It's almost 2020. I think the time has come to ask a very specific question. And while AI and quantum computing may (or may not) be advancing, I feel like this is the long way round to answer the question I'm thinking about. Because with AI we are essentially starting from scratch. Since the big bang, it took billions of years of evolution, and no fewer than several impossibly improbable, accidental mutations for intelligence like ours to arise. What makes us think we can just recreate or reverse engineer that in a few decades, from the ground up? It's highly unlikely. Meanwhile, intelligence already exists. It exists in us. The final answer to the question I have in mind can involve almost anything. But given where gene editing technology is already today, the most obvious avenue seems to lie with some form of gene manipulation, with the ultimate aim of increasing intelligence in humans. Now, we all know that this is currently verboten, in large part due to the actions of a certain country whose language I just used. But if we don't abolish this arbitrary taboo, I believe our species will not have a future to speak of. However you do it, if we don't circumvent this self-imposed mental prison soon, we are going to go extinct, no hyperbole. So with that, the big question of our time in 2020 seems to be:

How do we make people smarter?