As much as I’d love to live in a world where humans have uplifted various animal species and we all live in diverse harmony with more varied minds generating wild and wonderful ideas and cultures, attempting something like this, at present, seems like a very bad idea to me. Humans-in-general have not yet figured out how to live peacefully with (and care about the well being of) each other, or to take care of the parts oft he world not directly useful to themselves. We’re getting and doing better than we used to, but do we really want to bring intelligent parrots, octopods, dogs, cats, or pigs into the world and have to explain to them what we’ve been doing and are still doing to their wild or less smart brethren? (Side note: We often hear a similar argument applied to having children, “Who’d want to bring a kid into this world?” and I reject it in that context for a number of reasons that I don’t think apply here.). Plus, think about what it would actually take for new sapients to participate meaningfully in society, and compare to the basic accommodations we still struggle to consistently provide to humans with disabilities.
I also think that even if we undertook such a project, we don’t understand the genetic basis of intelligence well enough to get parrots (or other species) to a point where they could unambiguously convince humans to treat them as people instead of animals. One small corner of Spain tried to grant legal personhood to great apes, but despite some progress in animal rights legislation, no one else has gone that far even for our closest relatives. I consider my pets family, but legally they’re still property. This seems like groundwork we should set out to fix before even considering embarking on any kind of uplift project. It’s bad enough we’ll have to figure it out for AI personhood questions, but in this case we have much better evidence on what animals need, want, and feel, and still can’t bring ourselves to recognize it in law.
As much as I’d love to live in a world where humans have uplifted various animal species and we all live in diverse harmony with more varied minds generating wild and wonderful ideas and cultures, attempting something like this, at present, seems like a very bad idea to me. Humans-in-general have not yet figured out how to live peacefully with (and care about the well being of) each other, or to take care of the parts oft he world not directly useful to themselves. We’re getting and doing better than we used to, but do we really want to bring intelligent parrots, octopods, dogs, cats, or pigs into the world and have to explain to them what we’ve been doing and are still doing to their wild or less smart brethren? (Side note: We often hear a similar argument applied to having children, “Who’d want to bring a kid into this world?” and I reject it in that context for a number of reasons that I don’t think apply here.). Plus, think about what it would actually take for new sapients to participate meaningfully in society, and compare to the basic accommodations we still struggle to consistently provide to humans with disabilities.
I also think that even if we undertook such a project, we don’t understand the genetic basis of intelligence well enough to get parrots (or other species) to a point where they could unambiguously convince humans to treat them as people instead of animals. One small corner of Spain tried to grant legal personhood to great apes, but despite some progress in animal rights legislation, no one else has gone that far even for our closest relatives. I consider my pets family, but legally they’re still property. This seems like groundwork we should set out to fix before even considering embarking on any kind of uplift project. It’s bad enough we’ll have to figure it out for AI personhood questions, but in this case we have much better evidence on what animals need, want, and feel, and still can’t bring ourselves to recognize it in law.