Here’s an unsettling article from Wired about a book called Augmented Animals by James Auger. Auger suggests that we develop devices to help animals overcome their physical limitations. Well, for wild animals the idea is to help them overcome their limitations and in some cases enhance whatever intelligence is present. (Like we know what we’re doing well enough to intervene without the risk of causing more problems than we solve?) The article also discusses some enhancements that would help animals deal with domestication or the trauma of factory farming. On the one hand, this sounds kind of like soma to me; we don’t need to really treat them better, we just need to delude them into thinking that they are living in better conditions. On the other hand, to be pragmatic about it, if we are going to treat them badly (e.g., factory-farming animals), maybe we do owe it to them to mitigate the misery if we can. Well, read the article for yourself and see what you think. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who’s read the book.
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67349,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
