Arenamontanus wrote:

Which begs the question of how they actually do it. In my own work on human enhancement I often use the "bottleneck principle": a system is usually limited by one bottleneck, so if you fix that you can improve performance a lot (and you will get some other, new bottleneck somewhere else). Many people's intelligence seem to be limited by their working memory, so training, improving or circumventing it improves their effective intelligence. So one approach for designing a superior individual is to really fix key bottlenecks. Another approach is to look at evolution. The reason we have not evolved a proposed enhancement naturally are usually 1) evolution "wants" different things from us (hence no evolved contraceptive ability), 2) there were tradeoffs (e.g. food availability) in our evolutionary past that made the enhancement not happen (e.g. an even bigger brain is too costly), and 3) there are things evolution cannot evolve, either because they require nonbiological solutions (e.g. radio), fitness deserts have to be crossed (e.g. getting rid of the human appendix; small appendices are easily infected and their owners have lower fitness), lack of time (e.g. some likely intelligence-promoting genes are still diffusing) and a bunch of other possibilities. With technology we can do intelligent design: we can make different tradeoffs (many biomorphs probably burn calories at a rate that would starve them if they live in a hunter-gatherer society), we can include entirely artificial systems extending biology, and we can make long jumps in evolutionary space by designing biology. So I think the ultimate researchers (and of course their colleagues at Cognite and Skinthetics) are spending a lot of time analysing exactly what limits people. They might be buying recordings of human performance in bulk to run data mining, they subject people to severe testing (Aperture Science as an ultimate outfit?) and they run big simulations. When they identify bottlenecks they start looking for what causes them and ways around them. The easy bottlenecks are merely old trade-offs that can be patched with modern biology, but most of those have already been dealt with (this is largely the difference between Flats and modern biomorphs). The real challenge is to design around fundamental limitations of human design. This is where the ultimates have an advantage in that they care little for traditional biology and hence can consider radical new ways of doing the same thing. But coming up with entirely new ways of making bodies stronger (fullerene fibres instead of actin, with diamond myosin-analogues?) is much easier than finding *good* ways of doing it. This is where the ultimates have perhaps their main advantage: they ruthlessly test radical enhancements on themselves or on indentured infugees. The lessons learned go back into the research database and get incorporated in future designs. This is a mixture of evolution and iterative development. Rational planning can do amazing things (long jumps in phenotype space) but is bad at foreseeing consequences. This is where evolutionary approaches excel (local optimization).

TBRMInsanity wrote:

In fact, if you have the computing power and no ethics you can do amazing stuff in simspaces. Add randomly varied versions of your enhancement to forks of one or more people, run them fast to see who does best in a number of tests and keep the versions that did well. Erase the forks and seed next generation with versions of the modified enhancements. Over time you will get better and better enhancements. At the simplest, this is just a genetic algorithm using random variation. But you can have AIs or forked researchers in the system doing the enhancement updating too, rather than just normal evolution. In fact, you can run the same evolution on them: enhancer designers that do well get more forks (maybe tweaked in different ways). "Congratulations, Dr Soitre, your design reached 75.2% score. That means that you go on to next iteration. Your personal fitness is 0.45, 12% above the median. Good luck with your next assignment." I think Xiphos is an exciting but scary place. Can't wait to have my players go there.