Alien neuropunk slaver civilizations

Must a brain-in-a-vat which controls a factory machinery having a simple, pre-determined task, necessarily be self-aware? Because if it's not, than it's no more slavery than the case of a contemporary factory robot, or a horse pulling a cart.

If the aliens are good at bioengineering, I can imagine they would be able to create an intelligence higher than their own.

I am not sure about the scenario, whether they use as slaves other species (an analogy would be humans using animals) or also the same species (humans using humans). If the latter, then creating a higher intelligence could be relatively simple, maybe just a question of changing some evolutionary trade-off in a way that increases intelligence and decreases some other trait that the slave-owners don't care about. If there are no ethical concerns, they could just run thousand random experiments, have the slaves take IQ tests, and see what works. Such slaves with improved intelligence would still be unable to recursively self-improve (they could only improve the next generation of slaves), so it would be easy to keep them enslaved; especially if the modification would make them less able to survive in real life.

When the bioengineering becomes so powerful that you can increase a brain's intelligence by doing a surgery on an existing organism, then there will be a risk that a group of slaves will recursively improve each other's brains to the level when they are able to devise an escape plan. Now the question is whether their understanding of brain centers for intelligence is better than their understanding for brain centers for things that could make the slaves rebel. That is, whether they can eradicate all desire to rebel before they can increase the intelligence. In AI words, whether "Friendly intelligence" comes before "recursively self-improving intelligence". This is a (hypothetically) empirical question; it depends on the specific design of the alien brain.

Also, with sufficiently good bioengineering, these aliens could develop cyborgs, so the first superintelligence might have a half-biological, half-electronic brain.

This world has many parallels to Hanson's brain emulation world.

Pretty much equivalent, I'd say. I don't think it's relevant here whether minds run on wetware or on silicon.

How different is that from our world? We call our vats some combination of workplace and apartment, and we give the working brains money because that reinforces their behavior much like drugs do, but overall, when you substract the aversive imagery of "food drips" and direct stimulation of nociceptors (instead of yelling, lawsuits and imprisonment)... that doesn't seem substantially different.

Which means the answer to your questions is yes. We already have a superintelligence infinitely smarter than any human, it is called science, and the AGI project is its ongoing project of improving upon itself. So yes, I do think superintelligence is possible without electronic computing.

I think you may have oversimplified bio-engineering to suggest it could arise in such a way before advanced technology. Ignoring that for a moment; because in our future we could conclude that vat-brains are more effective at a task than programmed-robots.

I don't think there are many standard ways to look at the ethics of manipulating brains in vats in return for processes. however a stripped down brain essentially becomes a robot. This question is wondering of our understanding of sentience. Which we are really not too sure about at the moment.

I just see biological-based robots with bio-mechanisms of achieving tasks.

You seem to be describing a combination of the Prador (who are, as you describe highly resilient and use the forcefully extracted brains of their juveniles in place of computers or AI's) or the affront who engineered slave species to fill automation roles (in whatever way was most painful).

This scenario is certainly possible, and, perhaps, that civilization, like ours, would eventually evolve to value all sentient/sapient life, and switch to using the tools which do not experience suffering. Or maybe not. It is far from clear whether the modern/progressive Western morality is a necessary evolutionary step.

Assuming the original organics have to absorb a comparable amount of data to what Earther brains do, any brain with stimulus of the outside world will grow, which means overseers in a vat that interact with overseers in bodies will, even if not given stimulus, come to know their bosses and their personalities and moods and what not, and have as much chance of manipulating them as anyone whose only power is a bunch of underlings. How expensive are well trained overseers to replace? That is how much leeway they have in whatever equivalent they find to human bureaucrats with small amounts of power.

Could they develop superintellegent AGI? Depends wholly on their brains architecture, and their skill with artificial selection. Not enough data to predict.

Is this society evil? It is very slightly possible that it is not. I mean, I know some autistic people who on occasion wish to be cut off from their bodies during sensory somatic issues. Ehh, cloning aspies who are afraid of touching is kind of evil if it's just as easy to clone aspies who aren't afraid of touching.