Okay, hear me out: we already have human level/ general intelligent human aligned agents by the billions. And making new ones artificially seems to be really hard according to lots of alignment researchers. So why haven't I heard or read about projects trying to improve human intelligence? I'm not saying to do it in order to solve the alignment of pure artificial intelligences (although that could be a possibility too), but to the point of getting a hybrid (natural + artificial) superintelligence or just more useful than AIs.
I know that then there is the question about what a superintelligence would do or how having it aligned would help us to not make misaligned ones, and although there are possible good answers to that, those are questions that already exist outside "normal" alignment.
The only similar thing to that that I've heard was Elon Musk talking about Neuralink, but there is a hugeee difference between the things that Elon mentions as aspirations (in particular merging with an AI) and the product that is making right now. I don't see how Brain-Computer Interfaces would improve our decision making that much. A lot of people when they talk about augmenting intelligence seem to bring them up, and of course they could be useful, but again: I'm not talking about using them to solve AI Alignment, but to get around it. I'm wondering if we can find a way of scaling human intelligence in the same way we scale artificial intelligence.
I found a post that briefly mentions similar ideas than mine but under the term BCI, which I don't understand if it's a more abarcative term than "a device that allows you to use other devices with the mind", because as I said, I don't know any device which would improve our decision making that much if we could just use it with our minds.
The clearest strategy that comes to mind is to make artificial neurons communicable with biological ones and then integrable with whole human neural networks. Could that be possible? I know that it could sound crazy, but I guess I'm talking to the people who think aligning an AI is really difficult and that having superintelligences on humanity's side sooner or later seems like the only path forward.
On another note, I disagree that there aren't projects specifically targeted to enhance human intelligence. I wouldn't discount more mainstream and broader-target projects, including subsets of cognitive psychology (esp. heuristics & biases), developmental psychology, metascience, social epistemology, economics, educational technology, and more.[1]
More promisingly, I think projects like prediction markets, QURI, the Sequences and LessWrong more generally, note-taking/knowledge network software, spaced repetition software, are extremely promising and I predict they'll have immense impact even if society continues on a gradual path indefinitely.
During the development of the Internet, there were many projects designed to improve collective intelligence, and I predict a lot of that is in the water already. We just can't see most of it because we take it for granted. Wikipedia is perhaps the most obvious example.
Yeah, you are right. I guess that I was trying to say that I haven't heard of projects that try to do it from a "hardware" standpoint. Considering the limitations that the human brain has in relation with the scalable computers and AIs.