Alternative Intelligence: The Other A.I. 

"Dear Spell-Check, It is never, 'ducking'."

An example of pet animals or domesticated animals being smarter than one might think is my cat. He learned that the smell of hot metal often leads to the fire alarm going off. So when my kettle or saucepan boils dry, he comes to get me. Since the downstairs neighbors accidentally set their kitchen on fire, he's been far less tolerant of that smell, and will often tell me much earlier that i have a problem, or get between me and whatever else I'm doing and generally be disruptive until I go back to the kitchen to check on it and stay there. He's also shown a huge amount of emotional intelligence as well. When I get upset on the phone, or just too loud in general, he comes running to try and calm me down. Once during COVID my neighbor was crying on her porch. I thought she'd had a fight with her ex again, they still talk to each other about taking care of the kids and he's consistantly irrisponsible and immature. My cat got up on the window sill, drew himself up in a gesture I know means he wants his attention, and then looked alternately at me, and then at her out the window as if to say "are you gonna do something about this?" So I grabbed a spare acorn squash from the farmer's market's attempt to adapt to COVID and went downstairs to check on her. Long story short, her father had just died of COVID and it was bad enough he had to be cremated. She didn't get to say goodbye to him. She'd come out to the porch to cry while she figured out how to explain to her kids that their grandfather was dead, and what death meant. He also once tried to get into the computer screen to comfort a grieving character on the show I was watching. So this is not a one time thing. He is emotionally invested in my happiness and that of those around him. Edit: Okay, settling some debate/safety concerns here. 1. At no point did this saucepan or kettle get red hot 2. When the neighbors downstairs set their kitchen on fire, mom gave me her whistling kettle. 3. Bandit, my cat, basically put together that smell A=fire alarm will make loud sound B. 4. Cats have senses of smell so much stronger than ours that they can smell pregnancy hormones. Even if we can't smell metal, he sure as hell can!

Artificial Incompetence when?

As someone whose educational background is evolutionarily animal behavior, I found this episode very well done.

I for one welcome our Octopus Overlords.

In elementary school (grades 1-6), we were not allowed to use calculators because it was considered cheating. We also couldn't use pens, only pencils. In junior high/middle-high school (grades 7-12), we were required to use a calculator and write in pen.

I love how thoughtful your videos always are. The notion of one intelligent species catalyzing others (without the need for actual uplifting or even direct breeding) is quite mindblowing.

Ah, roosters. The OG alarm clock. Having grown up on a hobby farm in the boonies, I was always baffled when people were late waking up. Since we had a Mr. Coffee, we named him "Mr. Chicken", as in an alarm clock. He was a friendly but noisy rooster.

"Retirement policy for spare roosters" had me LMAO Too funny.

Immediately thought of Children of Ruin when you brought up the giant pacific octopus. Adrian Tchaikovsky's stories delve into alternate intelligence so well, the best in sci-fi. A superbly informative and intellectually stimulating video, Isaac.

Biopunk super creatures vs Skynet

My dog got really depressed when his friend died, we thought he was sick but he was just really sad There was also these raccoons that regularly raided our trashcans so we put a trap (cage) and it sacrificed its kid and sent it in there and got the fish we put in the cage

Excuse me, did you just suggest that something might destroy all the cockroaches? Never in Lovecraft's most depraved imaginings have I heard of such a thing.

this is television quality content.

The webcomic Freefall features a character inspired by an octopus. Sam Starfall's species (called the Sqids (no, that's not a typo, Sam even corrects another character at one point for saying "squids" and saying "you're pronouncing the 'u'" to explain how they got it wrong)) die on reproducing, so a kid being raised by relatives is unusual for them. They also evolved in an environment with more oxygen than humans did, so Sam needs an environment suit with an oxygen-concentrator in it to survive in a human-normal atmosphere.

I had hydrocephalus (normally a life limiting disease) that gave me a larger connection between the two halves of my my brain. I have a first class comp sci degree and when I move the first fingers of one hand, the fingers of the other hand move also. I used to write one half of a line with my left hand, then swap then pen to the right hand to finish the line :)

Also: Crows, Elephants, and Whales all mourn their dead, years later still. They are PEOPLE.

Saw a rat trying to cross a busy 4 lanes yesterday and wondered if we might have accidentally "taught" these animals new skills like crossing the street, with our advancements .......and then isaac released this vid.....the hell??😂

Vulcans have _Green_ Blood because they have sulfhemoglobinemia (don't ask why when they have copper blood, Roddenberry wasn't a biologist). Blue Bloods are the Andorians.

My friends actually signal the raccoons in the area before they let thier dogs out. If they are letting dogs out, deck light goes on. Just going to smoke, no lights. It works.

David Brin's "Uplift Saga" (two Trilogies). Every galactic race has been uplifted by an older race (The Progenitors are the legendary Eldest), except Humanity. And by the time we encountered Galactic Races, we'd already Uplifted Chimpanzees and Bottle Nosed Dolphins. This made us not only unique (not having been Uplifted) but also shockingly advanced (already Uplifting others).

“Red Giant” by Stellardrone got played twice in this video. That means the knowledge density was absolutely titanic! I scrubbed back three times just to make sure I got everything you were trying to impart! Another absolutely EXCELLENT video! 😎👍🏽👍🏽

Man I was waiting for this episode since it was put up to a vote, and you didn’t disappoint! This fascinating and thought provoking and something I can share to others. Really loved this episode. Also wow the safety razor thing is something I’ve actually wanted. I’m gonna order some haha. So five out of five star episode when even the advertisement is useful!

There are likely hundreds of hours worth of videos on this channel I need to watch for inspiration in creating a sci-fi graphic novel I've been playing around with in my mind for a few years now. Isaac Arthur is like a science fiction wormhole that sucks you in and branches out into so many topics. It's mind-boggling how he does all this.

Thank you so much for calling our subspecies by our proper name; Homo Sapiens Sapiens 😊 A huge point of contention for me ever since I attented OSU; now technically decades ago 😒, and studied Anthro and Geology. Wonderful video as always.

I love all your videos but this is extra wonderful, thank you so much for what you do!!

City of Toronto Racoons probably have the highest pressure to payoff driving their mental evolution, the city regularly updates how the bins are locked, they're also incredibly fat and friendly. As to corvids, they are generally highly intelligent and self training, so of they see someone fishing items out with a hook on a stick they will copy it, a university in Nova Scotia looked into the trainability of crows and ravens, and if they could learn by indirect example.

I recently read the children of time series and he did a great job with the uplifed animal intelligence. I'm half way in, so if this is mentioned, i apologize. The octopi's multple brain thing was really neatly done.

This may be the finest piece of content I've watched on RU-vid in some time. Thank you for putting this together.

Great video, Mr Arthur. Very thought provoking, thanks.

There has rarely ever been television contact that is, it is high-quality as all of the videos which Isaac Arthur has narrated I love every one of the videos I have ever watched and that is many many because he has done a lot of them. He is highly educated, and he is able to contribute information on any of the topics involving space and celestial bodies and pretty much all of reality. He has a very good grasp on, he reads so much he knows so much this you’ll understand the more you watch the podcast

Usually i hate sponsored ads edited into a video, but this razor one was nice, especially how he mentioned the stuff about they make space stuff and it's precision built and stuff. I almost want one but scared to look at the prices

Thank you for your work, you did a wonderful job!

such an incredible topic. people often don't realize that we're set apart more by our language and complete reliance on inventing new behaviors than we are by raw "intelligence" in any area besides language.

I propose the name Artin for artificial intelligence, instead of AI.

Have you ever read the book, Control? If that geneticist is correct, then creating alternative intelligences from existing brains may be harder than building a planet.

As someone who used that have issues with o.r's and e.r's it's awesome to tune in every now and then and hear your pronouncing things more and more fluidly. It sounds exactly like how I was when I started to speak more often and it slowly went away naturally.

The mammalian brain and brain in general is a pattern recognition machine. Humans dial this up to 11 allowing for an emergent phenomenon called culture appeared, allowing us to pass on our discoveries to the next generation to work off of.

I did a personal study on spiders because I had a dislike of them and thought if I broadened my understanding of them I'd cure this strange hatred...it did...but now it's a respect so deep that it's horrible in its depth. We live our whole lives most of us never being more than 30 feet away from these little geniuses. We eat their close relatives in the best high dollar restaurants...some fly on the currents of the wind possibly never touching the ground...they learn...they lie and they steal...but do they love? The idea terrifies me!.

The plural of Octopus is not Octopi as Octopus is not a Latin derived word, rather it is Greek, thus the plural is Octopodes.

Now this is one of my favorite videos, along with the civilizations at the end of time.

Just on the crows thing. When I travel out to my far there is a lot of roadkill. Roos, rabbits, foxes and wombats. But never crows, yet they are all along the roads eating the roadkill. When I'm speeding towards them at 100kph they accurately calculate that I'll be staying on a certain side of the road, and merely walk to the other side of the white line, wait for me to pass and then walk back over.

In the same way you don't need to be smart to be rich, you don't need intelligence to form a civilization you just need to accumulate lots of lots of resources

Human brains have actually shrunk in size over time. The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago. It is hypothesize that this is the result of the rise of civilization, each person in an agricultural society does not have to know as much as a hunter gatherer.

At 27 minutes in the notion is very similar to the "tines' in A FIRE UPON THE DEEP. by the late Vernor Vinge.

I missed you man !!

Made me think differently. One of your best. I feel your pain with the Rooster. I heard this argument recently “I don’t eat animals that are cute”. That is subjective, it was about caring about line caught tuna. Drag nets kill everything including ‘ Dolphins’. That’s the selling point of line-caught tuna. So does that mean I don't care about the tuna? Are tuna not cute? Is it because they are not mammals? If so why do I eat beef? Cows (to me) are cute, intelligent and mammals. If I do not understand this argument because of my own feelings (that change depending on mood and many other factors) then how do I justify my choice of selecting certain animals to eat? I don't know. Perhaps that's the point or answer if that was ever a question. Confused? I am. Night humans 💯❤️

Blindsight is a great book. Gave me an existential/10

Just saw that video of the talk you did with real engineering. Good talk.

29:22 It hasn’t been called Multiple Personality Disorder for 30 years. It’s Dissociative Identity Disorder now.

Isaac Arthur advances his equivalence with Nostradamus by speculating every imaginable future. I have no doubt that he will be correct with one or more of his "predictions"

This is exactly what I come here for. God bless your intelligence and curiosity.

Isaac Great title, great content 👍🏾

Jack Vance has a few stories with alternative forms of intelligence, like "The Last Castle." In one of his stories, he posits that "intelligence" is merely the human method of dealing with the world, and other life forms use something else.

Great video, as always. I have also been using a safety razor for years. I highly recommend you get one if you're thinking about it. Its so much cheaper and I love not throwing plastic razors in the trash. Try it!

That thing about the red tailed hawk. I relate so much 😔 I really loved this video, it really opened my mind to the idea of cognitive horizons.

I would just like to clarify that "multiple personality disorder" is an antiquated term. The disorder people are thinking of is Dissociative Identity Disorder, meaning the patient has experienced intense and chronic dissociative episodes due to experiencing multiple traumas at an extremely young age. The patient would not have "multiple people living inside of them" but rather extremely strong amnesic type barriers compartmentalizing their experiences and therefore manifesting "alters" who have ALTERnative experiences from each other.

It's interesting that the chart at 2:00 doesn't have birds as some of them do get quite close

Do you use Adrian Tchaikovsky as a pen name?

Here's hoping we start to nurture and support our fellow animal intelligence's on this planet and learn to live together peacefully. Things like cellular agriculture and precision fermentation will likely change our relationship with animals for the better. Or at least, here's hoping! Maybe when we go to the stars we won't just have Cetacean Ops, but also an Aviary and the occasional raccoon roommate.

Very good 👍 Imagine being a hivemind chilling about with your buddies, sharing sights and hearing, exploring the world. And all of the sudden humans find the frequency you think about with. You would be kind of at the human's mercy. You no longer have a private life... or rather, the isolated is the only one who has a private life. The potential horror! It'd be like losing one of your senses, only that it isn't lost, it is forcefully one way shared

There is only one behavior of H.Sapiens not witnessed nor suspected in any other animal - ever - killing at distance. Everything else kills within reach or grasp.

If you haven't already, I'd love to see an episode on how Panarchy fits in the evolution of complex systems and civilizations.

Truly fascinating

According to my quackulations, the duck people will surpass us by 2164. (First!)

This was really interesting! And with regards to the ”hive mind” or ”multi-headed” intelligences; modern day AI built on the transformer architecture all-most all of them have multiple ”attention-heads” each one focusing on certain tasks. Also, most networks are trained using drop-out which is theorised to in essence generate an ensemble of subnetworks working together. Finally, the Tesla autonomous driving sensor stack (among others) also work by latching multiple “heads” of computation onto the same base core AI. Quite interesting

Really makes you think.

CROSSOVER EPISODE!!! - me, who is both a long time Isaac Arthur and Adrian Tchaikovsky supporter, when Isaac starts going off about cephalopods

The kids won't want to eat Red, if the retirement plan involved the kitchen table. Take Red to auction or let nature take it's course, which will still make the kids sad but is a normal learning experience

Looks like someone has read "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" Good book. Everyone should give it a read. Science has been slow to gain a real appreciation for the varied forms of animal intelligence.

Thank you

Where vídeo subtitles?

The more I look at the animals on our planet the more I'm weirded out and amazed by them. That's an alien, just look at it! I got so used to them I'd pass them by in my thoughts.

I'm writing a fantasy story rn, but this is super relevant. Thanks!

Did you do the thumbnail, if not who's the artist, I'd like to check them out!

It always bugged me that they don't refer to copper based blood as "cuproglobin".

For a great fictional example of the "sub personalities" section around 29:30 I highly recommend Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams. I'd love to see that idea expanded into an episode.

This was just so enlightening and I have tons of take-aways but the most chilling is the purely scientific reason behind mourning and empathy that Isaac is probably correct about but saddens me because I like to think my grieving of my fathers sudden passing was a sign that I loved him and transcended above evolution. And even worse. If evolution favors psychopathy; my faith in the universe vanishes all together…

My dog recognizes himself in mirror. I put on his gold chain he goes to mirror to check himself out.

Awesome Arthur, thanks for the video. I thought the plural for octopus was octopodes, as the word is Greek not Latin.

The Migou from CthulhuTech are a good example of aluen and alternative intelligence.

*"A.I."* analog intelligence artificial intelligence alternative intelligence automated intelligence ad nauseum

I was thinking the other day that here in the uk we might end up with pheasants that don’t fly. Hunters can only shoot a flying pheasant. Eventually pheasant that chose not to fly will survive.

I would think a discussion of intelligence differing from ours would cause i re-thinking of your conclusions to the fermi paradox (communication, spreading across galaxy, dyson sphere, etc)

There is a short story I heard once we're humanity uplifted most animal life. We would uplift a number of them and have a discussion with them on if the rest should be uplifted.

Love the RU-vid video of the cuttlefish passing the delayed gratification test! Ha. It's a snail that forgot to be cold blooded, with the associated limitations of cognition..! Also It buggers up the idea that only social animals can or need to be that smart. It gives birth to hundreds of eggs, so doesn't raise young or invest time spreading ideas or proto-culture. Gold.

I love this guys voice.

to put it in short they do their things we do our things

what can foresee movement is intelligence -as in from where brains origin (for numbers to exist you need to ask how many - numbers are abstracts )

Dear Isaac Arthur, there are no subtitles in this video. Greetings and respect from Istanbul...

I am in 20:14 now. Just realized that: from a moral/Ethic point of view the evolution of other talking animals is a more scary that about anything else I ever saw in this channel. Regardless if it happens in consequence of intentional uplifting made by humans or not. Anything we had so far in the realm of Ethical conundrums if funny joke compared to the problems that will emerge from trying/having to share a world with people who are octopus. I imagine our first experience with non-human people (free or slave) will be with uplifted orangotangos, chimpanzees. Them dogs, probably. But I am sure this will not happen in my live time (least not where common people without access to privileged information, governamental and industrial secrets, can see). And I fell ambivalent about not having to share the world of language with those newly born citizens. Scary as it is, I would love to see what kind of comic books talking bats, octopi, and spiders are inclined to make. And read. Play D&D with actual spiders around the table, as players, would be interesting. Specially when the story involve drows and their main deity. I would love to see how Game Master spiders will portray the clerics of Lolth. By the time humans start playing (and sometimes losing to) chess whit talking octopi humanity shall have centuries of experience in sharing existence, and public spaces in daily life, with talking dogs and cats. Gradual change makes things less "tragic", I imagine. Fiction often goes for drastic revolution, because contrast catches imagination more easily. They happen in (arguably) real live too, of course, but my impression is that they are less frequent in our world than in most fictional ones. I hope the spread of language will be one of those "baby steps" processes.

Octopi are super intelligent. That's why I don't eat them anymore.

Standowd, compawative, Typewhytows

14:39 after the release of this Video a familiar Racoon showed up at Mr Arthurs home and offered a hit on the runaway Rooster. For a substantial amount of cat food.

Experience begets experience, perhaps. I'm pretty convinced that experience is the point (yes, I've re-considered some dietary choices), and that's not some empty existentialism or nihilism, as might be ascribed to Nietzsche or some such. If you can find reason to believe that experience really is conserved, that's as much rationale as you need for matter or space-time to exist. And if those two turn out to be consistent, you might have reason to suspect that experience will continue to increase, no matter what we do. Which makes me think about time and entropy, neither of which I understand.

What if I told you future robots build a secret underground robot city? Hidden from humans, humans are only allowed as science experiments. How would they power such a city? What materials would they use?

I had a girlfriend who had been an extremely premature baby. Academically she was exceptionally bright but she had virtually no emotional self awareness, didn't understand her own feelings and couldn't make rudimentary everyday judgements like choosing between two colours. She was completely dependent on her social crowd to know what to do even when it was clearly wrong. Moral of the story - never go out with a cuttlefish no matter how high their IQ.

I’ve thought of using a dog as a basis for AI. Built in loyalty.

In the future, machines will resemble animals more than the machines we use today.

Psyched to see a safety razor commercial... ive been using a Merkur handle for about 15y now. Every time i see the ad that touts $2 blade, I laugh. Mine cost about 10 cents!