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FiftyTwo comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
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Do you expect animals with human-like intelligence and dolphin-like bodies will fail to develop technological civilization? As a first approximation, I expect a community of modern human engineers (with basic technical background, but no specific knowledge) in dolphin bodies can manage to do that eventually, if they form a society conductive to long-term pursuit of the project. It's less clear if at human level this happens spontaneously, since it did take 200,000 years for humans with hands to get to technological civilization, and an additional difficulty could make it millions of years if intelligence is kept fixed.
(Assuming that machiavellian intelligence pressure can run further than it did with humans, machiavellian dolphins could at some point become even smarter than humans, which can be used to overcome the no-hands difficulty more effectively than human-level dolphins could. Alternatively, human-level dolphins can learn of selective breeding and create smarter dolphins irrespective of whether smarter dolphins would arise on their own.)
Why would they want to? A modern dolphin can get basically all the food its needs with minimal effort,so the main competition is intra-species. So for a dolphin society to advance technologically you would require every individual within it to give up their own reprodutive fitness but putting time and energy into the great project with no immediate benefit. For a technological society to develop it isnt enough that with sufficient coordination they could do so, but that it is in their self interest at every step along the way.
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It may also be possible to fall into local maxima and not get out of them even once a species has got a starting level of technology. Consider that humans spent 2.6 million years or so at paleolithic technology levels, and were probably only knocked out of it y sudden environmental change not by a gradual process of improving technology.
They don't. They either starve, be killed by predators, humans or by something.
They haven't escape this bloody cycle of exponential population grow on one, and mass death on other hand.
There is nothing like a "stable population" among dolphins.
This is part of a hypothetical intended to explore the issue of technical feasibility of developing technology using only dolphin bodies (underwater, etc.). This hypothetical removes two other most obvious issues in order to focus attention on this one. It removes the issue of developing useful-in-practice understanding of science by assuming that we have modern engineers. It removes the issue of unfavorable incentives by assuming that the incentives are directed towards the project.
You can explore other issues in other hypotheticals.
This group of dolphins might do it as a (long-term) way to better compete with that group of dolphins over there.