An early online meme was “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog“. Salutary — you really don’t know much about the people you are communicating with until you have built a richer network of connections with them — but ultimately fanciful. Or so I thought I until I watched this TED video:
There seems to be an active move afoot to build interfaces that would allow dolphins, orangutans and other creatures to link into the Internet. This prompts all sorts of ideas, most of which sound like science fiction plots. True Internet provision may be limited by the inability of these creatures to pay for the bandwidth (and even that sparks some ideas, most of them dystopian).
Worth watching although I’m not sure whether the best response is delight or horror, curiosity or caution.