[pron]

> In the end, the unleashing of energy will be due to people researching the genetic basis of intelligence and IVF.

I'm not so sure. There is a core problem here, and that is that intelligence is not all that it's made up to be. It takes no more than a glance at the current American president to see that. That intelligence (by which I mean relative intelligence) is some ultimate power is, itself, a myth perpetuated by people who consider themselves particularly intelligent. You'd hear similar things about beauty from beautiful people. Clearly, many great works were done by people who were not amazingly intelligent, and people who were amazingly intelligent have done some amazingly stupid things. Personally, I think charisma is far more important. I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.

[NaggingGranpa]

You don't need to understand intelligence that well to change the world. A little predictive power can go very far.

In the end, it's a bit like playing roulette. A small edge and many bets will make you rich.

> I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.

It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb. Better brains means better weapons, which means conquering and annihilating stupider tribes. It's the history of Mankind.

Charisma helps uniting tribes. But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.

[pron]

> A little predictive power can go very far.

Yeah, but I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things (weighted by impact). Again, look at the current US president; or at stock traders.

> It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb.

No, but arguably neither would have been done when they were done if it weren't for a war that started largely due to charisma.

> But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.

But it's not high relative intelligence that brought us industrialization. Those same people who were later industrialized had had hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering.