directed evolution and selective breeding of smarter animal populations
I’m not sure I get the point of this. If you succeed, then now you’re doing horribly unethical+immoral experiments on intelligent conscious beings at a significant scale with little benefit. In terms of genetics, we already know enough about the polygenic architecture of intelligence to probably get to world-class-genius levels. On my view, making that feasible for many people / whoever wants, is more important (and easier and safer and more likely to work) than pushing much past that, if that’s relevant.
(I also do not in fact belief you can evolve an animal population to be human-level intelligence within a couple decades. If it’s, say, chimps, then even leaving aside ethics, you have only a few generations. If it’s, say, mice, then you’re probably really far from having genius mice.)
Further, I don’t see much intermediate benefits, whether financial or scientific.
To be clear, it’s worthwhile to test out strong reprogenetics on animals; but that’s in part because you’re skipping the intermediate generations, and instead just seeing if you can directly vector a trait by vectoring the genome based off polygenic scores from the current population.
Developing higher intelligence is not unethical or immoral. I am very surprised to hear you say otherwise. I think that in a lot of these discussions people seem to go into them with some sort of base assumption that everything is going to be abhorrent and awful and terrible. I have given you no indication of that. I think it’s an uncharitable assumption to assume that developing higher intelligence through these methods is inherently unethical or immoral. Intelligence is extremely beneficial and extremely moral to develop. Also on the detail level I don’t actually believe that you would need to breed an animal population to human-level intelligence to benefit from this sort of project. I think that you would be able to learn many things that could be applied to humans even if the animal population is developed to a level that is below human intelligence.
I’m not sure I get the point of this. If you succeed, then now you’re doing horribly unethical+immoral experiments on intelligent conscious beings at a significant scale with little benefit. In terms of genetics, we already know enough about the polygenic architecture of intelligence to probably get to world-class-genius levels. On my view, making that feasible for many people / whoever wants, is more important (and easier and safer and more likely to work) than pushing much past that, if that’s relevant.
(I also do not in fact belief you can evolve an animal population to be human-level intelligence within a couple decades. If it’s, say, chimps, then even leaving aside ethics, you have only a few generations. If it’s, say, mice, then you’re probably really far from having genius mice.)
Further, I don’t see much intermediate benefits, whether financial or scientific.
To be clear, it’s worthwhile to test out strong reprogenetics on animals; but that’s in part because you’re skipping the intermediate generations, and instead just seeing if you can directly vector a trait by vectoring the genome based off polygenic scores from the current population.
Developing higher intelligence is not unethical or immoral. I am very surprised to hear you say otherwise. I think that in a lot of these discussions people seem to go into them with some sort of base assumption that everything is going to be abhorrent and awful and terrible. I have given you no indication of that. I think it’s an uncharitable assumption to assume that developing higher intelligence through these methods is inherently unethical or immoral. Intelligence is extremely beneficial and extremely moral to develop. Also on the detail level I don’t actually believe that you would need to breed an animal population to human-level intelligence to benefit from this sort of project. I think that you would be able to learn many things that could be applied to humans even if the animal population is developed to a level that is below human intelligence.
It’s not the higher intelligence that’s bad, it’s the forced breeding or other dangerous experiments on much smarter animals.
Like what?