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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> Are there worlds where there are 2 or 3 radically different civilized species sharing the land?

Extremely unlikely. We can barely manage to peacefully share the land with members of our own species. Can you really imagine homo sapiens making significant economic sacrifices in favor of a different species?

> If we stopped killing everything and taking all the resources for ourselves, would we be able to witness the emergence of one in the next 5000 years?

Almost certainly no. Other species are intelligent, but none of them have our innate ability to communicate using complex language. That is a biological trait that would almost certainly take a lot longer than 5000 years to reproduce.

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>Cam you really imagine homo sapiens making significant economic sacrifices in favor of a different species?

Miaow?

Good point! :-) (I think in this case we may not be the superior intellect.)

I strongly suspect that cats know sudo for humans.

Some primates can use a few signs from deaf language already, and combine them to make almost a sentence. The foundation seems there already. We also have no idea how much the dolphin language can convey. Your conclusion seems very definitive for a question that I meant very hypothetical and so many missing variables.

Yes, I'm well aware of the language abilities of other animals. (I'm a retired AI researcher with a Ph.D.) Animals are quite remarkable, but there is still an enormous gulf between them and us. A human child can learn any human language and form complex sentences well before age 2. Well before age 5 they can reason abstractly about cause and effect. No other animal gets close to that ability over their entire lifetime even with intense training.

What does being a retired AI researcher with a Ph.D. have anything to do with being aware of the language abilities of other animals?

It's something I studied. NLP is a sub-discipline of AI, and animal studies are used to inform NLP research. I'm not saying that this makes me right, only that my speculations are not completely uninformed.

> Other species are intelligent, but none of them have our innate ability to communicate using complex language.

That isn't proven. There is plenty of evidence, that "complex" is relative and humans have limited sensory organs, compared to other species. Naturally our vocalizations have had to diversify.

It's important to remember that the vast majority of all interspecies communication is non-vocal (this includes non-written). The ability to write is unique to humans, as far as I know. There are more, but they aren't related to vocalization (or communication at large).

> The ability to write is unique to humans

Yes, and this is crucial. It's what allows us to operate as Turing machines.

I was reminded of another distinguishing characteristic of humans by a recent event [1]: we tell stories.

http://news.mit.edu/2019/patrick-winston-professor-obituary-...

I wouldn't be surprised if whales or dolphins at some point in time had fairly evolved means of communication. They still might, but it's possible that killing off the majority of their population has significantly curtailed what ever culture they previously had. Just a speculation, there is a lot about alternative forms of communication and intelligence that we don't know.

A few hundred years wouldn't evolve a species out of the ability to use language. Language isn't cultural. If you take a dozen babies from different cultures/language communities, and cut off their tongues, and if their caregivers never speak to them, they will still find a way to use a pidgin language among themselves, because human language is innate.

Language is very much cultural, the instinct to communicate and decipher others utterances is what is inate. Otherwise one could automatically understand other languages without learning them.

Dolphins and whales are already communicating currently. But it's possible that what we are seeing now is a much simpler version of what existed previously, not to mention that we don't have any clue how to decipher what we are hearing now.

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