While we are holding onto our seats for the surprises, pranks and crazy ideas on April Fool’s day, we want to share a thought experiment. Here is a job offer that we would like to share with you from 2035.
There have been tremendous advances in machine learning and decoding communications between elephants. From a paper published in Nature in June 2024, that detailed that elephants have unique identifiers for each other, to now in 2035, where we know that elephants remember routes, directions and have a culture of story-telling to pass on this knowledge from one generation to the other.
Over decades, habitats have shrunk leading to repeated aggression and casualties on both ends: elephants and humans. In this world, coexistence is only possible if there is a balm to soothe the pain for everyone. While we understand, know how to work and communicate with humans, this has presented a new opportunity: the role of an elephant soother, who works with elephants to ease their pain and mitigate their aggressive tendencies towards people. This position here is for an Elephant Soother, housed at the fictional Human Elephant Language Learning Organisation (HELLO).
If you would like to know how this future came to be, please visit hello.ecologicalfutures.earth
We invite you to leave your thoughts, comments, ideas, disappointments and questions all here, so that we can have a richer discussion about what is the kind of future we want. Below in the comments are some prompts for you to respond to.
- How did the experience of seeing the job offer and the post make you feel about the possibility of this future? What did you like or dislike?
- Is it ethical for us to communicate with different species? Are we just adding more noise, since real communication might not ever be possible? Can communicating with other species unlock how we could communicate with aliens(if they exist)?
- If our current version of the world has been developed based on what people wanted, whose dreams are we living in? And what informed those dreams?
- What kind of world do you imagine would exist in 2035?
- What else can elephants be a metaphor too?
@Aditib
HELLO- Elephant Soother.pdf (113.7 KB)