sorry to be coming to this late. i have been running silent and deep and am only now surfacing for some fresh air and human contact.

this seems to me a very interesting and very problematic development and i intend to post to brainmortgage about it.

in short, i find it troubling (a) that it would be ok to destroy non-human beings that exhibit human behabior (which presumably would indicate self-consciousness/self-awareness and rationality on the part of said non-human beings), particularly when we are the ones who gave them that very capacity, and (b) that a scientist who presumably ought to know better is cracking silly jokes about animals standing up and speaking english, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together understands that rats and mice (and indeed most other animals) don't have the facial structure necessary to speak any human language. what rubbish.

and finally, this brought to mind an interview i did with paul di filippo in wired WAY WAY back in 1997. it was in many ways already dated when we got it published (like a lot in wired), but going back to look at it (and be mortified), i was struck by the last paragraph, where paul says:

We've been talking about these sorts of questions with artificial intelligence for a while. But the biologi-cal revolution is at once more alluring and more off-putting than the cybernetic revolution. Everybody can relate to familiar animals - dogs, cats, whatever. By grafting intelligence or even human features on them, you engender a whole host of emotional responses you don't get with robots. Especially if they think and talk, they're in a twilight zone where you don't know what your response should be: Are they humans? Subhumans?

Dumb animals are very alluring, but when they approach our own emotional and intellectual capacity, they will become very disturbing.

what if they were doing this stuff to dogs and cats and horses? would it still be ok to destroy them? and do we really think there won't be a huge market precisely *for* introducing human brain cells into pet animals? training rover to go get the paper becomes an entirely different prospect.