A lot of people are worried about Artificial Intelligence right now, and rightfully so. Intelligence is a scary thing. It got us kicked out of Eden, way back when, and it’s also responsible for philosophy courses at universities across the world. The thing is nothing but trouble. Why would we create more of it than naturally occurs?
Unfortunately, Artificial Intelligence isn’t the only intelligence breathing down our necks right now. There’s also a significant threat from Real Intelligence, and it’s happening off the coast of Spain.
We’ve long held the position at this blog that humans aren’t that smart. (You’re nodding, as you read this.) We’ve bet heavily on it, in fact. An NIT blog with an off-season focus on license plates? There’s no way that succeeds commercially unless you guys are into the same dumb things we’re into. We have a vested interest in The Internet not getting too intelligent.
An accompanying position to our position on humanity is that we think other animals are much smarter than they’re mostly given credit for being. Crows are a key piece of this, but the thought extends to parrots, dogs, capuchins, elephants, and chimpanzees, to name a few. We aren’t trying to say these animals are smarter than humans (except for toddlers—the dog vs. toddler battles of wits are electric). We’re just saying that these animals are closer to us in smartness than the human consensus gives them credit for being. Humans like to pretend that humans aren’t animals. Humans also get really excited when they train other humans to shit in a bowl. (Side tangent on animals and religion below.)
Conspicuously not mentioned in the examples above are the animals of the deep. Dolphins. Blue whales. Octopuses. And, of course, orcas.
This is a blog post about orcas.
Live Science ran an article last week on how orcas have sunk three boats off the coast of Spain. It’s happened over the course of roughly three years, but it’s more than three boats which have been attacked. There’s a pattern of killer whales around both Gibraltar and Galicia attacking the rudders of ships and ramming them from the side. The rudder attacks are the more prevalent form of conflict.
What’s going on? Sailors have reported seeing full-grown orcas train their calves to do this, so the thought is that this is a learned behavior. The question, as I understand the article to say, is whether it’s playful—the orcas are playing a devastating prank—or vengeful. In the vengeful scenario, one explanation is that a single orca collided with a boat or got trapped by a fisherman breaking the law and got pissed. It’s kind of like if one group of people had a group of three significant buildings, full of thousands of people, get hit by planes hijacked by members of another group of people, and then the first group went and got their friends and unleashed holy hell on the group the attackers came from.
Basically: Iberian orcas may have declared war on us.
This is a problem for us on a few counts.
On one, we might lose a war to the orcas. The orcas might retake the seas. We’re smarter than orcas right now, I’ll give us that, but we’re also getting smarter with time, so shouldn’t orcas be getting smarter as well? There’s no natural law to my knowledge that says orcas can’t outsmart us, given enough chances to iterate. Couple in their twin advantages of 1) being able to swim for a lot longer than we can without drowning and 2) defending their home turf, something that always helps in wars [see: Ukraine], and we could theoretically lose this war. Which would be kind of awesome—who doesn’t love an upset—but would also probably lead to a spike in poverty and a swell in Cruise People spending more time on land, roving about taking over small towns en masse in search of trinkets and hair-braiding.
On another, the Iberian orca population is very endangered. Being a rather magnanimous species, this matters to us. If there’s a war, we’re going to play by some set of rules. We don’t know if the orcas will. If push comes to shove, we’ll shove, but that might mean no more Iberian orcas, and that would be very sad because orcamanity, again, is great. You’ve gotten excited about a Pacific Life commercial before. Now picture it with orcas instead of blue whales. Yep. It would suck if we had to exterminate the orcas of any peninsula, Iberia included.
On the last count, we’ve been trying to ally ourselves with orcas for forever. We saw the potential in these beasts as war machines as early, in the United States, as 1960. (Remember to remember Ahab this Memorial Day, dude gave his life for our country and didn’t even get USAA benefits for his grandkids.) If we go to war with orcas, this means our attempts at alliance are *not* going well. Going back to our Middle East example, this would be a bad sign for the Western World’s peacekeeping potential.
So, hopefully the orcas are just playing. Hopefully it’s just a prank. Hopefully orca kids are spending some seminal teenage birthday getting to go out with Mom and learn to tear up sailboats. I can live with that. In a more literal sense, I hope the orcas can too.
Ok, here’s the side tangent: The argument that humans aren’t *that* different from other animals really upsets certain followers of certain religions, on the basis that it conflicts with the line that man is “made in God’s image.” I don’t think it conflicts with that line. I think these people don’t like to be reminded how close they are to animals because these people take the “God’s image” line to mean that they, said followers, are equal to God, set apart from the other living beings of this planet. The line doesn’t say that man is God. The line says man is made in God’s image. A stick figure is made in the image of a human, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. If you’re uncomfortable with the biological fact that you are an animal, you might not be worshiping God. You might be worshiping yourself.
