The connection is that by making humans smarter, we could sidestep the need for powerful AI or be better equipped at dealing with AI that's smarter than us.

I find the proposal in the post ridiculous too and human gene editing given current technology is a bad idea, but I think human augmentation in general is an interesting path and something that will very likely be taken more seriously in the future.

Thank you, but I didn't actually need that spelled out. I simply accepted that a community with a thought leader who failed to recognize what to me was a self-evident lack of scientific rigor just wasn't for me.