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patcon • today at 1:34 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

It's beautiful, but the animals are not thinking this about us.

They structurally cannot understand what we are doing at the place where we hit our ceiling. Only with our highest technology (well beyond their understanding) do we have the tools to go back for them, and try to bring them along and interface better with us (re: recent work in animal communication)


Replies

lisplist • today at 1:48 AM

Not to derail, but the optimist in me thinks if we suddenly gained the ability to converse with livestock, we'd stop eating so much of them since they could tell us how much they suffered.

The cynic in me says it wouldn't change a thing as plenty of people know the horrors factory farmed animals face and still continue to consume them anyways.

Hopefully GPT 8 will treat as a bit better than we treat the cows.

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virgildotcodes • today at 1:53 AM

> recent work in animal communication

Worth noting that this is an invisibly small part of the sum total of our global efforts, especially versus the much more tangible effort we put into enslaving and slaughtering them, then mangling their carcasses for our own uses as we drive more and more of them to extinction.

We simply don't care about anything beyond ourselves and even there it breaks down on closer analysis when we see how many within our species don't truly value the collective whole beyond themselves.

It's just atoms all the way down.

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