Oliver A. Ryder, an American geneticist and conservationist, has dedicated nearly fifty years to investigating how molecular biology can help preserve threatened animal species. Director of Conservation Genetics at the San Diego Zoo (California, United States) and co-chair of the Animal Biobanking Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, he is one of the founders of the Frozen Zoo, a collection of thousands of animal cell samples that is, he claims, a “genetic insurance policy” for the Earth.

“I have a request: do not call it a monk seal. That is an invention, a literal translation from Spanish without any tradition in our language.” With this very clear warning, the Majorcan biologist and conservationist Joan Mayol touches a raw nerve in maritime memory: “In our sea, it has always been called a sea old man, sea calf, or sea lion. And recovering its name is not a whim, but the first step to restoring the dignity of an animal that lived with us for millennia.” This claim is the starting point for rediscovering a discreet giant that, for decades, we condemned to oblivion.

The idea that humans might develop technology capable of destroying us –one by one or en masse, or even as a species– goes back a long way. Already in Antiquity, they imagined artifacts, often sent or forged by the gods, that were capable of doing the job: in the Argonautica, for example, appears Talos, a giant made of bronze who, from the coasts of Crete, threw rocks at invading ships to sink them. Prometheus, for his part, steals fire from Olympus with the intention of supplanting the gods and their ability to create life, an idea that we find recovered in myths such as that of the Golem or Frankenstein.The fear that machines might eventually develop some form of consciousness that leads them to rebel against humans runs through the entire history of literature, but it is evidently from the Industrial Revolution onwards that it gains the most strength. The 19th-century tales of automatons or the aforementioned Frankenstein by Mary Shelley anticipate the great explosion of the science fiction and dystopian genre during the 20th century. The emergence of cinema as an artistic and entertainment form also has a decisive importance in the success of stories about artificial life forms that become a threat to human life. From 2001 to Blade runner or Gattaca, from Metropolis to Terminator or the fusions of human flesh, prosthetics, and genetic manipulations in the cinema of David Cronenberg, the repertoire is endless.A characteristic of human intelligence is that, at the end of the day, the distance between imagination and reality is very short. Sometimes, zero. “If it can be imagined, it can be done” is a motivational, aspirational phrase, but it can also turn around and become a threat. These days, statements from engineers and other people related to large artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI warning that language models could become self-aware and plan – and execute – a mass extermination of humanity have placed us not before a fantasy, but before a possibility that some of these engineers quantify at over ten percent.Until recently, we were convinced that humans were the only self-aware species inhabiting the planet. Later we learned that some animal species also possess self-awareness, and now we are facing the self-awareness of machines. Three years ago, the exhibition AI: artificial intelligence, at the CCCB, showed the history of large language models and brought their pros and cons up for debate. The darkest predictions, as was already the case with the giant Talos, come with military uses. The exhibition spoke, even then (three years in the AI world is a long time), about lethal autonomous weapons, capable of searching for targets on their own and also making decisions autonomously in order to eliminate those targets. Killer robots, to put it simply. The human species does have a unique ability when it comes to building contraptions to massacre itself. In that, indeed, no one equals us.