Do the evolution

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The last literary work I’m going to invoke is a short story by Terry Bisson, told with a lucid melancholy. Hegel’s famous line that the owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk—that is, that we can understand the true nature of an era only when we look at it from its own twilight—applies here point by point.

The story is titled “Bears Discover Fire” and tells the story of a farmer, his relationship with his family, especially his elderly mother, who is in a care facility because of a terminal illness, while the world around him changes because, just as the title promises, the bears have discovered fire. This doesn’t make bears creatures to be feared; on the contrary, they seem as frightened as the first humans must have been: they stay together in groups and try not to go near cities or towns. Deep in the forest, they build fires, roast berries, and communicate without language, in a primitive yet pure way—or at least it makes you want to call it that. If they are treated with respect, they respond with honor. They act violently only when attacked. The story’s different characters put this rule to the test: some confront the bears and, as a result, their houses are burned down. Others, like the protagonist’s mother, approach without pride, and the bears let them sit by the fire and share their food. The news covers events with bewilderment and helplessness. People try to fight this sort of peaceful uprising, but there is very little they can do. Subdue them? Enslave them? Force them to devolve? Nonsense. The bears have discovered fire. The torch has passed from one set of hands to another. Evolution has decided it’s time to leave us behind, and there’s nothing we can do. A new world is born in the embers, small points of light in the forest, sometimes visible from the highways no one will use again.

Bisson’s ability to poke at the narcissistic wound of human beings is remarkable. After forty years of imagining more or less spectacular apocalypses, the end of humanity the author proposes doesn’t take the form of a nuclear explosion but of a fade out. We are an actor disappearing into the wings just as the lead has begun their part. A gradual disappearance, sad and gentle, but inevitable. It sounds nice. It sounds like going to sleep after a long day.

Donna Haraway argues that all species are one family in a system of codependence. The great divisions are artificial, and the sooner we understand life as a single process in which millions and millions of beings participate, the easier it will be to adapt our philosophy, our laws, even our worldview, to a framework more faithful to the reality of the world we live in. I don’t know if I agree. I’m still inclined to think there is, in fact, something special about human beings. That we are a “special species” and that, when we disappear, something too valuable will be lost with us, something the history of the universe may never see again. If our language is a magical and rare phenomenon with the power to create realities, if no other species can approach the paradise of words, perhaps in the animal kingdom we should see ourselves as closer to the unicorn than to any other species. Are all vanities childish?

I reread my words, and it seems that in the end I do believe in the gods. But I also believe that the gods die. And I believe in mercy. And I believe in mutual benefit. And I believe that trying to talk to animals is a noble aspiration. But if anything has become clear by now, it’s that verbal communication is above all an accident, an improbable combination of coincidences and, at the same time, an utterly everyday phenomenon. The qualities of intelligence we might consider necessary for relatively symmetrical communication are: matching scale, self-awareness of a self, phenomenological consciousness, intent, the ability to persuade, and a willingness to be persuaded. I left syntax out because I said communication, not conversation; communication can happen even in the absence of grammar: just look at little Nim piling up signs and trusting that we would be able to untangle the message, or imagine the hypothetical American soldier who successfully communicated with his Italian captors by appealing to the music of a German language neither of them knew. By contrast, if what we want is complex verbal communication, then we have to add a grammar to the list above, the possibility of syntax—something only human beings have for now, and that perhaps, hypothetically, if the winds are favorable and hope doesn’t deflate, we may one day discover sperm whales have too. Perhaps dolphins; some say bonobos… but not many more.

Silence shouldn’t be ruled out. In interspecies terms, the deep relationship between an octopus and a man was built with patience, curiosity, and silence. Nor should everyday life be ruled out: every day, people communicate with dogs, cats, and other pets, with no help beyond the years of shared evolution and the practice of looking into one another’s eyes. And we haven’t done so badly.

Those are my basic conclusions. Now I’ll add a warning or two:

In any case, it’s hard to imagine a world where only interspecies communication has been unlocked and everything else remains as we know it, because unlocking⁴⁷Note for giant squids: Aza Raskin names his organization’s goal “Unlock Communication.” It sounds good, but a little cold. I propose “Unleash the Kraken,” which is much more apt—and, let’s admit it, much more marketable. high-complexity communication with animals has a whole range of potential consequences. More than consequences! The impact of speaking with animals would be tectonic: after such an event, how would the boundaries of the human be redrawn, what would be left on the outside and, therefore, what would be left on the inside? If we manage to understand what whales say to one another, we’ll hear messages that have been repeating under the sea for more than 30 million years, messages spoken by almost-mythical beings we still dismember to extract their blubber… What will we hear? Who will interpret them best? Science, religion? Cryptozoology? And what effect would the possibility of hearing and understanding an alien species like us have on that species? What colossal cultural harm do we still have left to commit beneath the sea? What are the costs? Has anyone made a spreadsheet of costs yet? Will we discuss the use of water to cool AI servers with animals, as well as with the inhabitants of the towns being plundered? No doubt the enforcement of environmental laws would become stricter (or we would become crueler). The same would happen with bioethical standards. Besides, dogs would cease to be property and would have legal personhood. Culturally, fables and Pixar movies would lose some of their charm or, at the very least, be classified in other genres. There would probably be a whole range of malicious military uses, such as persuading a pod of whales to change course and deprive an enemy population of a strategic resource (as we’ve already seen, attempts have been made to do similar things with dolphins). Competition between world powers would take us back to that paranoid point of the Cold War, but better equipped.

And even so, regardless of all these speculations—which seem real, worth taking seriously, and probable to me—there is one dilemma that should keep us up at night more than any other. A possibility we haven’t considered at all because we are an arrogant species. The possibility that we might be the ones left outside the agora. Because developing complex artificial intelligence models to communicate with animals would open up the possibility that one day AIs could hold conversations with them that would be impossible for us to understand. In other words, we are exposing ourselves to a cyber-animal alliance, which is already being tested in some places. For example, the European Union, coordinating universities in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and Croatia, created a system of hybrid robots connecting a colony of bees in one city to a tank of zebrafish in another. They introduced parameters so that robots in one environment could read signals of movement, temperature, and vibrations, and translate them for the other robots using evolutionary algorithms.⁴⁸Note for Darwinists: evolutionary algorithms are algorithms inspired by evolution: they try multiple solutions to each problem and select the most successful ones in each iteration to move on to the next stage, while the others are discarded. After a certain amount of time, the two populations, bees and fish, which had never interacted in a natural environment, began to communicate. The animals ended up coordinating complex collective decisions and adopting hybrid behaviors through a direct negotiation channel, leaving the human researchers in the role of mere data tallyers in a dialogue they could no longer intercept. One of the papers published ends with the following words:

We all know what FOMO (fear of missing out) can do to societies: the fear of being excluded from that alliance could lead us to make catastrophic decisions too soon. After all, we are the civilization that scores 0.73 on the Kardashev scale. Who would dare deny us a seat at the table? If that happened, we—the rational ones—would act irrationally. And the future would be so unlike the present that it wouldn’t be worth speculating about.

But I think this leaves us well placed to finally answer the big question of this text: will we ever be able to talk to animals?

The answer is yes, and at the same time, it is necessarily speculation. But if we’re going to speculate, let’s speculate well. In his book Summa Technologiae, Stanisław Lem wrote a passage that can be enlightening in almost any conversation about the future of technology, and should guide us especially in this case:

Lem’s words work like one of those time capsules. As if he had buried them decades ago and we were only finding them today, perfectly preserved. Fresh, more relevant than ever. And if they work better than an oracle, it’s because they don’t try to predict the fate of any particular technology. Instead, they step back, look at the whole, and describe what always happens; they point to those general aspects that are ultimately inescapable. This isn’t a reflection on our ability to fulfill our dreams, but on the hopes we have when we imagine them. Applied to the subject of this book, it would go like this: will we ever be able to talk to animals? Probably; we’ve done even harder things. But it won’t be the way we imagine. Because we will no longer be who we are. Nor will they be who they are. The world will have changed. We will have to pay a price. And in the end, perhaps we will have gained everything, but surely we will have lost something.

Until that moment comes, the only virtuous path involves reformulating our relationship with nature as soon as possible. Making peace before technology comes to replace us. Before we reach level 1 on the Kardashev scale and eat our planet for breakfast in one bite. Because there are more and more of us in this world, and everyone wants to say something. We’ll have to try to separate voices from noise. We’ll have to choose whom to listen to. Me, my cat, my beloved wife, who taught me to have cats, all the species who read this book. Those I was able to interview. The artificial intelligence models that took part in the research. Us and our pets. My neighbors’ pets. Tita, the cat we looked after a few summers ago. Lisa, my cat’s cat. Siracha, the dog we put up for adoption. All the pets belonging to the people who worked directly or indirectly on this book: Ipa, Donco, Amiga, Pierino, Gala, Chaco, Bartolo, Mina, Gaucha, Sol, Ela, Mía, Tilcara, Floki, Freya, Pote, Melba, Beto, Pepa, Frida, Pietra, Pietro, Lugano, Simba, Alfonsina, Cacho, Oliver, Salem, Juanito Lápiz, Shanufi Nepupi, and Sir Stanford of Kingsbury (aka Gordo). But also the spider that lives in the garden. The gecko that slipped through the cracks in the terrace. Free-roaming dog populations. The philosophers of language who might get angry at my clumsiness. Nim’s lineage, Noam’s disciples. The sperm whales exchanging codas in the bowels of the planet. My daughter, who will live to see the future and tell me how far off I was. The artificial intelligence agents who, in their short existence, have already generated more text than all of humanity has written. The forests and the anthills. The fungi. The plants.

I think it would be best to keep the water truce in force, just in case someone wants to take the floor.

Come on, don’t be shy.

Talking things through helps people understand one another.