Why not breed for compatibility with human values as well? We could then study the differences between various degrees of “aligned” cephalopods and wild cephalopods.
It might be easier than selecting for intelligence too; humanity has successfully modified dogs, cats, and livestock to provide more positive utility to humans than their wild counterparts, but hasn’t drastically increased the intelligence of any wild animal to my knowledge, despite there plausibly being benefits for doing so with ex. horses or dogs.
Breeding for human values also limits some of the downsides of this plan, like the chance of ending up conquered by unaligned octopuses.
I think the risk of unaligned octopuses taking over the world is lower than the risk of unaligned AGI:
We know how to stop breeding octopuses once they reach human intelligence.
Even once octopuses reach human intelligence it might take a long time for them to learn the technology required to win a war against us.
They have short life spans, so limited time to learn new technologies or cultural evolution. The idea would be to see how long it took for octopuses to solve the sort of problems uneducated intelligent people could, not invent novel mathematics.
Why not breed for compatibility with human values as well? We could then study the differences between various degrees of “aligned” cephalopods and wild cephalopods.
It might be easier than selecting for intelligence too; humanity has successfully modified dogs, cats, and livestock to provide more positive utility to humans than their wild counterparts, but hasn’t drastically increased the intelligence of any wild animal to my knowledge, despite there plausibly being benefits for doing so with ex. horses or dogs.
Breeding for human values also limits some of the downsides of this plan, like the chance of ending up conquered by unaligned octopuses.
Sorry, had to be done!
I think the risk of unaligned octopuses taking over the world is lower than the risk of unaligned AGI:
We know how to stop breeding octopuses once they reach human intelligence.
Even once octopuses reach human intelligence it might take a long time for them to learn the technology required to win a war against us.
They have short life spans, so limited time to learn new technologies or cultural evolution. The idea would be to see how long it took for octopuses to solve the sort of problems uneducated intelligent people could, not invent novel mathematics.
Planet of the Squids!