What Humans Can Learn From Non-Human Intelligence

“I had the immense pleasure of witnessing this piece being performed live on stage for the brilliant Story Sosa in Nairobi. Immediately after the show, I downloaded this pdf and have read it over and over. Chris is one of those extraordinary journalists who can take a complex concept and connect it to a story as wild as a monkey taking down an entire nation’s power lines, and articulate with simplicity and clarity the why of it all. This essay is for those wondering how AI thinks, or how we imagine it thinks.” -Anne Moraa

AM: “This taut, well-crafted short story about a pathogenic diplomat negotiating for humanity’s survival has haunted me since first reading. How do viruses think? What would happen if we could speak to them? And worse, what could happen if other intelligent beings could speak to hem too? In a world after Covid, still in Covid, the idea of a Pathogenic Diplomat is both exciting and horrifying.”

AM: “So aliens are real. Like, that happened. This year. Like, we were told this outright. It still blows my mind. This historical context helped make it make sense to me.”

AM: “Ogres were always real to me. A myth from childhood, one eyed, ready to devour disobedient little girls, I always wondered about their inner lives. This short story, both precise and empathetic, uses a catalogue of various ogres to explore who the real monsters are.”

AM: “In this video, US Author and psychologist Deirdre Barrett explores what can be gleaned about how nonhuman animals might dream. She ‘contextualises what we know about the rapid eye movements and brain structures of other mammals with high cognitive capacities—including cetaceans like whales and dolphins, and other primates—to detail the fascinating ways in which their dreamworlds might differ from our own.’”

AM: “Perhaps as the daughter of a farmer, I had an innate and unfounded belief that plants speak. To us, to animals and most of all to each other. This is far from unique in Eastern and African cosmologies; the idea that every living thing is a full being. So, when I read this essay, it was less a revelation and more a validation that indeed trees, and all plants, everywhere have lives as rich and full as our own.”

AM: “I can’t say it any better than this: ‘As any long-time reader of science fiction can tell you, “The Great Silence” is another name for the Fermi Paradox, and the Fermi Paradox is a meditation on two contradictory truths: 1) the idea that we represent the only intelligence in the universe is preposterous and 2) despite the increasing range of our extraterrestrial search, we have found only silence.

Ted Chiang’s very short story, “The Great Silence” adds another set of questions to these speculations. Why, he asks, are we so interested in finding intelligence in the stars and so deaf to the many species who manifest it here on earth?’

This short story is a brilliant meditation on the intelligences we have right here.”

AM: “As is LAM tradition, here’s a song break for you: to bring you back to your humanity, a tender favourite from an all time great.”