“The world has an abundance of serious ethical problems, causing human and animal suffering, and delays or risks to our future. Wild animals suffer gruesome fates, farmed animals are tortured, humans endure diseases, war, poverty, torture, slavery… These problems could be called villains to be defeated.

The biggest villain is a sort of all powerful meta-villain, called insufficient intelligence to solve our problems instantly. Imagine that an advanced extraterrestrial group of cyborgs, having evolved for millions of years with superintelligence, reached Earth and contacted our world leaders in order to help us solve our problems. Does anybody honestly think that they would follow the same inefficient strategies that we do to solve our problems, such as distributing nets to prevent malaria in Africa, or encouraging people to donate to it?

Their solutions would be much faster, they might rapidly develop a gene therapy suited to our needs, that would spread in a highly contagious virus or some other method of delivery and turn us into more evolved and ethically efficient beings. They might develop cultured animal products such as meat, eggs, milk, and leather that would cost very cheap and instantly substitute abusive animal farming. Their solutions would be extremely different and more efficient.

Why are we not as efficient as these aliens? The only thing preventing us from being like them is not being intelligent enough. Therefore, intelligence enhancement or defeating the villain of insufficient intelligence is very important, perhaps the most important thing of all. It is the chief of all the other villains.”

— Jonatas Müller