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knb comments on How inevitable was modern human civilization - data - Less Wrong
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Which to me raises a question: how much smarter could birds get? Flying is already a very demanding and difficult task - how much larger a brain could their metabolism support?
I suspect that ravens and parrots are close to this limit, and that higher-calorie birds would have to be flightless. Penguins and other flightless birds like the ostrich are, IIRC, the heaviest and largest birds there are.
This present a problem for any intelligent-bird lineage: the groups that have demonstrated a need for intelligence (like the parrots and the ravens) are very separate from the groups that have demonstrated their access to the calories/protein necessary for human-level intelligence. So how they get here from there?
I've always wondered how intelligent dogs, birds, chimpanzees, bonobos, dolphins, rats, etc. could become with say, 100 years of rigorous scientific selective breeding for intelligence.
I can't imagine any of them would reach human level intelligence (unless they had some really lucky mutations), but they might become extremely interesting, and highly instructive about the nature of intelligence.
Oh, I think they're already extremely interesting/instructive. Consider Border Collies; they can memorize <300 commands, which is pretty impressive. There aren't any grammar-producing results or indication of genuine understanding, but just the memorization points to a pretty good memory. And the border colly breed only goes back 1 or 2 centuries before it disappears in the general sheepherding/working-dog haze.
What could your 100 years of rigorous breeding do? I dunno; intuitively I feel that if silver foxes could be completely domesticated in a few decades, 10 decades ought to get border collies up to chimp-level cognition.