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I'd put a reasonably high probability (5%) on orcas and several other species having all the necessary raw mental capacity to be "uplifted" in just a few (<20) generations with technology (in the wider sense) that has been available for a long time. Being uplifted means here the ability to intellectually engage with us on a near-equal or even equal footing, to create culture, to actively shape their destiny. Humans have been training, selecting, shaping other animals since before the dawn of history. Whenever we did so, it was with the goal of improving their use as tools or resources. Never, to my knowledge, has there been a sustained effort to put these abilities to use for the sole purpose of the mental and cultural flourishing of another species. It is my belief that many other universal learning machines beside the human brain have been produced by evolution, but just lack or lacked the right training environment for the kind of run-away development the homo genus went through, for various reasons.
Could "uplifted" orcas outperform humans on hard scientific problems? Would they care to? I don't know, but I'd love to find out.
Indeed, I would have very much preferred to see other animal minds elevated before we turned to the creation of artificial ones. To explore a wider space of minds and values, to learn more about what an intelligent species can be, before we believed ourselves ready to "build" intelligence from scratch. But it seems at least half a century too late for this now.
Then I misunderstood your original comment, sorry. As a different commenter wrote, the obvious solution would be to only engage with interesting people. But, of course, unworkable in practice. And "social grooming" nearly always involves some level of talking. A curse of our language abilities, I guess. Other social animals don't have that particular problem.
The next best solution would be higher efficiency, more socializing bang for your word count buck, so to speak. Shorter conversations for the same social effect. Not usually a focus of anything billed as conversation guide, for obvious reasons. But there are some methods aimed at different goals that, in my experience, also help with this as a side effect.
I understand, for someone with a strong drive to solve hard problems, there's an urge for conversations to serve a function, exchange information with your interlocutor so things can get done. There's much to do and communication is already painfully inefficient at it's best.
The thing is, I don't think the free-association game is inefficient, if one is skilled at it. It's also not all that free. The reason it is something humans "developed" is because it is the most efficient way to exchange rough but extensive models of our minds with others via natural language. It acts a bit like a ray tracer, you shoot conversational rays and by how they bounce around in mental structures, the thought patterns, values and biases of the conversation partners are revealed to each other. Shapes become apparent. Sometimes rays bounce off into empty space, then you need to restart the conversation, shoot a new ray. And getting better at this game, keeping the conversation going, exploring a wider range of topics more quickly, means building a faster ray tracer, means it takes less time to know if your interlocutor thinks in a way and about topics which you find enlightening/aesthetically pleasing/concretely useful/whatever you value.
Or to use a different metaphor, starting with a depth-first search and never running a breadth-first search will lead to many false negatives. There are many minds out there that can help you in ways you won't know in advance.
So if the hard problems you are working on could profit from more minds, it pays off to get better as this. Even if it has not much intrinsic value for you, it has instrumental value.
Hope this doesn't come across as patronizing, definitely not meant that way.