James Auger in his controversial new book, Augmented Animals, envisions animals, birds, reptiles and even fish using specially engineered gadgets to help them overcome their evolutionary shortcomings. He imagines rodents zooming around with night-vision survival goggles, squirrels hoarding nuts using GPS locators and fish armed with metal…
This reminds me so much of Ben Bova’s Uplift War, that it’s funny. I don’t think its an inherently evil idea, unlike those who believe that the word ‘natural’ should be in capitals. I do think that this is a plagiarised idea – I’m not sure if it was Bova’s idea in the first place. If not him then who?
I would have thought that before people performed frivolous augmentation research (adding night-vision goggles to squirrels for gods sake), they might look to genetics to perform some fundamental enhancements to the cognitive capabilities of an animal.
They might also want to think about performing some serious research into growing two dicks on a tiger, so i don’t have to have so many migraines.
Industrial Inference 