"You be good. I love you."
--Final words of Alex the African Grey Parrot
The Great Silence is a short story by Ted Chiang published in 2015. The title is a common alternate name for the Fermi Paradox. Our universe is vast, old, and seemingly empty of life apart from our pale blue dot. The Arecibo radio telescope was the largest of its kind at the time of its construction. It was an important tool in SETI and like all other tools failed to find any kind of nonhuman intelligence among the stars. Down here on Earth we are surrounded by nonhuman intelligence. The Great Silence is written from the perspective a Puerto Rican Amazon parrot. These are a critically endangered species. They are also found around the Arecibo radio telescope. Our unnamed narrator laments that humans put so much effort into communicating with aliens while ignoring the extremely talkative creatures on there own planet. Creatures that may not be here much longer. This story is very short and you should just read it here.
The more we study animal intelligence the more we find. Dolphins and great apes were the rage in the sixties and seventies but corvids, parrots, and even octopi have gotten in on the action. One of the things that we've seen time and again is that intelligence is not linear or predictable. Chimps are highly intelligent tool users and they take an embarrassingly long time to recognize themselves in mirrors. Once they figure it out they spend time just looking at all of the body parts they can't see like there teeth. Gorillas don't grasp reflections. Cognition is a strange landscape that we are only starting to map and this story asks how much of it will we lose. The Puerto Rican Amazon is believed to have around five hundred remaining, mostly in captivity. To a species that numbered in the hundreds of thousands this would appear to be the end of days. There is no blame in this story, merely sadness.
We recently created Large Language Models which can carry on conversations. It is generally accepted that these are not people. This and other Ted Chiang stories land slightly differently post AI. If we're committed to that stance then it follows that we really can't use conversational skill as a correlate of personhood. At the same time it feels like there is still a baby in that bathwater. When LLMs were coming out in 2020 the Arecibo radio telescope collapsed. It won't be rebuilt for lack of funding. It's been superseded by better technology. This story is firmly in the past but it's core remains strong. The desire to be heard, understood, and remembered remains compelling even as the world moves forward.
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING