Avatar Polymorph - The Ethics of Boosting Animals from Sentience to Self...

This video was posthumously published - RIP Avatar Polymorph.  The question of boosting the intelligence of animals other than humans, to the level of self-awareness and consciousness, is one that cannot be considered in isolation from the general process at work in the social and speculative movement known as Transhumanism. Transhumanism is partly about augmentation of the human body, for example by molecular computational nanotechnology (cell repair and DNA repair molecular machines, and rod logic molecular supercomputers for enhanced memory). More generally is is the movement to ‘self-directed’ evolution (replacing evolution by random mutation and natural selection). This was pointed out by myself in 1996 and by Damien Broderick in his book The Spike, which was the first popular book on the idea of the ‘technological Singularity’ (a time when technology surges forward based on accelerating computing).

This is a radical movement away from evolution as we understand it, and unchosen death. It is a movement towards chosen lifespans (and very extended ones, certainly some claim possibilities of hundreds of millions of years) and augmentation.

In this scenario, it is the internal environment that can alter the physical characteristics of a population. Make a mistake by modifying something essential to your will to live and you may well end up permanently dead.

For a conservative Transhumanist, the minimal rational position would be to consider us already effectively immortal. This is because genetic and proteomic therapies, along with cures for many diseases, will begin to be available within a very few years, perhaps the middle of the decade of the 2020s.

This will tide most people over until the arrival of computational superintelligence and computational nanotechnology (that is, not materials nanotechnology, but ‘intelligent’ nanotechnology, devices at the molecular scale that cannot reproduce but that can be ‘commanded’ to achieve goals). Stem cell therapies will provide a surface appearance of youth in terms of hair and wrinkles and teeth (this is already happening, in the case of teeth see the work of Dr Mao of Columbia University). The fuller issues of a long life are more complex (memory, consciousness, cosmic ray damage, skeletal structure and so on). However, telomerase therapy (for DNA repair), cell-sized ‘nanobots’ and smaller nanotechnological cell repair machines and molecular supercomputers (perhaps sixty in each cell) should be able to monitor and augment of both individual neurons and a person’s wider neural structure.

As a comparison to these ideas of living for many millions of years, the oldest living multicellular thing on Planet Earth currently is the clonal root system of the quaking aspen Populus tremuloides in Utah, dated to 80,000 years, probably older than modern humanity itself. In theory some of the ‘immortal’ jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, could live forever but in practice most are probably killed in the environment. Many animal species live longer than humans, for example the rougheye rockfish lives for 205 years.

It is important to understand that superintelligence will be required to solve deeper problems of memory and neural identity over the immense time scales projected, especially for those conservatives who choose to remain relatively human for much or all of the time.

Some radicals may gradually move their neural structure into AI systems, or even into virtual realities within computer substrates (for example topological quantum computers or femtocomputers, both of which are devices which have not been built yet).

It is hard to argue against the physical possibility that such real human-AI or virtual beings could live until the end of the universe. For example, Abraham Loeb of the Centre for Astrophysics at Harvard University believes intelligences could orbit around red dwarfs for ten thousand billion years.

This then is a general structure for the consideration of ‘boosting’ of non-human animals.

https://hplusmagazine.com/2012/02/01/the-ethics-of-boosting-animals-from-sentience-to-self-aware-consciousness/


Humanity+ @Melbourne 2011 Conference Website (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20131106021014/http://au.humanityplus.org/conference/






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