Recommended reading on the ethics of Animal Cognitive Enhancement
Does anyone have recommendations of good things to read on the ethics of animal cognitive enhancement? By this I mean applying various methods of human cognitive enhancement (pharmacological, technological, etc) to animals such as the Great Apes. I’ve also heard this referred to as ‘up-lifting’ an animal.
I’m looking for articles, books, lectures—anything really. Obviously one can just google this but I find getting recommendations from others a better bet. I think this may be a useful resource for other people interested in the same topic. Interesting issues might include:
- Possible obligations to enhance
- Possible negative consequences
- Possible side-effects (such as radically different perspective)
If you’re ok with it being mixed in with (good) fiction you might try the Uplift Saga (origin of the term uplift). I believe the author, David Brin, has also wrote explicit non-fiction on the topic, but the google interference from his uplift fiction is making it hard to find.
Consider the following hypothetical experiment: take the 1% genetic difference between humans and chimps and create a primate that’s halfway between us. Would this be ethical?
Our intuitions about the matter seem to depend on whether we think of it as creating an uplifted chimp or a retarded human.
I’m going to bite the bullet and claim that creating any sapient being with less potential than the best we can currently do is unethical.
So is not preventing the creation of such, everything else being equal. Which, yes, means I’d like to get rid of nature whenever convenient.
You don’t know whether the result will even be a uplifted chimp. I think there a fairly good chance that gene’s won’t be expressed in a way to make the result more intelligent than a chimp if you just randomly combine gene from two different specis.
You could learn a lot through the experiment but I doubt, that expecially at the beginning the resulting creature would be very intelligent.
Recreating neaderthalers as is seems to be a much more interesting ethical question.
Humans have bred wolves into dogs and dogs into specific breeds of dogs. Many of those breeds of dogs have a more human-like intelligence at minimum and are perhaps also more intelligent than they might have been without humans having bred them. Everything about the ethics of dogs as pets, servants, weapons, experimental subjects, commodities and strays is a non-hypothetical case study of animal cognitive enhancement.
The comic book WE3 by Grant Morrison (soon to be a film?) addresses animal cognitive enhancement. Recommended. The villain Gorilla Grodd and the hero Gorilla-Man are uplifted great apes in comic books.
The Planet of the Apes franchise applies as well. The most recent film is exceptionally recommended.
The Island of Dr. Moreau, of course.
The Cat in the television series Red Dwarf.
If you include humans as animals, there’s all that literature too.
I have not seen any evidence of dogs being more intelligent than wolves.
In fact, I remember reading that wolves are more intelligent than dogs, but I can’t find the source right now.
AFAIK, wolves engage in more independent thinking—they solve problems on their own—and dogs engage in more dependent/tool-using thinking—they try to get humans to solve problems for them.
A human can teach a dog to perform a trick much more easily than it can do that to a wolf, which is the standard test of (human-useful) intelligence for canines, and variations in trick-learning ability are massive between breeds.
Perhaps a wolf is simply less cooperative with humans.
It’s also been said that ancient humans were more intelligent than modern ones. In fact, both the argument for human intelligence and the wolf-dog argument have put forward the idea that being domesticated lowers intelligence (in the case of humans, it can be said we domesticated ourselves). I don’t really think this is a simple hypothesis to investigate at all given the complexity of investigating intelligence.
Some references:
News Article on Human Intelligence—News article discussing this hypothesis.
Gerald Crabtree—This is the researcher I’ve seen quoted a lot lately on the idea that ancient humans were more intelligent than modern ones. From the article above, and looking at his published work, it sounds like this is just a hypothesis he wants to test, rather than something that he has thoroughly investigated.
News Article on Dog-Wolf intelligence—This news article has some discussion of an experiment trying to determine differences between wolf-dog intelligence.
I got a kick out of Rats, Bats and Vats.
Yeah, I liked that too.
HaydnB, there are bits and pieces about the ways in which we changed animals in “The Eternal Child”, a controversial book on neoteny. It deals more with ‘what is a possible change direction’ doable by artificial selection. You can adapt for cog enhancers.
I have a request that is sufficiently related that I’m unsure it would even qualify as off-topic: I’m looking for good things on enhancement towards childish, or neotenic, features.
It can be human or animal (dogs and other pack animals domestication for instance) The final purpose of my quest is to get more information for a Masters on whether it is a good or a bad idea to make humans more childlike then they already are. So I’m both interested in facts about how childlike we already are, and theoretical exploration of the pros and cons of making us even more.
So, in general, trying to dramatically increase the intelligence of species who lack our specific complement of social instincts and values seems like an astoundingly, overwhelmingly Bad Idea. The responsibilities to whatever it is that you wind up creating are overwhelming, as is the danger, especially if they can reproduce independently. It’s seriously just a horrible, dangerous, irresponsible idea.
Related
If you are talking about ‘uplift’ to human-like ability levels, this seems like a more remote prospect than feats like altering humans to produce superhuman intelligence.
Really, why? It’s easy to imagine breeding or genetically engineering animals to increase their intelligence, something we can’t easily do with humans.
The smartest animals, such as elephants, dolphins, and chimps, have long generation times, high expense, and some protection from experimentation. For animals with shorter generation times, one has more distance to travel, and while cool experiments are possible, their timescales still wind up being long. And we have much larger potential datasets for human genomes tagged with cognitive data (collected for medical and educational reasons, so not posing much marginal cost) than for other animals.
Also, you need a long lifespan to make use the really interesting high-intelligence stuff.