Again, I’m pulling from David Brin - his Uplift stories are brilliant, by the way - and this is one of my favorites.
To wit:
We’ve searched the heavens in our quest to find other intelligent life…to find other intelligences to talk to and learn from.
There’s no one home. If there are, there’s no one near enough in space and time to make it practical - or even that we’d know exist. We are, forever, alone.
But do we have to be? There’s plenty of other species RIGHT here and we’re getting decent at genetic manipulation. You, yourself, have come up with a means of altering a species genetics so they begin achieving an intelligence similar to humanities. It can be a different kind of intelligence - how, I leave to you - but they have the ability to learn, formulate questions and develop their own independent culture. All here on Earth.
Do you do it? Do you take a chimpanzee and turn him into someone capable of kicking around things over coffee? Is it a good idea? Or is it somehow wrong and shouldn’t be done? Species being raised also - along with intelligence - get the ability to manipulate their world - hands or equivalents - and the ability to speak/communicate.
If so, what rights do they have? In Brin’s universe, the uplift process takes millennia and the uplifted species owes 100,000 years of servitude to its benefactors to repay the gift of being raised. Is that reasonable? Or is it more reasonable that once they’re raised, they’re free to pursue their own goals?
AND, as a subsidiary idea. What species would you raise? Chimpanzees/bonobos? Porpoises? Do we owe it to our long-term partners dogs to get them there?
Bees and ants. I’d work towards a collective hive consciousness that has a means of storing information that can be retrieved later. They’re physically pretty versatile and would be able to manipulate things and could create and use tools to extend their grasp.
I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
I’m not sure what that would accomplish other than increase resource competition here on Earth. In the books, it served a narrative purpose in that Earth/humans were a Patron race, which meant that they couldn’t be made a client of some other Patron race. And it gave Brin the chance to explore how chimp and dolphin societies might differ from ours.
But there wasn’t any real reason given for WHY the galactic species engaged in uplift- they just did as far as I can remember.
They have whatever rights they are granted by the more powerful or that they are able to claim and defend, pretty much like us.
By my standards 100,000 years of servitude … Yeah, no more reasonable than any form of slavery. Even if it wasn’t beyond the pale the individuals didn’t choose any such contract, neither, really, did the species.
And “uplifting” is one area where I fall squarely in the “no playing God” camp. What if we make chimps significantly smarter, but as a group they turn out inherently violent. Do we just go “yeah, they’re still not people, so we’re going to keep manipulating their offspring and not letting them move about freely”? What purpose is worth that risk?
The description in the OP makes it sound like you do a little genetic engineering according to your requirements, including enough intelligence to accomplish prescribed tasks (but not too much), and- presto!- you get 100000 years’ worth of free slaves, all legal-like. Maybe in this book universe robots are expensive but lives are cheap.
Horses, Dogs, Elephants, Cetaceans, Chimps, Bonobos, Gorillas, Grey Parrots & Ravens/Crows all seem like good choices.
Dogs might be the best choice though harder than some others. They want to please humans. We’ve already bred without advance science Border Collies, significantly more intelligent on average than the average dog. They love to work, take a lot to tire and usually want to please their humans. The dog genome on the surface appears to be very plastic, so this might not prove too difficult.
Dolphins seem pretty easy, a little more intelligence and improved speech centers?
I’ve seen way too many documentaries detailing the possible risks associated with this sort of genetic manipulation. One of them included an iconic shot of the Statute of Liberty…
You don’t have to answer these questions if they’re discussed in Brin’s stories, you can just say “read and find out”, but I’m intrigued…
So these are species native to Earth, “uplifted” by humans to near-human or human equivalent sapience? Not that our own sapience is discovered to be owed to some alien species that uplifted us at some point, and is now calling the debt?
What about species with far different lifespans than humans? If dogs became sapient but still had lifespans of about 10-15 years, “100,000 years of species servitude” must seem unfair. Shouldn’t it be counted in generations?
What would “servitude” mean at a species level, anyway? Are all dogs now sapient, or is it like in Narnia where there is a distinction between Talking Animals and Dumb Animals? Are sapient dogs registered in the service of specific people, or just generally “gotta do what any human says, if/when they tell me to do it”, but otherwise going about their lives?
What about the obvious response, “Forget you, man, I didn’t ASK to be uplifted!”
What about the free will of sapient creatures? If we have the technology to create sapient creatures from animals already domesticated, can we also create their attitudes? Like in The Restaurant At The End of the Universe, where the ethical “carnivore’s dilemma” was resolved by breeding a cow “that actually wanted to be eaten, and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly?”
I forget whether it was Chiapas or Guatemala where we saw carnicerias adorned with big, bright cartoons of obviously sentient chickens, pigs, and bovines happily offering themselves to be sliced up. I suspect any “uplift” program applied by greedy capitalists will set such a goal. Or maybe, instead of that, edible critters are imbued with terrible existential angst that drives them to suicide by throwing themselves into AI-driven butcher-bots. “Life is useless. Chop me. Eat me.” mutters the world-weary lamb.
I’ve a cynical view of enslavement. Instead of “uplifting” animals to be willing servants with limited capabilities (unless dogs grow hands with fingers) it’s easier to medicate or otherwise process humans into servility, say with “zombie drugs” or implanted canine RNA. Don’t uplift animals to near-humanity - downgrade people into beasts of burden. Cats have already domesticated humans for that purpose.
It’s been a while since I read the series, so take this with a grain of salt, but as I recall it the uplifting of apes and dolphins happened on Earth through centuries of human directed breeding and humans where then discovered by a galaxy-travelling, multi-species culture. In that culture discovering a new planet with life meant you uplifted species there and they had to serve you for centuries.
The species didn’t have to be non-intelligent to start with, so if humans hadn’t already uplifted some of our local species, we’d have been forced into servitude for the privilege of joining that civilization. (And we wouldn’t get a choice whether we wanted that privilege.)
There’s more to it than that of course, but you’ll just have to read and find out …
In the Uplift book universe, sentient robots are a different order of life that exists separately from and in parallel with the biological species. However, the biological species also make extensive use of robotics, some of which seems to be quite high on the AI scale. It’s not really explored in the books, but presumably the distinction is that the robots-as-tools aren’t fully sentient (/sapient), whereas the robots-as-people are.
So, if you start uplifting dogs, at what point do you have to treat neo-dogs as “people”? Past that point it’s rather icky to continue doing things to them without their consent, isn’t it? And what if they don’t like the way you’ve done things, or want to uplift themselves in a different direction? We don’t allow humans to go tinkering in our genetics willy-nilly; why should neo-dogs be allowed the same? But does that mean that you have to stop when they’re barely intelligent enough to bark “want fud”? Or keep going until they’re swollen-brain supergenius dogs who’ll enslave humanity with their mental powers forcing endless frizbee throwing?
And now that you have neo-dogs as independent people… are they an eternal underprivileged minority? Do you give them their own nation? Wealth? Bring them to parity with other nations, maybe give them atomic weaponry?
We can’t even answer these questions with humans that have been forced into being an underclass. Making neo-dogs is just asking for the same tragedy to be repeated again, at greater cost and hubris. For that matter, if the justification is “someone else to talk to”, maybe figure out how to get along with all the people currently sharing the planet without spending effort on this frivolity.
In his Uplift books, Brin makes a point that the neo-chimps and neo-dolphins recognize how awful humanity had been to them (and the planet) in the past. It’s just that in the Uplift setting, every other alternative to humans is so unbelievably worse that the neo-chimps and neo-dolphins are forced to cooperate with the genocidal people who almost wiped their ancestors out. It’s Stockholm syndrome, romanticized. Kind of like Song of the South for sci-fi fans. I do like the books, but it’s a godawful basis for an ethos.
“No one is home” is an arrogant and short-sighted assumption. We are using what must be for any advanced civilization a primitive form of communication. Any race advanced enough to reach the stars is not going to use a form of communication that takes years to travel the necessary distance. It would be useless and make no sense.
Basically, we are on a mountain top in the Rockies sending up smoke signals and assuming no one is out there just because we are not getting an answer when, in reality, the environment is teaming with communication that we simply can’t detect.
A hundred thousand years of slavery is absurd and evil. It would be absurd and evil even if the species being “uplifted” had been given a choice.
I don’t remember the details of the Brin books clearly, but I don’t think he was arguing otherwise – IIRC, I thought the reason he had humans barely escaping the same fate was to make it more likely that readers would understand that it was wrong.
Seems to me that as soon as there’s somebody you can have the conversation with, it’s necessary to get permission. I also suspect that some individuals will give permission, and others withhold it – though of course there’s the further complication that they’d be giving permission for their not-yet-conceived children, who might or might not wish that they’d withheld it (or vice versa). But, to some extent, that’s a problem with deliberately having children in the first place.
I also don’t think we’d be entitled to finish off any existing species by “uplifting” all members.
And I don’t think there’d be any sense in it if by “uplifting” we meant ‘try as much as possible to turn into copies of ourselves’; and it would be wrong if what we meant by it was ‘try as much as possible to turn into better servants for us’. If we actually knew enough about what we were doing to for instance give dolphins hands, or dogs speech and better language capacities, while still having them be dolphins and dogs – that’s a different sort of matter, maybe. I think that we and the dogs have been working together on improving interspecies communication for quite a long time now; I don’t think that’s wrong.
Any species that creates its own competition deserves every horrible thing that is going to happen to it.
Uplifting if we have easy FTL and an infinite universe to play in is fine, a no-brainer - then we’re just creating companions for the fun, not competitors. I’d Uplift lots of different species then. But to do it when we don’t have FTL and limited resources (implicit in the OP’s condition that reaching other intelligences is not possible) is dumb and will bite us back harder than a part-Orca NeoFin.
I think an exotic (to us) species would be the way to go. The biggest benefit I see in such an undertaking would be having the perspective of an alien intelligence to share with. Sapient social insects like ants or bees, as mentioned above, sounds like a good way to go. Sapient non-human primates seems like the wrong way to go.
Intelligence, maybe we can give them. Independent culture is going to be much more difficult. Let’s say that we do our DNA magic on a chimp ovum and sperm, combine them in a test tube, and implant it in a chimp host mother. A few months later, we have a chimp baby who will grow up to be sapient. But who raises it? Humans, presumably. Who will then impose their own culture on the chimp-child. Likewise for all of the other sape apes we create. Where do they get their own culture?