There's no animal I'm aware of that has a mental capacity beyond that of a child. We don't think children are capable of giving consent - are we clearing the way to legalise paedophilia too, or are there animals with the mental capacity to provide informed consent that only lack the ability to communicate that consent?

Spoiler: It's not a communication issue. If this technocratic psycho was more concerned with actually contemplating the morality of the question, and less focused on rearranging the insides of a parrot, his takes might be a little less monstrous.

i like how he sees the "consent problem" as just a communication thing. "if they could speak, they would be saying yes"

I don't think anyone else has said this, so I shall.

What in the actual fuck.

Why do I feel like this guy knows exactly how far a Scooby snack gets you.

How the fuck will LLMs help you flirt with Mr Snuffle paws? What is going on in this guy's head?

It's fascinating seeing everyone project onto this things. Like a rorschach test of desires. You have the madcap industrialist slavering over firing all humans, the nerd rapturists, the sexbot enthusiasts, the doomsday preppers, and apparently dolphinfuckers now.

of all the hills to die on, why would anyone pick this one lmao

I don’t think the guy even understands consent tbh.

So why not wait a few more years

The world this posits is wild. First, you’ve got a person wanting to commit bestiality, but only wants it if it is legal, otherwise, why wait? Second, we’re going to both translate animal language (or neural activity if you wanna go steelman) into human language and back. And third, we’re gonna use that to successfully teach animals sex education (that, mind you, many countries already don’t have a great track record on teaching humans sex ed). Fourth, somehow these animals will be able to comprehend any of this in a meaningful way for the legal system to recognise their ability to consent (again, bad track record). And fifth the animals will actually consent.

higher animals

like, birds?

I'll be shocked when dude builds his translator, and every animal, rock, and inanimate object reliably says how much it wants to fuck him. Could the translator be wrong? No, he must be that desirable.

If there's one thing I'll definitely take a very conservative stance on, it's that beastiality is absolutely disgusting and should not be legal, ever. If it's something like Sonic or a fictional drawing of an anthro on e621, fine, but if it's your pet dog Helga, you need serious help.

dear internet vegans trying to start fights online by comparing eating meat with raping animals: fuck off

dear insecure meat eaters who think anyone gives a fuck you don’t like vegans: see above

Gotta wonder if that’s in any way related to how so many of those assholes have a hate-on for furries

Knowing just a smidgeon about how the statistical parrots work, I wonder were they will get the dataset for the animal languages.

This reminds me, I read an article in Nature about teaching dogs to read. Now, this was a 19th century article in a 19th century Nature, so it described how the author had written "food" on a note and placed it on the food bowl and placed a blank note on an empty bowl and eventually gotten his dog to fetch the note that had "food" written on it. Alas, due to unforeseen circumstances, it was hard to expand into more advanced literature.

So where to get the dataset? Nevermind, Magical AI to the rescue!

Evolution is when all of the animal fuckers die from zoonotic diseases.

hey chatgpt, how do I bit flip my dog translator?

the animal consent problem hasn’t been solved, but probably actually will be quite soon thanks to Al (at least for the higher animals with complex languages)

looking at his dog what if the ai consents tho...

Every time I hear the name "Richard Hanania" it's in the context of this type of thing or worse. What's his deal?