singularityhub | Science fiction author David Brin popularized the
concept in his “Uplift” series of novels, in which humans share the
world with various other intelligent animals that all bring their own
unique skills, perspectives, and innovations to the table. “The
benefits, after a few hundred years, could be amazing,” he told Scientific American.
Others, like George Dvorsky, the director of the
Rights of Non-Human Persons program at the Institute for Ethics and
Emerging Technologies, go further and claim there is a moral imperative.
He told the Boston Globe that denying augmentation technology to animals would be just as unethical as excluding certain groups of humans.
Others are less convinced. Forbes’ Alex Knapp points out
that developing the technology to uplift animals will likely require
lots of very invasive animal research that will cause huge suffering to
the animals it purports to help. This is problematic enough with normal
animals, but could be even more morally dubious when applied to ones
whose cognitive capacities have been enhanced.
The whole concept could also be
based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of intelligence.
Humans are prone to seeing intelligence as a single, self-contained
metric that progresses in a linear way with humans at the pinnacle.
In an opinion piece in Wired arguing
against the likelihood of superhuman artificial intelligence, Kevin
Kelly points out that science has no such single dimension with which to
rank the intelligence of different species. Each one combines a bundle
of cognitive capabilities, some of which are well below our own capabilities and others which are superhuman. He uses the example of the squirrel, which can remember the precise location of thousands of acorns for years.
Uplift efforts may end up being less about boosting intelligence and more about making animals more human-like. That represents “a
kind of benevolent colonialism” that assumes being more human-like is a
good thing, Paul Graham Raven, a futures researcher at the University
of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, told the Boston Globe.
There’s scant evidence that’s the case, and it’s easy to see how a
chimpanzee with the mind of a human might struggle to adjust.
