The opening of Brad Templeton’s article about the future of brain enhancement, which suggests that chimpanzees may become post-simian–something we’ve tried before in more modest ways–before we become post-human:

“Once this chimp brain is created, it will cause a flurry of research. Quite possibly, the ‘software’ part of the brain will be published and made available for others to work on, and the hardware will be readily available too.

Indeed, the software of this chimp brain might be made available for free distribution. An ‘open source’ ape, for all to experiment on.

And they will experiment on it. Once again, even if a human brain is similarly available, moral and legal considerations will limit what experimentation can be done, while actions on the ape-brain will probably not be nearly as limited.

Apes however are remarkably similar to humans. As you may know, chimps share 98% of our DNA. In addition, we have made intensive study of the ways in which they are different, and we will attempt to learn more.

Thus some of the first experiments on this artificial chimp brain will be to enhance it along the lines that humans and chimps are different. Humans are not so qualitatively different in our brains from chimps, though the few differences have a magnified effect in our capabilities. We have more of certain types of brain structures, and some of our structures are larger and have more neural connections. There is no component of a human brain not found in a chimp brain. Experimenters will quickly try to see what happens if you modify those aspects of the working chimp brain. They will also ‘graft’ information from post-mortem and live scans of human brains, where available.

If the artificial chimp brains ‘run’ much faster than biological ones, they will be able to perform these experiments quickly. They may be able to have their computer play out a thousand different experimental scenaria, each playing out years of biological scale time — perhaps in just a day of real time. They will quickly learn what works and what doesn’t, what enhances and what doesn’t. And there will be many of them.

I think quite quickly they could create a chimp brain capable of human level intelligence or beyond. She may then need training or ‘rearing’ by real human parents, but she will be a very quick and supremely capable learner. All this will happen much more quickly than the ethical changes to occur which would allow scientists to do similar experiments on human based brains.”