I think it’s fundamentally interesting that out of all the scientifically competent but morally bankrupt regimes in the last 100 years, none have (publically) created weaponized human super-thinkers by either selective breeding with an artificially short generation time, genetic modification for large brains, or even chemical / surgical modifications in utero. I strongly suspect most have tried some or all of these techniques- especially the CIA and soviet regimes had the time, the money, and the sociopathic tendencies
I mean, humans take an extraordinary long amount of time to develop (18-25 years to reach maturity). Even if you could selectively breed only high IQ individuals it would take you probably a few dozen to a few hundred generations to reach some order of magnitude of higher intelligence.
And even then, along the way you might accidentally breed out some other important gene. Humans are also not machines, and require a great deal of emotional care to develop into functioning, centered adults.
There is probably a trade-off between generation time and brain size. Human babies already require substantially long care even by mammalian standards, because the brain cannot develop fully in the womb. We also take an extraordinary amount of time just to be able to walk on our own. Most animals are born with the ability to stand and move around.
Perhaps genetic engineering technologies such as Crispr will make it practical in the not too distant future.
Either no-one has seriously tried it, it’s impossible for some reason, or it worked and we don’t know. I am of the opinion that the first and last option are implausible, which indicates that humans are remarkably close to our local optimum of intelligence
Maybe ours is just wired differently and we use the cellular hardware nature endowed us just very differently at the cost of a very long bootstrap and tech support process.
Kind of illustrated to me by watching a video of a giraffe calf learning to walk - it has about 60 minutes to master it and keep up or it becomes lion food considering it's odd shaped body at birth.
Imagine how much neurons are hardwired just for that after birth ???.
