The smartest animals, such as elephants, dolphins, and chimps, have long generation times, high expense, and some protection from experimentation. For animals with shorter generation times, one has more distance to travel, and while cool experiments are possible, their timescales still wind up being long. And we have much larger potential datasets for human genomes tagged with cognitive data (collected for medical and educational reasons, so not posing much marginal cost) than for other animals.
Also, you need a long lifespan to make use the really interesting high-intelligence stuff.
Does anyone have recommendations of good things to read on the ethics of animal cognitive enhancement? By this I mean applying various methods of human cognitive enhancement (pharmacological, technological, etc) to animals such as the Great Apes. I've also heard this referred to as 'up-lifting' an animal.
I'm looking for articles, books, lectures - anything really. Obviously one can just google this but I find getting recommendations from others a better bet. I think this may be a useful resource for other people interested in the same topic. Interesting issues might include:
- Possible obligations to enhance
- Possible negative consequences
- Possible side-effects (such as radically different perspective)