What if the whales are right?

It wasn’t AGI that changed everything. It was what we started to “hear” because of it.

Let me go back a little. About eight years. In 2030, when artificial general intelligence finally became real, people’s relationship with AIs had already shifted considerably. From the euphoria of the distant 2022 with the first generative models, to the agents that followed, through the damage those famous second brains had caused in the still-forming minds of the young, the roller coaster of the most disruptive technology ever created by humans had generated unprecedented impacts. Especially in markets. Many people had lost money; many managers had lost their jobs trying to justify the ROI of oversized projects. The bubble burst with a dull thud that still reverberates today. And of course, everyone pretended not to see what was coming, just to grab the last tokens before the collapse.

But while Silicon Valley and Shenzhen were trying to shake off the hangover, a group of scientists was getting very close to something truly revolutionary. Curiously, they were not trying to create new intelligences — they were trying to better understand the ones that have existed here for billions of years.

The CETI project, the one attempting to decode the language of sperm whales, had started back in 2021 with an almost naive enthusiasm. Researchers placing hydrophones on the floor of the Atlantic, recording hours and hours of clicks, codas, and modulations that whales exchange among themselves with a sophistication that would make any software engineer envious.

With AGI, everything shifted to another level. What would have taken decades happened in months.

And then the day finally came.

It wasn’t a translation. It was almost an epiphany. Like when you start learning a foreign language and suddenly realize that that sequence of sounds carries intention, context, and emotion — and everything finally falls into place. The researchers described a mix of euphoria and vertigo as each sound gained meaning. One of them said it was like seeing the image behind a thousand-piece puzzle that, in one magical moment, clicks into place revealing something you could never have imagined. They weren’t words, conversations, or specific calls from one individual to another. They were sophisticated mantras reverberating each specimen’s relationship with its environment. Everything a whale needs to know throughout its life was there. In those sounds.

They carry collective memory, passed down from generation to generation. And they have been doing this for tens of millions of years. Imagine a song that never stops playing, where each group picks up a pattern, adjusts it slightly, and releases it back into the ocean. There is no original version, no authorship, no novelty. There is permanence.

This shifts the question. Not “what are they saying,” but “how does something continue to exist without depending on anyone.” In a world that measures value by authorship and novelty, this landed as a major provocation. Perhaps intelligence is also this: sustaining over time, not just creating.

The fungus that is not what it seems

If the whales reorganized the meaning of memory, fungi upended our notion of collaboration. For decades, we described mycelium as a vast cooperative network.

The “wood wide web.” The solidary forest. Older trees feeding younger ones, resources flowing from those who have to those who need. Beautiful, moving — and it became a mandatory metaphor at every innovation talk. I myself used this example more than once.

Except that when we actually started to “interact” with this logic, trying to understand the system from the inside, the narrative complicated in a far more interesting way. Mycelium is not an NGO. It manages tension by connecting different systems because difference generates movement. It does this by redistributing resources between those who have too much and those who have too little — not to achieve balance, but to keep the system active.

Total equilibrium, for nature, apparently turns out to be bad business. It’s hard not to think of James Bridle here. That idea that intelligence may lie less in order and more in the capacity to handle tensions without collapsing.

Fungi don’t avoid conflict. They make it productive. And this had an immediate effect on the human world. Misalignment stopped being just a problem. In some contexts, it became an asset. The question shifted from “how do we align everything” to “how much misalignment can the system sustain while generating shareable value.”

What the cow has to say.

But the most unsettling turning point — and perhaps the one with the greatest consequences — came neither from the ocean nor from the underground. It came from the farmyard.

When the same AGI tools were applied to cattle, pigs, and poultry, what emerged was something many people preferred not to hear: these animals have rich emotional lives, form bonds, feel fear, anticipate suffering, and communicate all of this in ways we had simply never wanted to decode before.

Not coincidentally, between 2035 and 2038, veganism stopped being the choice of a minority and became one of the largest mass behavioral shifts in recent history. Not because people read yet another sustainability report, but because, for the first time, they had access to the other side of the counter’s perspective. When you are somehow able to “hear” what an animal feels at the moment of slaughter, your dinner steak will never taste the same again.

It’s uncomfortable. And it was inevitable.

The hardest thing to sink in. They don’t love us!

And then we come to our best friends.

When the decoding systems were applied in depth to the canine world — not just to barking, but to chemistry, neurology, attachment patterns — what was discovered was unsettling: dogs don’t love us. At least not in the way we always imagined.

Breathe. Don’t call the therapist yet.

What they do is, in practice, even more impressive. A dog’s gaze into our eyes triggers, in both human and animal, a cascade of oxytocin identical to the bond between mother and baby. A neurologically real bond, built over forty thousand years of co-evolution. They chose us. Or we chose them, in one of the greatest relational decisions in the history of life on this planet.

Except that this bond doesn’t work like love in the human sense. The dog isn’t judging you when you wake up in a bad mood. It isn’t tallying up the day, deciding whether you deserve a tail wag. It doesn’t change its attitude because you were harsh in the morning and affectionate in the evening. They don’t spend their time recalculating whether you deserve to be there. They don’t run emotional audits — they just adjust their reading of you in real time, because maintaining the bond matters more than judging it.

This permeated education, mental health, and leadership. And it left an uncomfortable question hanging in the air: how many human relationships collapse today not for lack of affection, but from an excess of expectation and judgment?

2035: the year history changed its subject

Curiously, at no point did we begin to “converse” with other species in the literal sense. There was no perfect translation, no organized dialogues.

What emerged was something else.

The recognition, and then the coexistence, of different logics. And that coexistence began to permeate everything.

Companies less obsessed with authorship. Relationships less based on constant judgment. Systems less dependent on perfect equilibrium. Decisions less held hostage by urgency.

It was in this context that biomimicry stopped being a discipline of observation and became a practice of interaction.

For decades, it functioned as an inspirational lens. We observed nature, extracted principles, applied them to design, engineering, strategy. That was already powerful. But it was one-sided.

From this turning point, it expanded radically. It began operating as a two-way street. We no longer just observe — we adjust in real time to living systems that also affect us.

Biomimicry stopped being metaphor and became one of the most powerful disciplines in this revolutionary era we have begun to inhabit.

A new way of thinking, deciding, and designing in dialogue with processes that carry 3.8 billion years of continuous experimentation. Solutions tested at planetary scale, refined not by isolated efficiency, but by the capacity to endure.

And perhaps that was the greatest shift of all.

We stopped looking at nature as reference, resource, or problem. We began to regard it as presence. And presence, like any real relationship, does not demand perfect translation.

It demands the willingness to not be the center of the conversation.

In the end, the greatest discovery was not about whales, fungi, dogs, or plants. It was about us.

About our historical difficulty in recognizing intelligence where it does not resemble us.

And about the possibility — still recent, still unstable — of finally taking that seriously.