This is one of the big lessons in history. The civilizations that use their intelligence to make tools and weapons end up screwing civilizations that "muck about, having a good time".
I don't necessarily buy it. A pacifist civilization might be "dominated" by a violent civilization, but they might still choose death over becoming violent themselves.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160204-cute-and-cuddly-dolp...
You're not buying it but they're not selling it?
Even if you were super intelligent, i bet you’d get fucked up in a net if you had low visibility in the water, you were traveling at high speed, and you didn’t have opposable thumbs to untangle yourself.
(Unless we're positing that running the risk of being trawled is an essential part of mucking about and having fun, or a scientific experiment, or dolphins having enough imagination for some of them to speculate warnings about boats are a conspiracy to keep them from the best fish :D)
A reasonable exhibit one for the presently observable limits on (at least collective) human intelligence.
It’s an open question whether our aggressive strategy will be successful past anything but the very short term. (Currently it’s not looking that good.)
I dunno. There is a real, if dwindling and not that large, possibility that mankind breaks free of earth and establishes itself elsewhere.
You can't say that for any other species except perhaps some microscopic extremophiles.
It's only so easy to be cynical about this because of how close we are to something greater, because of how much we are poised to lose.
Modern humanity has certainly impacted the ecology dramatically over the past couple hundred-thousand, but calling us successful is premature. When we're as old as bluegreen algae (or hell, even Araucaria araucana), I'll happily revise my position.
The humans and proto-humans of the past weren't 'stupid'. And even if they were comparatively, 'stupidity' isn't a justification for committing harmful actions, degrading, or otherwise treating the recipient as lesser. This sounds like a philosophy that encourages "well I'm going to hurt you and it must be right because you can't stop me or dissuade me".
No, it isn't. Just like killing dolphins isn't justified. But it probably means that the interstellar empire in question is very likely to be more intelligent and/or advanced than us.
I don't think the GP was saying it is. I think he was trying to look at it from the dolphins' point of view: he was proposing that the fact that they didn't use any of their intelligence (assuming they have it) to construct ways to defend themselves from other intelligent species, like humans, was a mistake on their part.
for instance, this is how i converted from religion to atheism (arguably still a religion)... a product of my nurture that i decided to shed. other examples include my interaction model with others which included tenets such as curbing my decidedly unjustified high level of empathy for all others, controversial as it may be.
1. reprogram in the sense of mental models and thoughts or in a literal cells and atoms sense?
2. potentially depending on your definition and scope of `reprogram`, wouldn't that be a subset of intelligence, as opposed to something higher order or different?
3. what kind of behaviors/habits do you think humans (like you or I, not high-funded corporations) could employ now to get as close to achieving your second sentence as possible?