The dolphin's smile

Summer’s come to a close, and that means it’s time to log back in.

But for a while, you know, it was great to not think about things like the world, our place in it, and whether AI is coming for us all. A few weeks back, I discovered the best way to forget about all that was to boat out to some random spot in the ocean.

My family chartered a deep sea fishing tour off the coast of Hilton Head Island. It was something we’d always meant to do and finally did.

We ventured out to a reef near Daufuskie Island, and it was quiet out there. It was the middle of July. We were hot and sleepy and so were the fish.

Captain Mike was undeterred though. He’d fished on this boat for many years. He looked the part with his gray goatee, yin-yang tattoo, and “Get busy livin’” wristband. He cut bait for us and cast rods with seemingly infinite patience.

Eventually, he could tell we were getting bored, so he steered us closer to Tybee Island where he knew we’d find some action. And he was right.

The fish were hungrier there–mackerel and sandtrout–and other things were hungry for them. I reeled in a Bonnethead shark and held it nervously just long enough to take a photo. A short while later, our hooks started coming up empty. Something was nibbling at them. The culprit soon arrived.

Behind the stern, a dolphin drifted up to the surface proud of itself. Mike recognized him immediately. The dolphin had followed him around for years and had a reputation. The fishermen had christened him Slash for a notable scar near his rear.

“Usually, when he finds me, he never leaves,” Mike explained.

We kept a lookout for Slash and tried to cast away from where he was, but he still picked the hooks clean each time. Try as we might, Slash was nimble and willing to swim anywhere with glee.

Don’t let their pleasant grins fool you. Dolphins are sneaky, savvy creatures. They’re content to let us putter around in our self-important boats while they snatch the easy pickings, and they don’t have to try as much as sharks.

One of my favorite series growing up was Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was my earliest dose of sci-fi absurdism, and dolphins appear from time to time. They mostly mind their own business.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had assumed so much–the wheel, New York, wars and so on–while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they more intelligent than man–for precisely the same reasons.

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

When the end of the world comes, the dolphins get while the getting is good and leave humanity with a parting note: “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

I wonder if they’d say something similar to us now. I sit here, like you do, listening to the nonsense out of Silicon Valley about how there will be no jobs anymore and no use for humans, and I smile and nod. Uh huh, AI’s gonna change the diapers, AI’s gonna take out the trash, AI’s gonna cut bait. As it stands, a LLM can generate a blog post and not much else.

I imagine the utility of AI on the water is similarly limited. We’ve had fish finders for a long time. Sure, perhaps you could spin up a model that factors in weather patterns, currents, migratory patterns, what type of bait to use, etc. But methinks the machine will be just as vexed when it encounters that true agent of randomness–the dolphin. And salt water corrodes electrical components. Mike’s job is safe for now.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom floating around these days. I’m not going to listen to it. I’m a dad now and that means I don’t get to despair anymore. Doomsday thinking is a luxury for people without kids.

I, for one, won’t be scared by selfish, greedy people. Growing up millennial and working in journalism and marketing have made it so I can’t be bothered with alarmists. Fearmongering is a cheap way to spark urgency. Thanks, I’ll just cancel Claude.

I keep hearing this axiom that whoever wins at AI wins everything. There won’t be any opportunity remaining for those left behind. No more fish in the sea.

That thought grips you until you remember that nature adapts, and eventually, fish will adapt to the fishermen or the fishermen will fish themselves out of a job. Anything built by AI is just as easily replaced by AI. It’s one big devil’s bargain.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. In the open water, there is no shortage of competition for the big catch. Flip on the Discovery Channel and watch from the comfort of your couch as fishermen on their downeasters chase tuna and each other up the leaderboard. The lucky one wins while the rest eat into their profits by burning fuel.

To us, that’s capitalism. To a dolphin, it’s probably amusing.

We’re definitely at the logical end of something, but I don’t think it’s the end for everyday folks like you and me. It could spell the end for a certain kind of tech bro so hollow and unhappy with the present he’s willing to churn humanity if it means reaching some imagined computer-fused singularity. Nothing has ever been sustained by brute force alone.

So sure, Sam and Dario, crawl this page all you want. Capture what you can in those big, clumsy dragnets. There will still be something left for the rest of us.

The soul, that inner light that vies for connection, that has sustained us since time immemorial, is as elusive as ever. Happy to stay hidden, it lurks in the nooks and crannies while the world waits for the next time it surfaces. Until then, it treads alone in the dark smiling, laughing, and following the fish.

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