> 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.
There's a brief scene in Heavens River, book 4 of the Bobiverse series, where some characters spend some time with the equivalent of alien dolphins. The "dolphins" have a very limited language that main consists of names and one word inquiries and warnings.
For example, the local replicant who they know introduces his fellows. The dolphin speech is essentially "who? Marvin! Marvin friends?"
Which is basically "Who are the strangers? Oh it's Marvin! Marvin, are these your friends?"
I imagine most animal languages are at this level. And nothing wrong with that. For their lifestyles, many intelligent animals with a language like this are served perfectly well. Personal identifiers to call out friendly individuals, names for threats, maybe even general welcomes for fellow groups like elephants and whales that generally live in family groups and occasionally meet up for mating or due to resource constraints like grazing and seasonal water construction.
Regarding Koko, it isn't really clear if she really was able to have complex dialogues, or if that was wishful thinking on the part of her trainers.
In general, I don't think there are any animals that are as intelligent as adult humans. After all, if there's nothing special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant species on the planet? It's not like other animals had the opportunity to take over and rejected it.
Although I suspect humans are the most intelligent, it's possible that is us creating a standard specifically for our skill set and other species outperform us by equally reasonable but different standards.
> After all, if there's nothing special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant species on the planet?
Could be a lot of things. Sea life can't have fire, so no ceramics or refined metals.
We're unusually cooperative at multiple levels of abstraction; wolves have packs, ants have colonies, but we have global trade in information, energy, goods, and two nations of over 1.4 billion people each.
Opposable thumbs are really useful, relatively rare.
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.