We're about to become more intelligent than at any other point in human history

We know of humans that we consider super-intelligent, but we don't yet know how to engineer that intelligence - or exceed it - in people. But some researchers think that advances in genomic science and machine learning are going to open up new avenues of possibility in that realm, potentially leading to individuals whose cognitive abilities leave the greatest minds of history in the dust. That future of superintelligent humans may be upon us sooner than we think. Consider individuals that we consider the smartest of all time, those like Carl Friedrich Gauss or John von Neumann, says Stephen Hsu, a physicist who is the vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University and an advisor to the genomics researchers at BGI. Hsu is a member of BGI's Cognitive Genomics Lab, a research group that's trying to unlock the genetic codes that account for complex traits like height, susceptibility to conditions like obesity, and - perhaps most controversially - intelligence. Most researchers believe that intelligence is influenced by genes and environment, and when it comes to genes, we think a large number of genetic variants all make very small contributions.