What the Eels Knew

There's a place in southwestern Victoria where, at least 6,600 years ago, a group of people looked at a lava flow and saw a system.I mean that with total sincerity. The Gunditjmara people of Budj Bim looked at cooled basalt left behind by an ancient volcano, part of the Newer Volcanics Province, which scattered the landscape with over 400 small shield volcanoes, and they saw inputs, outputs, throughput, and yield. They built stone dams. They engineered channels. They created ponds and wetlands where short-finned eels could be guided, grown, harvested, and traded. UNESCO lists it as one of the world's most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems, predating the pyramids by roughly two millennia and inventing scalable infrastructure while most of the planet was still figuring out pottery.I bring this up because everyone wants to talk about AI right now, and almost nobody wants to talk about eels. Which is a shame, because the eels have a lot to say.The data coming out of arXiv this year…