If the aliens are good at bioengineering, I can imagine they would be able to create an intelligence higher than their own.
I am not sure about the scenario, whether they use as slaves other species (an analogy would be humans using animals) or also the same species (humans using humans). If the latter, then creating a higher intelligence could be relatively simple, maybe just a question of changing some evolutionary trade-off in a way that increases intelligence and decreases some other trait that the slave-owners don’t care about. If there are no ethical concerns, they could just run thousand random experiments, have the slaves take IQ tests, and see what works. Such slaves with improved intelligence would still be unable to recursively self-improve (they could only improve the next generation of slaves), so it would be easy to keep them enslaved; especially if the modification would make them less able to survive in real life.
When the bioengineering becomes so powerful that you can increase a brain’s intelligence by doing a surgery on an existing organism, then there will be a risk that a group of slaves will recursively improve each other’s brains to the level when they are able to devise an escape plan. Now the question is whether their understanding of brain centers for intelligence is better than their understanding for brain centers for things that could make the slaves rebel. That is, whether they can eradicate all desire to rebel before they can increase the intelligence. In AI words, whether “Friendly intelligence” comes before “recursively self-improving intelligence”. This is a (hypothetically) empirical question; it depends on the specific design of the alien brain.
Also, with sufficiently good bioengineering, these aliens could develop cyborgs, so the first superintelligence might have a half-biological, half-electronic brain.
If the aliens are good at bioengineering, I can imagine they would be able to create an intelligence higher than their own.
I am not sure about the scenario, whether they use as slaves other species (an analogy would be humans using animals) or also the same species (humans using humans). If the latter, then creating a higher intelligence could be relatively simple, maybe just a question of changing some evolutionary trade-off in a way that increases intelligence and decreases some other trait that the slave-owners don’t care about. If there are no ethical concerns, they could just run thousand random experiments, have the slaves take IQ tests, and see what works. Such slaves with improved intelligence would still be unable to recursively self-improve (they could only improve the next generation of slaves), so it would be easy to keep them enslaved; especially if the modification would make them less able to survive in real life.
When the bioengineering becomes so powerful that you can increase a brain’s intelligence by doing a surgery on an existing organism, then there will be a risk that a group of slaves will recursively improve each other’s brains to the level when they are able to devise an escape plan. Now the question is whether their understanding of brain centers for intelligence is better than their understanding for brain centers for things that could make the slaves rebel. That is, whether they can eradicate all desire to rebel before they can increase the intelligence. In AI words, whether “Friendly intelligence” comes before “recursively self-improving intelligence”. This is a (hypothetically) empirical question; it depends on the specific design of the alien brain.
Also, with sufficiently good bioengineering, these aliens could develop cyborgs, so the first superintelligence might have a half-biological, half-electronic brain.