Stories of clever animals abound, from pigs playing video games to monkeys trading mobile phones – now tests reveal that they don't merely act on instinct but can think flexibly, like us
It really seems like humanity’s feelings about who constitutes ‘us’ has been expanding significantly in the past century or so. It makes sense. Global communication went from being non-existent to a few bits of broadcast media and specialist communication to a massive information network spanning the entire planet, capable of instant communication with negligible latency inside of, what, three generations?
When I was born none of this stuff existed. You had like, dial-up networks like Genie and Prodigy and that was about it until I was like 8 or 9 or something. I think the first time I got on the Internet i was like 10 or 11. By the time I graduated high school, literally everyone was online. By the time I was 30, most people had a device in their pocket connected to the Internet with a speed and power (if not versatility) that beat out anything we had in high school. Now pretty much everyone has it. It’s literally easier to get an Internet connection than it is to have somewhere to live.
That has a lot of implications. It’s hard to hide injustice and bullshit when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and can connect to the Internet instantly. We know what factory farming looks like, we know that exploitation looks like, and we know the scale of our destruction of the environment in a way we didn’t before.
Probably most importantly, we’re learning, gradually, that what divides our interest is less and less national borders, physical appearance, or our different ways of living, but the hoarding of wealth and power. There’s some push back, to be sure, but the Overton window has shifted substantially from where it was at the beginning of this global communication phenomenon and it’s continuing to move that way a little at a time.
When we learn compassion for ourselves and the people around us, especially the people we were once taught were so different, it makes sense that we’d begin to generally become more practiced at compassion, empathy, and careful observation that is less and less rooted in our starting biases.
It makes sense that as that happens, the people controlling the purse strings and authorizing studies that might show that ‘us’ can extend further than we imagined might also gain more insight and be less defensive.
It really seems like humanity’s feelings about who constitutes ‘us’ has been expanding significantly in the past century or so. It makes sense. Global communication went from being non-existent to a few bits of broadcast media and specialist communication to a massive information network spanning the entire planet, capable of instant communication with negligible latency inside of, what, three generations?
When I was born none of this stuff existed. You had like, dial-up networks like Genie and Prodigy and that was about it until I was like 8 or 9 or something. I think the first time I got on the Internet i was like 10 or 11. By the time I graduated high school, literally everyone was online. By the time I was 30, most people had a device in their pocket connected to the Internet with a speed and power (if not versatility) that beat out anything we had in high school. Now pretty much everyone has it. It’s literally easier to get an Internet connection than it is to have somewhere to live.
That has a lot of implications. It’s hard to hide injustice and bullshit when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and can connect to the Internet instantly. We know what factory farming looks like, we know that exploitation looks like, and we know the scale of our destruction of the environment in a way we didn’t before.
Probably most importantly, we’re learning, gradually, that what divides our interest is less and less national borders, physical appearance, or our different ways of living, but the hoarding of wealth and power. There’s some push back, to be sure, but the Overton window has shifted substantially from where it was at the beginning of this global communication phenomenon and it’s continuing to move that way a little at a time.
When we learn compassion for ourselves and the people around us, especially the people we were once taught were so different, it makes sense that we’d begin to generally become more practiced at compassion, empathy, and careful observation that is less and less rooted in our starting biases.
It makes sense that as that happens, the people controlling the purse strings and authorizing studies that might show that ‘us’ can extend further than we imagined might also gain more insight and be less defensive.