we already live with alien life and the way humans behave towards it is how we'll behave towards anything else that comes along, unlikely as that prospect is
Anything else comes along and we’ll be in the position of the elephants and dolphins and chimps. Nothing to do but hope Sagan was right and only enlightened and peaceful cultures invent interstellar travel
elephants are so funny man
sometimes teenage boys act up and the head mama goes like "nuh uh youse gots to go!" and so they just fuck off somewhere, maybe attack a human village or two, and then come back a couple years later to fuck
I remember reading a story a while back about an elephant that was treated for injuries at a research center - later they figured out that it had communicated to other elephants that it was a safe place to go for medical assistance because they’d show up there with problems and wait for it to open
Does this mean that, like, Elephant A has a name for Elephant B, or that Elephant A has a name that Elephants B-Z all know? Both are amazing, to be sure, I just wasn’t clear on this.
Looks like there is some potential evidence for the latter but they failed to prove it.
Perhaps we shouldn't read too much into that failure: it's a miracle of science that they managed to prove *any* part of this.
I disagree strongly with Guardian's decision to describe this as "AI." That's a pretty bad label in general but in the recent discourse it usually refers to large transformer-based neural networks, and this is something totally different, though I don't know how computationally intensive.
Until recently they were calling this sort of thing "machine learning" (and a lot of people would say that's still too anthropomorphic). But it seems the dam has broken: LLMs are "AI" and I guess everything else in the world is too.
that's fair. it can be really hard to get people to use actual accurate terms, especially for tech stuff which most people have only very basic understanding of to start with!
I mean I absolutely know what you both mean, and at the same time this is news about a funded study where people were specifically looking for intelligent life on earth. It’s okay to be down on this stuff most of the time, but today was a win, yeah?
I think you misunderstand the point of what I was saying in reply to another reply. This wasn't meant to be a downer, just a cynical observation about how we could be doing MORE of this type of thing if not for greedy people!
No, I got it—and like I said, every other day of the year I agree with you. But today’s an exception. Today it went from “we could be doing this, period,” to “we could be doing more of this.”
I believe that the same way we can identify bird calls on Merlin app, we will soon be able to learn dog language &so many other animals. They are already understanding some whale communications. It is going to be awesome to talk to our pets (more).
