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 in time a bit. About eight years. In 2030, when artificial general intelligence finally became a reality, people's relationship with AIs had already changed considerably. From the euphoria of the distant 2022 with the first generative agents, to the agents that followed, passing through the damage that the famous second brains had caused to the developing brains of youth, the rollercoaster of the most disruptive technology ever created by man had generated unprecedented impacts. Especially in the market. 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, which reverberates to this day. And of course, everyone pretended not to see what was going to happen to secure the last tokens before the collapse.

But while Silicon Valley and Shenzhen were trying to recover from the hangover, a group of scientists was getting very close to something truly revolutionary. And, interestingly, they weren't trying to create new intelligences, but rather trying to better understand those that have existed here for billions of years.

The CETI project, the one that attempted to decipher the language of sperm whales, had begun back in 2021 with almost naive enthusiasm. Researchers placed hydrophones on the bottom of the Atlantic, recording hours and hours of clicks, codas, and modulations that the whales exchange with each other with a sophistication that would make any software engineer envious.

With AGI, things changed completely. What would have taken decades happened in months.

And then the day finally arrived.

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 has intention, context, and emotion, and everything finally makes sense. Researchers described a mixture of euphoria and vertigo with each sound that gained meaning. One of them said it was like seeing the image behind a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, which, in a magical moment, fits together revealing what we couldn't imagine. These weren't words, conversations, or specific calls from one individual to another. They were sophisticated mantras that reverberated the relationship of each specimen with its environment. Everything a whale needs to know during its life was there. In those sounds.

They carry the collective memory, transmitted 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 captures a pattern, adjusts it slightly, and returns it to the ocean. There is no original version, no authorship, no novelty. There is permanence.

This changes the question. It's 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 has become a major provocation. Perhaps intelligence is also this: sustaining over time, not just creating.

The fungus that is not what it seems

If whales have reorganized the meaning of memory, fungi have shaken up our notion of collaboration. For decades, we have described mycelium as a large cooperative network.

A “wood wide web.” The supportive forest. Older trees feeding younger ones, resources flowing from those who have to those who need. Beautiful, moving, and it became a mandatory metaphor in innovation lectures. I myself have given some exploring this example.

But when we actually started to “interact” with this logic, trying to understand the system from the inside, the narrative became much more interesting. Mycelium is not an NGO. It manages tension by connecting different systems because difference generates movement. They do this by redistributing resources between those who have too much and those who have too little, but not to keep everything balanced, but to keep the system active.

Total balance, for nature, it seems, is a bad deal. It's hard not to think of James Bridle here. This idea that intelligence may lie less in order and more in the ability 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 ceased to be just a problem. In some contexts, it became an asset. The question changed from "how to align everything" to "how much misalignment can the system withstand while generating shareable value."

What the cow has to say.

But the most unsettling shift, and perhaps the one with the greatest consequences, didn't come from the ocean or the subsoil. It came from the barn.

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 this in ways we simply never wanted to decode before.

Not by chance, between 2035 and 2038 veganism ceased to be a choice of a minority and became one of the greatest mass behavioral transformations in recent history. Not because people read yet another sustainability report, but because, for the first time, they had access to the point of view from the other side of the counter. When you can, somehow, "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 realization to grasp: They don't love us!

And then we come to our best friends.

When decoding systems were applied to the canine world in depth, not only to barking, but to chemistry, neurology, attachment patterns, what was discovered was disconcerting: dogs don't love us! At least not in the way we always thought.

Breathe. Don't call the therapist yet.

What they do is, in practice, even more impressive. A dog's gaze 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 successes in the history of life on this planet.

But this bond doesn't function like love in the human sense. The dog isn't judging you when you wake up in a bad mood. It's not taking stock of the day, evaluating whether you deserve a wagging tail. It doesn't change its attitude because you were rude in the morning and affectionate at night. They don't spend their time recalculating whether we deserve to be there. They don't conduct emotional audits, they just adjust their reading of you in real time, because maintaining the bond is more important than judging the bond.

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

2035: The Year the Story Changed Subject

Interestingly, at no point did we begin to "converse" with other species in the literal sense. There was no perfect translation, nor organized dialogues.

What emerged was something else.

The recognition and, subsequently, coexistence with different logics. And this coexistence began to contaminate everything.

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

It was in this context that biomimicry ceased to be a discipline of observation and became a practice of interaction.

For decades, it functioned as an inspirational lens. We observed nature, extracted principles, and applied them to design, engineering, and strategy. This was already powerful. But it was unilateral.

From this turning point onward, it expanded radically. It began to operate as a two-way street. We not only observe, but we adjust in real time to living systems that also affect us.

Biomimicry has ceased to be a metaphor and has become one of the most powerful disciplines in this revolutionary era we are beginning to live in.

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

And perhaps this has been the greatest change of all.

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

It requires a willingness not to 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 doesn't resemble us.

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

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