News

Should we engineer animals to be smart like humans?

Humans have been thinking for a long time that the only difference between our specie and the rest of the animals is our level of intelligence and our sophisticate language and speech system. But well, what will happening if we know how to put an others species in our same level of intelligence?

That idea is not as far as it seems. One study realized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the relationship between the intelligence and genes, engineered mousses to produce the human gene that is responsible to the learns brain capacity and the speech process.

The result of one of the test was exiting. The mouse with the new gene learned one route faster than the mousse without it.  But it means that can we create animals with news levels of intelligence? This concept knows as “uplifting”.

Uplifting was explored in the past by the science fiction, but now it has parallels with the real research. In 2011 a research team from North Carolina used monkeys to investigate how restarts the lost control in illness, like Alzheimer. First they trained the monkeys to identifying symbols and images, and then they gave her cocaine to reduce her intelligence. When the researchers repeat the test, using neural prosthetics who correct the functions of neurons disable, they could see how neural prosthetics can use to restore decisions-making in humans.

George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies thinks that we can't equalize the science fictions yet, because we need technology that we haven’t yet. But he says that is important continue investigating for the great profits we can get.

Uplifting produce a big moral dilemma, too: while some think that it’s great for humans and for the rest of species improve their intelligence a lot of people think that it is immoral and we don’t have enough authority to take this decision for them.

The title of the news attracts my attention mainly because I like sciences and I like know how they improve as fast as we advance. The news sets out something that at the moment we only knew thanks science fiction films or imagination. But suddenly some scientists in some part of the world are developing the same. In my opinion it’s amazing. Every time we are inventing and discovering more things that few years ago it seemed impossible. All have a lot of applications, for example, in medicine and help us to get better life.  

The news tell us about the new concept “uplifting”, that it means the capacity to create animals with different levels of intelligent until equalize the human intelligent. At first it seems impossible and probably strange, too. But it is true and in a future we can do it.

On the one hand I think that it would be extraordinary because who has never tried to  your pet? But on the other hand I believe that it is not something that we can do and we haven’t have enough “power” over the rest of species, although we think the opposite. We could break the evolution and evolution takes a lot of time. If we do it we could have a lot of negative effects for the way to live in the earth.