What fish can teach us about AI: Reflections on reading ‘What a Fish Knows’ alongside ‘Scary Smart

Having worked extensively with small-scale fishing communities around the world, I am acutely aware of fishers’ perspectives about the fish they harvest. They train themselves to perceive the way fish think, feel, and know. All this is key to a successful harvest. Fishers educated me to think about fish not merely as a natural resource.

Knowing my interest in fishers and fish, a friend recently presented me with a book I would never otherwise have discovered – What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe.

More recently, I stumbled across Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat. It’s the latest of books I’ve read because I’ve been curious about predictions that this technology will dominate our futures. In Scary Smart, the Egyptian author and former technology executive Gawdat took me step by step towards a different understanding of AI – what it really is, what it can become and how we might collectively shape its future.

What a Fish Knows and Scary Smart appear to belong to different worlds. One asks us to reconsider the inner lives of fish, the other asks us to confront the emergence of artificial intelligence. Yet beneath that difference lies a striking common concern: how...

Read more