Editor's pick: A long history of cooperation between fishers and dolphins
I was interested to read Elizabeth Preston's article about dolphins assisting human fishers in Brazil (7 October, p 9). I have been researching the 19th-century biologist John MacGillivray, who was the naturalist on board HMS Rattlesnake during surveying cruises along the northern coast of Australia from 1846 to 1850. He later published a that makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the development of biology just before the Darwinian revolution.
At Moreton Bay, off what is now Brisbane, MacGillivray observed a mutualistic association between indigenous people and bottlenose dolphins (though he called them “porpoises”). They drove large schools of spawning mullet towards fishers in the shallows waiting with spears and nets. The dolphins swam among the humans, he wrote, “as if fully aware that they would not be molested”.
In turn, the fishers gave part of their catch to the dolphins. Earlier, MacGillivray had become aware of a strong taboo against killing dolphins. These observations gave him a clear explanation for it.
This cooperative bond between human and dolphin may well have been established for many millennia. MacGillivray's insightful account gives us cause to reflect on the long history of complex animal husbandry practised in Australia by its first people long before the last wave of “out of Africans” moved into Europe.
Editor's pick: A long history of cooperation between fishers and dolphins
Cooperation between dolphins and humans is not as rare as Preston suggests. David Neil of Aboriginal people fishing not only with dolphins, but also orcas in eastern Australia. Caroline Bird has similar, but unpublished, data concerning dolphins from Western Australia.
We had a meeting of minds on artificial minds
In your editorial on the recent colloquium of AI researchers and people in the humanities, you claimed the participants struggled to find common ground (7 October, p 5). As a participant, I believe we made an important start at connecting.
Our main focus was the question of “imagination” in machines and humans. Literary participants were understandably surprised, scandalised even, by the notion that a machine might have a form of imagination.
As with the reactions of Go players to the success of AlphaGo, the challenges AI poses to our preconceptions should prompt the humanities to review our human capacities.
Despite the initial discomfort of participants, I can vouch that our meeting has proved a catalyst for some original and creative thinking about machine and human imagination. This was just the beginning.
First class post
I see this and lie awake worrying about lying awake worrying causing Alzheimer's Rose Garden after seeing our report on the connection between sleep and Alzheimer's disease (14 October, p 30)
Artificial intelligence and who makes choices
Michael Brooks proposes realism on artificial intelligences, and says they “are all just algorithms” (7 October, p 28). An embodied robot interacting intimately with the real world is not just an algorithm.
As long ago as 1977, I suggested a general method whereby a robot can create its own goals. Most AIs being programmed now are just algorithms because they are designed to carry out specific tasks, but they don't need to be. The ones that aren't will be much more interesting and human-like.
Artificial intelligence and who makes choices
Brooks misses an essential point about both the benefits and the downsides of AI. The threat to jobs, livelihoods and ways of living isn't AI. It's me.
I seek benefits in my life. I work in an economic system that rewards me for reducing costs and improving services to make more money. I am the one who seeks reliability, consistency and an improved experience, whether as a customer or for my firm's clients – me, not AI.
I don't want to worry about holiday cover, illness, childcare and other human employment issues, so I will outsource the telephone answering to AI, putting eight receptionists in eight locations out of a job. Maybe they will get other meaningful work, or not. It's not my problem.
I seek an immersive, full-body, remote experience, so I can “visit” the Himalayas without actually going there, protecting the environment. I save money and pollution and put airport workers, plane-makers, hotel staff and mountain guides out of work.
When I retire and find my pension has been asset-stripped to make a very rich person even richer – that's me, and you too.
My different fears of a locked-in life
Robin Harbour finds the idea of being conscious but unable to communicate by any normal means horrifying enough without the added thought of being written off and switched off because nobody could fully check brain activity (Letters, 7 October).
I fear the exact opposite: that I may be trapped inside my body, unable to communicate by any normal means, and that nobody will have the decency, humanity or legal powers to put me out of my misery. And therein lies the problem. Even if both Harbour and I make our current feelings clear to our friends and families, we might both change those ideas when faced with reality.
Where do gravitational waves get energy from?
Have I missed something? Surely this is big news: Jon Richfield describes black holes losing significant mass (Last Word, 7 October). I took the trouble to read the paper on the detection of the black hole collision by LIGO and Virgo (Physical Review Letters, ). The black holes had masses of 30.5 and 25.3 times our sun's, and the resulting black hole had a mass 53.2 times bigger. So about 2.6 solar masses were radiated as gravitational waves.
It was a well-known rule of black holes that neither matter nor energy can ever escape them (bar a whiff of Hawking radiation). It now seems that there is a way out after all!
The editor writes:
• The “missing” mass/energy was indeed radiated away as gravitational waves. But that isn't due to mass escaping from a black hole – it comes from the potential energy in the positions and spins of the two black holes.
We can raise cattle in regenerative agriculture
Why do you leap from Prince Charles's support of grass-fed beef to say that means we can “eat as much as we want” (7 October, p 7)? How about: “we can improve current production greatly”? As an ecologist, I view agriculture as one of the worst human impacts to the planet. And within the agricultural spectrum, annual tillage is the worst of all.
In regenerative agriculture, a wide variety of domestic and native pasture species are planted, grazed intensely for a short period and then an annual crop is grown. The land is never broken, the dramatic loss of soil carbon and microorganisms caused by chemical-based monoculture is reversed, and the water retention of soil improves, with a major reduction in run-off and flooding.
Nuclear deterrence depends on rationality
The tension between North Korea and the US has escalated since you published Debora MacKenzie's discussion of how any conflict might play out (16 September, p 23). She cites Michael Krepon's analysis that the presence of a massive US advantage continues to offer the best hope of peace.
Krepon asserts that two earlier crazed dictators, Stalin and Mao, were kept in line by deterrence and the superiority of the US at the time in arms production and development. The gross disparity today between the arsenals of the US and North Korea presents a much greater threat, due to the unpredictable personalities of their two leaders.
The rise of deer and of Lyme disease
The UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has named areas in southern England and the Scottish Highlands as high risk for Lyme disease (30 September, p 7). Many years ago, when we were children, my brothers and I used to run through the bracken and roll down the hillsides in the Lake District just wearing our shorts, and we noticed no problems with ticks. In recent years, as the number of deer has soared, my wife and I have been bitten several times, despite wearing long trousers. I have been lucky so far, but a couple of years ago my wife contracted Lyme disease. Thankfully, she was treated and has had no lasting ill effects. Should there be a major deer cull?
Keeping an eye on our resident mad inventor
Mick O'Hare remembers David Jones, author of the Daedalus column, who died in July (Old 快猫短视频, 2 September). I worked in the patents department at ICI Runcorn while his day job was as a researcher there.
For a period, we had to vet his column in advance, until management decided that this was unnecessarily heavy-handed. Such was his genius as a writer that we felt his ideas should be patentable and not merely “just beyond the bounds of possibility”.
After we had stopped vetting, we retained a nagging fear that he might subconsciously disclose confidential information. At the time, we were working on – an idea so unusual that it could have been devised by his fertile mind.
For the record
• In a caesium atomic clock, 9 billion cycles per second (9 gigahertz) is the frequency of radiation emitted when electrons move from a certain state to another. In the new strontium clock, electrons emit radiation at 429,228 gigahertz (14 October, p 18).