Roboramma
24th July 2008, 05:21 PM
So I was watching this video the other day:
bXQAgzfwuNQ
See also here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html
And it got me thinking - he says that crow brain-body mass ratio is the same as chimpanzees. (I'm not sure if this is calculated as a simple ratio or in some other way...)
What I was wondering about was, if we put a lot of resources into it, could we genetically engineer/breed crows to be more and more intelligent to the point of approaching human intelligence?
Could this be done faster than building such intelligence from the bottom-up by way of artificial intelligence via computers?
I know these are quite speculative questions. Actually, I think the answer (especially to the second question) is no.
But as we learn more about our own intelligence, and the influences of particular genes, some of those might work if simply put directly into the crow genome. More primitive artificial selection methods might also work.
The reason for this isn't simply to create really smart crows, though that would be cool, but because I think that we could learn a lot from them.
In particular, if they could develop a language as complex as ours, we could communicate with them, and they could directly tell us about the experiences of another sentient being.
We could use them as an alternative to either a manned or robotic space program (they're smaller than us, and probably easier to keep alive between planets).
I'm sure there are lots of jobs that they could do better than humans, so they'd represent a major new economic resource.
It doesn't even require that they have human-level intelligence, just complex-langauge and a reasoning ability at a level that we could "do business" with them.
Okay, so this is mostly just a silly idea - mainly I wanted to share the video with everyone, but I also like silly speculations and am interested what people think would be the problems with implementation and the repercussions if it were successful. :)
bXQAgzfwuNQ
See also here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html
And it got me thinking - he says that crow brain-body mass ratio is the same as chimpanzees. (I'm not sure if this is calculated as a simple ratio or in some other way...)
What I was wondering about was, if we put a lot of resources into it, could we genetically engineer/breed crows to be more and more intelligent to the point of approaching human intelligence?
Could this be done faster than building such intelligence from the bottom-up by way of artificial intelligence via computers?
I know these are quite speculative questions. Actually, I think the answer (especially to the second question) is no.
But as we learn more about our own intelligence, and the influences of particular genes, some of those might work if simply put directly into the crow genome. More primitive artificial selection methods might also work.
The reason for this isn't simply to create really smart crows, though that would be cool, but because I think that we could learn a lot from them.
In particular, if they could develop a language as complex as ours, we could communicate with them, and they could directly tell us about the experiences of another sentient being.
We could use them as an alternative to either a manned or robotic space program (they're smaller than us, and probably easier to keep alive between planets).
I'm sure there are lots of jobs that they could do better than humans, so they'd represent a major new economic resource.
It doesn't even require that they have human-level intelligence, just complex-langauge and a reasoning ability at a level that we could "do business" with them.
Okay, so this is mostly just a silly idea - mainly I wanted to share the video with everyone, but I also like silly speculations and am interested what people think would be the problems with implementation and the repercussions if it were successful. :)