Elephants Are Doing Something Deeply Human

They mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants behaving in a way that shows some form of consciousness and reflection on the world. They are clearly intelligent beings.

Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value.

Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.

I was lucky to spend a lot of time with elephants during my three years around Africa.

I feel certain future generations will look on us as barbarians for keeping elephants and other intelligent animals in concrete cells. They are magnificent, and care deeply for each other. One day when we speak to them I feel certain they’ll say humans suck and every animal knows it.

Decades ago, I was in Thailand at a safari park with a coconut cracked open from the refreshment stand, sipping the milk through a plastic straw.

An elephant did something deeply human and thugged that coconut right out of my hand, and into its mouth it went. Those trunks are quick and I, a dumb tourist, was not on guard.

Best thing I could do was pluck the straw from its maw, as that probably would not have been healthy.

Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals. I think there's a natural tendency for humans to anthropomorphize, to project human behaviors and motivations onto other animals, which can get pretty extreme and silly in some cases, like how we project this assumption onto non-living phenomena, like a rainstorm or machine learning model. However, I think in the case of animals, especially complex charismatic megafauna, and especially especially things like highly social mammals, it's actually a better assumption that their internal experience and motivations may resemble ours than this ridiculous contrarian backlash against it we got in the last few hundred years, where now we're supposed to treat "These tiny variations on what we are are somehow so fundamentally ontologically different that we should assume we can understand nothing about how they think, or whether they even do at all, without doing a zillion RCTs" (and this dovetails conveniently with immiserating them to an unheard-of degree at an unfathomable scale by modern industry). Similarly-shaped contrarianisms are unfortunately still much of the dominant culture of institutions, but it's nice that some of them are losing their grip

One 'deeply human' behavior is feeding other, unrelated animals.

How long before they have collisions and start using last names!?

> The thought of someday being able to address an elephant in a way it can understand is downright magical. To say, “Hello, I’m Tove. Please tell me your name.”

I truly believe that thinking other species are “less intelligent” than us comes down to our own inability to have a complex dialogue with them. Time and again, we have a pioneer who is somehow able to break this barrier through sheer perseverance. Then we get Kokos of the world. Now we’ve noticed traits resembling true human toddler like understanding in dogs and even some birds.

Perhaps one day, brain interface devices and machine learning will help us cross that barrier for good, and unlock a new age of learning from our peers in the animal kingdom.

"Hello, Bignose!"

Shouldn't machine learning be easily able to decipher animal communication at this point?

I kinda wish HN had a rule against submissions to sites with login walls related to news, articles, etc. Basically, content sites. It's constant these days and the only way to read the articles is via archival sites like this.

My guess is the sites don't benefit from the traffic being directed to them. The signup rate for this strategy is in the single digit percentage at most. Meanwhile, at least if you're like me, the user just immediately navigated back to HN. Out time is wasted and the "front page" of HN is being somewhat diluted by unreadable content.