HN user
I disagree. Less important, and no more important than a public library filled with books. It'd be a shame if it burned down, but the books are not the humans that wrote them. Those are long gone.
Well, yeah, but those rules will only be unique and useful for probably 5 or 10 dolphins. The rest of dolphin kind won't have any innate concept of the vocabulary they've developed.
Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, implicit context, mood and tone. You'll be starting at square one, with every separate pod, with minimal potential of cross-pollination across pods, based on dolphins that leave one group, and join another, and whatever they bring with them, and manage to learn from new dolphins they meet.
Even the presumable token words, which surely must exist: air, water, fish, dirt. One pod in isolation from the rest might not build these conceptual ideas, or use their noises the same way, and then what of another pod halfway around the world, which they've never met?
Sure, the capacity for language remains, but there's no persistent implementation. Each variant of a dolphin language dies with the dolphin that knows it.
I want to say that they might've had a language at some point, but the damage whaling and fishing industries have wrought on them, might've had an effect on dolphins the same way more than a quarter century of no formalized school system, due to war, has been detrimental to Afghanistan's intelligentsia.
I can't prove this, but consider that hand writing is pretty much the only thing that allows humans to provide extended reach to their accumulated learning, across generations and centuries.
Without hand writing, or something like it, to act as a physical artifact and provide shortcuts to skip over expensive processes of trial and error, I doubt that a codified language, borne of strictly oral traditions among small pods of disorganized dolphin social groups, would survive across generations, to jump the inheritance gaps introduced by being hunted nearly to endangered status by predators like us.
If they're as smart as their neurology suggests, maybe they could learn our codified languages, or one we can develop cooperatively and share, through careful training on both sides.
So, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?
Consider the idea that this is a vector into the idea of machines being possibly equally important, or considered even more important than living humans, based on their capacity to accurately represent the continued presence of deceased humans.
That a machine is permitted to occupy and consume resources, that might otherwise be used by actual living people who are also trying to live meaningful lives. Which one wins?