Money as memory
The Tehanu Project and its first step towards interspecies economic participation
Lecture with Jonathan Ledgard & Neil Gershenfeld
Jonathan Ledgard, CEO of Tehanu, will present on the Tehanu pilot project’s results and the Tehanu Foundation’s vision for interspecies equity through digital, AI and economic representation for non-human species.
In a world first, the Tehanu pilot project in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, a family of mountain gorillas was assigned digital identities and wallets. Leveraging artificial intelligence, blockchain, and digital identities, the pilot demonstrated that gorilla-linked digital wallets can make payments in line with AI-inferred gorilla interests.
Tehanu envisions this model as a scalable solution for biodiversity preservation, where AI-driven interspecies transactions create economic incentives for protecting wildlife. In the long-term, Tehanu seeks to further non-human species participation in the digital, economic and AI realms. The vision highlights the potential for digital and financial technologies to reshape the way humans interact with nonhuman life, leading to a new era of interspecies equity and new evolutionary futures.
Join Jonathan Ledgard and special guest Neil Gershenfeld to discover this groundbreaking innovation in conservation and interspecies collaboration.
About the speaker
Paco Calvo is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Murcia, Spain, where he directs the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab). His research explores the intersection of plant behaviour, ecological psychology, and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on non-neural forms of cognition. He is one of the leading voices in the emerging field of plant intelligence, and the author of Planta Sapiens (2023, New York, WW Norton), an internationally acclaimed book that asks us to rethink what it means to think, and who gets to do it. The book has been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, reflecting its global reach and impact. Paco’s work combines rigorous experimentation with conceptual analysis, pushing the boundaries of how we define cognition and sentience in living systems. He is particularly interested in the overall implications of de-centering the animal perspective, and in developing frameworks for interspecies understanding that go beyond anthropomorphic assumptions.
