I am overwhelmed with curiosity about what the animal would have been like if it had been allowed to live. Imagine that it was smart enough to speak or resemble humans even more closely than monkeys already do... imagine how earth shattering that would be. An entire race of beings to reconcile with. I wish they had let it live.
I wonder what political ramifications this would have. Say these monkeys were intelligent enough to have conversations with and they had thoughts and opinions on the world, but they weren't quite as smart as humans – they couldn't do advanced maths and were intellectually closer to young children – would we deny them the right to vote? Would we deny them employment rights? Etc...
If we did on what grounds would we do so? Lower average intelligence? How exactly could we do that while granting similar rights to humans with equivalently low IQs?
It's hard to imagine that this wouldn't destroy modern liberal societies. We would either grant them equal rights at a huge societal cost, or start denying rights based on intelligence which would come at a huge ethical cost.
I think about this a lot in regards to extinct human species. I often wonder what would happen if we found Neanderthals hiding out on an island somewhere. What rights would we give them? Would we allow them to bred with humans? It seems every answer is wrong.
Rights can already taken away from people who are declared legally incompetent [1]. Similar procedures could be used to give rights to monkeys that can prove mental competence (e.g., are able to meaningfully communicate and show an understanding of money and property).
The default is for humans to have rights, and in extreme cases those rights can be taken away.
It's very, very rare for a human to have to prove mental competence for any reason. We let mentally incompetent people grocery shop and drive cars and vote, knowing full well they're a danger (or at least not a net benefit). Every town in every country contains well-known incompetent citizens.
What's the default for intelligent non-humans?
Does each one have to prove mental competence? At what level: that of an average human, or that of the lowest competent human?
Is the default to assume they are competent, and have all the rights and privileges of a human, or is the default to assume they aren't competent and don't have those rights?
Personally, it makes sense to me to err on the side of "any being who tells me plainly that they want a vote gets to vote".
Yup. Ironically, it's in the context of AI where I first saw those questions being brought up. And there's an extra difficulty there: biological organisms can can reproduce only so fast. Software can reproduce as fast as you can provision new VMs in the data centre. So we can easily imagine suddenly going from 1 human-like AI program to a hundred billion instances of it, and then humanity becomes an insignificant minority from the point of view of democracy.
> we can easily imagine suddenly going from 1 human-like AI program to a hundred billion instances of it, and then humanity becomes an insignificant minority from the point of view of democracy.
