Scented candles come with warning labels about ingestion, vacuums with warning about genital insertion, and cups of coffee with warnings about the contents being hot. The original lawsuits that prompted these liability controls are predicated on the same problems that keep classrooms learning at the pace of the least-invested or apt students in the room, and television, movie, and advertisement production insipid and puerile enough to bore an intelligent eight year old. Regardless of desire the effects are obvious.

The claim that intelligence is a bigger advantage now than it was in the past, seems to me to be different from Wiklers claim that intelligence is a bigger advantage in NYC than it is on a farm. (It is also different from the claim that intelligence will be a bigger advantage in the future after human enhancement than it is now.)

Complicating the issue is that until fairly recently “support services” were in place that did more harm than good, like Bedlam-houses, electroshock, and lobotomy. Hopefully, future superintelligent overlords wouldn’t treat “normals” that way.

Is it? If I were dropped off without warning somewhere in e.g. the 18th century, I might end up a lot hungrier than someone from the 18th century brought forwards 200 years.

Eliezer, assuming that by “farms” you mean situations in general where disabled people are empowered, there is no agenda to “destroy farms and replace them with asylums.” The human world is just becoming more complicated, harder to navigate, and in general less “farm-like.” Homes for adults with developmental disabilities are legally and ethically bound to empower their residents to live in the world, not to isolate them as the term ‘asylum’ implies.

Based on this excerpt, Wikler’s concept of a “natural, inalienable right” to live in a simple society sounds like a straw man argument. Adults with disabilities can and do live well in our complicated world, if they have the support they need. They vote, marry, have careers, give back to their communities, and so on. They do not want society to regress to accommodate them. I hope that in a world of supermen, we “normals” could accept our limitations just as gracefully.