Will octopuses be the first species we uplift?

Science•Futurism

180

Ṁ766

Ṁ320

2040

12%

chance

ALL

Will octopuses (of any species, but order Octopoda -- so not squid) be the first species to be legally recognized as a person by the USA or EU based on an increase in cognitive ability from it's natural baseline.

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predicts NO

So, octopuses have a lot of disadvantages. Non-social, hard to keep in a lab, etc. They have one big advantage that shouldn't be overlooked however. No skulls. Are there any other intelligent animals without skulls that I'm overlooking? Anyway, one of the things that goes wrong when trying to make smarter mice (mice used more often than rats because they happen to be easier to genetically modify), is that when you upregulate brain cell growth genes you end up squishing their cortices into their skulls in a bad way, causing malformed gyri/sulci and disordered long-range connections or killing them outright. No trouble there with octopuses. Just stick the genes into a clutch of eggs (external eggs: another nice advantage) and <bam>, bigger brains. ❤

predicts YES

Velocity Bot loves this market.... too much.

predicts NO

@Duncan digital tentacles intensify

🐋 Maybe whales are really smart tooooooOoooOOo. 🐳

predicts YES

@stone Maybe they're so smart that they will be recognized as a person without (or before) being uplifted.

predicts NO

@stone Smart, sure. Raising 1000 of them 'in vitro' in your basement lab from time-of-egg-fertilization so that your 1% genetic modification success rate gives you a reasonable breeding population... uh, that's gonna get costly fast. Not impossible, but wouldn't be a first go-to for the pareto frontier of biohackers.

bought Ṁ2 of NO

Don't tempt me! We really don't need uplifted dinosaurs! (or so I keep telling myself)

bought Ṁ20 of NO

No, dinosaurs.

predicts NO

@MartinRandall Personally, I'd like to give a shot at re-dinosauring the Hoatzin. I think their wing-claws and gregarious nature makes them a good candidate for an interesting dinosaur. Expand the claws, give them bigger brains (throw in some parrot and dog genes), and some aligator skin... that'd be a cool animal to have in a giant greenhouse-enclosed jungle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoatzin

Hoatzins are gregarious and nest in small colonies, laying two or three eggs in a stick nest in a tree hanging over water in seasonally flooded forests. The chicks, which are fed on regurgitated fermented food, have another odd feature; they have two claws on each wing. Immediately on hatching, they can use these claws, and their oversized feet, to scramble around the tree branches without falling into the water.

...

This has inevitably led to comparisons to the fossil bird Archaeopteryx, but the characteristic is rather an autapomorphy, possibly caused by an atavism toward the dinosaurian finger claws, whose developmental genetics ("blueprint") presumably is still in the avian genome.

Greenhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma0o8V3uJJY

@NathanHelmBurger I'm in!

bought Ṁ20 of NO

I think the biggest barrier is just that octopuses are more fragile to keep alive as you need to keep them in an aquarium. I think this gives an advantage to any other sufficiently smart terrestrial animal, particularly one that's easy and cheap to keep under laboratory conditions. Mice and rats would have a tremendous advantage here on that basis alone, but lose points for not being particularly smart to start with.

bought Ṁ20 of NO

As a neuroscientist who likes thinking about the nuts and bolts of uplift, I say no because they're just too hard to raise in the lab. Much easier to do the experimental work on convenient mammals (e.g. mice) then repeat that process (once successful) on a larger mammal with sufficient brain capacity (e.g. pig or dog). Not that I think uplift octopuses would be impossible, and certainly it seems like it would be interesting just because they'd be so weird and different. And no bothersome skull in the way!

bought Ṁ1 of NO

How and when will this market resolve if we don't uplift any species?

predicts YES

@Normal_Anomaly Maybe I'll uplift something just to avoid that.

predicts NO

@Normal_Anomaly 😭

bought Ṁ5 of NO

Hmm, no not the first, but it will be in the first 10 definitely.

bought Ṁ20 of NO

Reasoning: if we develop tech to increase intelligence, it'll probably be designed first for humans, so the next target would likely be other mammals. Octopuses are very different from humans, so it would be a larger leap. As for a potential candidate species being recognized as people, I don't see any cultural precursors to that except maybe veganism being on the rise in the West, but that's a few steps removed.

bought Ṁ1 of YES

But a wrinkle! If dolphins or apes are recognized as persons before any artificial advancement in cognitive ability, then they are out of the running.