To use the analogy Bostrom uses, of the sparrows dragging an owl egg into their home to incubate, because they think a tame owl would be neat; I think tame owls are totally possible, and I wouldn’t say that I can be certain all those sparrows will get snacked, but I would definitely say that the sparrows are being bloody stupid, and that I would be one of the sparrows focussing on trying to condition the owl to be good, rather than overfeeding it so it grows even more quickly into a size where sparrows become snack sized.
We might be in a somewhat better position, because owls are hard wired predators (I assume Bostrom deliberately chose them because they are large birds hunting small animals, notoriously destructive, and notoriously hard to tame) and what we dragged home is basically an egg for a completely unknown animal, which could, through sheer coincidence, be friendly (maybe we got a literal black swan? They are huge, but vegan), or, slightly more plausibly, at least be more malleable to adapt sparrow customs than an owl would be (parrots are extremely smart, friendly/social, and mostly vegetarians), so we might be luckier. I mean, it currently looks like the weird big bird is mostly behaving, but we are worried it isn’t behaving right for the right reasons, and may very well stop once it gets larger. And yet everyone is carting home more random eggs and pouring in food faster so they get the biggest bird. This whole situation does give me nightmares.
Oh, hard agree on that.
To use the analogy Bostrom uses, of the sparrows dragging an owl egg into their home to incubate, because they think a tame owl would be neat; I think tame owls are totally possible, and I wouldn’t say that I can be certain all those sparrows will get snacked, but I would definitely say that the sparrows are being bloody stupid, and that I would be one of the sparrows focussing on trying to condition the owl to be good, rather than overfeeding it so it grows even more quickly into a size where sparrows become snack sized.
We might be in a somewhat better position, because owls are hard wired predators (I assume Bostrom deliberately chose them because they are large birds hunting small animals, notoriously destructive, and notoriously hard to tame) and what we dragged home is basically an egg for a completely unknown animal, which could, through sheer coincidence, be friendly (maybe we got a literal black swan? They are huge, but vegan), or, slightly more plausibly, at least be more malleable to adapt sparrow customs than an owl would be (parrots are extremely smart, friendly/social, and mostly vegetarians), so we might be luckier. I mean, it currently looks like the weird big bird is mostly behaving, but we are worried it isn’t behaving right for the right reasons, and may very well stop once it gets larger. And yet everyone is carting home more random eggs and pouring in food faster so they get the biggest bird. This whole situation does give me nightmares.