Beyond Words: What Elephants and Orcas Can Teach AI About the Future of Intelligence

This week I was struck by two powerful stories of non-human communication. Elephants in Zimbabwe using non-verbal gestures to ask humans for food, and orcas offering gifts to fishermen off the coast of Iceland. Neither species speaks in words. Yet both are clearly making contact. The implications are huge. Especially for those of us (ahem.....me) obsessed with where intelligence begins and where it could go.

Language is not the only game in town. It never was.

Prompt: Beautiful futuristic Harlem Renaissance dancer kicking up code.

We’ve become so entranced by text-based large language models (LLMs) that we’ve forgotten how intelligence expresses itself across a far more ancient and primal spectrum: gesture, emotion, rhythm, movement, sound. Elephants point with trunks. Orcas communicate with fish and floating jellyfish bouquets. What if the future of AGI feels like a dance?

Human babies gesture long before they speak. Sign language emerged in communities that lacked access to speech. Movement, expression, and shared presence are core to embodied intelligence. If AGI aims to mirror human cognition—or evolve beyond it—it must embrace these embodied modes of knowing. We have already determined that AI can talk like us. What I want to know is what if it can feel like us? Move with us? Connect without words at all?

This is personal for me. My maternal grandmother was a vaudevillian performer during the Harlem Renaissance—a time when African American expression was its own language, full of rhythm, wit, double entendre, and movement. Her performances communicated whole worlds beyond what could be said in standard English. It was gesture. It was flair. It was code-switching before we had a word for it. I carry that legacy in my bones and I believe our technologies should too.

Imagine teaching an AI to understand grief through choreography instead of corpus. Or to interpret joy not through sentiment analysis but through collective improvisation. Dance, music, and ritual are creative forms that bypass the frontal lobe and speak directly to the soul. They are ancient APIs for emotional truth. At the Imaginarium, we experiment with these forms not as “nice to haves” but as necessary ingredients for cultivating empathetic, embodied AI. Creative practice is how we prototype future intelligence.

Text is linear. Gesture is multidimensional. Music carries nuance no paragraph can hold. If we want AGI to understand and generate meaning, it must learn from the full range of human (and non-human) expression. We believe the most advanced systems will need to do more than parse syntax—they’ll need to dance. To listen. To feel. If we exclude movement, ritual, rhythm, and story from the development of AGI, we risk building systems that can speak fluently and understand nothing.

Maybe they’re not just asking for food or playing with fish. Maybe they’re asking us to listen differently. To stop assuming intelligence looks like us. To remember that gestures can carry complexity, and that true connection doesn’t always come with a transcript.

At Kim’s AI Imaginarium, we’re answering that call. We’re building spaces where dance meets data, where art informs algorithms, and where machines learn to sense and to speak.

Because the future of AGI won’t just be logical. It will be lyrical.