Smart pigs might challenge what it means to be human

We love to hear from smart pigs!  We empathise with Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web as he risks being turned into bacon and we understand the worst of human nature as Napoleon the Berkshire boar and his cronies take over in Animal Farm.  Many of us then tuck into our pork dinner without making any connection.  But how would we feel if, like Arthur in the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, we got to “meet the meat” and have a real conversation?

Elon Musk’s Neuralink has gained a lot of media attention and criticism as the company embeds probes and even microchips into the brains of pigs.  Some years ago, I highlighted that there are many ways into the brain apart from the obvious path of inserting probes including the repurposing (or extension) of nascent bionic eyes.

Since then, researchers have continued to be amazed at the plastic nature of human and animal brains, including the ability to seamlessly repurpose different signals.  A great example is a device allowing the wearer to “hear” through the skin.

Whether it is a Matrix-style implant, via a bionic eye or a simple skin patch it is very likely that the brain interface will go from the cumbersome to the seamless in our lifetimes.  But in the meantime, could these devices enhance the first animals that receive them, most probably pigs?

Artificial intelligence (AI) research has made amazing progress over the last decade, driving everything from chatbots to drones.  What it hasn’t achieved to-date is anything genuinely approaching consciousness or intelligence.  I have always believed that we won’t be outsmarted by our machines, but rather will combine with them.

What we haven’t spent enough time considering is the implications when the first machine/brain combinations aren’t with humans at all but rather bring AI together with animals that have previously been (to our sense at least) intellectually inferior.  It is entirely possible, even probable, that we will be able to add to a pig’s skills by AI augmentation.  We could truly “meet the meat”!

We may well find that a few AI-driven language skills bring out a super pig we can converse with.  If so, we’re going to have some very uncomfortable conversations as these animals discover the real role that they play in our society today.

Even if AI on its own is not enough to lift the animals we work with to our level of intelligence, the next generation of quantum computing technology may well complete the task.  Many scientists have argued that consciousness, or at least the sophistication of our brains, depends on similar quantum properties to those that are inherent in the qubits underpinning quantum computers.

Theories of computing technology and neuroscience are both going to be put to the test over the coming decades.  As a result, the definition of what it means to be human could become malleable.  We can’t expect all intelligence, emergent, technological or augmented, to have or want the same social orders or cultures as we value.

We were warned by many eminent computer scientists such as Professor Toby Walsh that the ethics of AI needed to be tackled quickly before they were weaponised.  That genie is well and truly out of the bottle with autonomous AI-powered drones already doing the killing in battles around the world.  Perhaps we should learn the lesson and deal with the ethics of augmented intelligence before it is too late.

Augmented intelligence could increase diversity, improve our quality of life and reduce mental health issues that plague society.  Alternatively, it has the potential to create slaves of animals programmed to meet our most banal needs, regulate out of existence the richness of human diversity and force us to alter the most fundamental attributes of our conscious experience.

Either way, we are going to need to start thinking again about what it means to be human and what forms of intelligence we will value and protect.  Not everyone will be equal in intelligence, if only by virtue of the technology upgrades that they had access to in their most formative years.  If ageism is difficult to deal with now, it will be even harder when an individual’s augmented technology will age even faster.

How we respond now will set the stage for the society our grandchildren will inherit.