Animal Thanksgiving
People — most of us anyway — are worrying about climate change, although a good number of us won’t admit to it — or even entertain the thought of it. It’s our way of protecting ourselves, I think.
Recently I’ve run into first-person articles about having children in this age of … what shall we call it? Collapse? Probably a good word. One article — the predictable one, and there are a number like this — was about creating children knowing that the world will be far more inhospitable to them than it is to us. Asking: is it fair to do this, to bring new life into the world given the certain horrors of a much hotter planet where much has already been so used up?
But there was also another story, about a parent’s fears for her child born into a world that artificial intelligence — “AI” — is now populating. A world of AI growing to the point, some think, that in the not-too-distant future, it will turn into “AGI” — which stands for “artificial general intelligence.” Which is when everything switches. A singularity will have occurred, and there will be no going back. At this time, which is also almost upon us (some say it is virtually here already) it will be impossible for humans any more to know — to be able to figure out — what is real in terms of biologically human thought from “thought” — “intelligence” — generated by massive computers.
I am, of course, simplifying.
I expect all of you have read articles about the dangers of artificial intelligence, just as you’ve read about the dangers of a heating planet. Still, we do so little to prevent any of it. But we do worry, as these few stories attest — and there are hundreds, probably thousands, of the stories. Some probably written now by AI.
So this where we are and will be from now on.
I do not have children. (That’s another story.)
But I have lived with animals for all my life. I grew up on a farm, with animals. I fed calves with bottles when their mothers were unable to nurse them. I knew cats and dogs. Many of them: some pets, some not. My grandmother raised chickens; I used to sit on our cellar door (does anyone anymore know what a cellar door is?) and talk to one, in particular. She and I were about the same height, when I was sitting down. I was 3 at the time, and she seemed to me at least faintly interested in our conversations.
I had hamsters; mice, rabbits. Tadpoles, frogs. Snakes. Never a lizard, but I wanted one.
The point is: I had relationships with animals. I loved animals.
So recently, thinking about AI and animals, I’ve come to realize that the thing that I believe we can count on, even when AGI takes over, is … our animals. I say “our” animals, but that isn’t really right, either. They are their own animals. A few years ago I learned that least some Indigenous people in the U.S. — I’m going to say the Dine, but it might be others — really thought the whole idea of having pets was wrong, some even thinking of it as slavery. When I started reflecting on it, as I have in recent years, it’s made more and more sense.
But I digress.
Biological life on Earth — “wet” life — as I’ve heard computer scientists refer to it — as long as it remains, will be life that we can connect with. That we can freely love, and will be loved back, if we are good to it, and honest and true — words and concepts we don’t hear much anymore.
There’s a whole world of relationship, of connection, that has started to be missing among humans. The cracks started to become visible to me during the recent Covid pandemic but it started before that. We have connection with each other still, humans do; but it has for awhile been moving into the “virtual” — onscreen, on computer, phones, texting, zooming (and some day the goggles if Mark Zuckerberg has his way) — and thus we maintain “relationships” but in an artificial way. You can be friends with another human, or a whole galaxy of other humans, never seeing them or touching them or knowing them.
“Knowing” is another term I have been thinking about lately: I think in ancient times, “knowing” meant at its essence a physical act. It didn’t just mean sexual intercourse; although it did mean that (see the Hebrew / Christian bibles) but it meant, I think, biological connection. Of a very deep sort that you don’t get from texting. Understanding. Loving, maybe, is even an appropriate word here.
I think the animals we have around us “know” us, and if we are good, we “know” them. Words are ok but superfluous. I think this connection is real and can be maintained in the face of AGI, which is as surely coming as is climate collapse. I believe that connection will not be in much danger yet of being lost.
“Our animal friends,” as I call them (using the title of a book I had as a young child), “ground” us. They love us in a way social media and tik tok stars cannot. They are real in the way an algorithm is not.
I could go into a long examination, of course, about the ways we have killed, abused, tortured and otherwise badly used animals — possibly now more than ever, given the vast factory farms, and the still-never-ending research facilities that often carry out entirely useless experiments in animal suffering. I could also recount things I’ve read about Indigenous cultures’ relationships with animals, which they also ate, but, it seems, held the animal in respect, even love.
But this piece I’m writing is not going to be that one (and I don’t think I’m even qualified to write such an article). The only way in which what I’m writing here comes close to that is that, in what you’re reading now, I hope you’re picking up maybe some of the the gratitude and respect for animals that I have seen evidenced in Indigenous cultures.
This piece is simply about Thanksgiving. I am thankful that there are animals. That despite our beliefs to the contrary, that we are not the only biological creatures who “know” things. That animals love us, and help us, and in the coming world of AGI, will connect us, still, to the biological “wet” life of this Earth that is our home.
