As I’m sitting on my desk writing this newsletter, there is a cacophony of birds around me. Some egrets who whoosh by, a couple of white terns who squawk from a nearby tree, several house finches who chirp around our orchid pot and a few daring mynahs who tip toe right into our living room.
All I hear are sounds but I wonder, sometimes, if they are talking about me. Are they making fun of my lone orchid, or perhaps mocking me for staring at my screen for a full 30 minutes before I could think of what to write? I won’t have to wonder for too long as artificial intelligence could soon help me understand exactly what the birds are chirping about.
This week, The Global Tiller looks into the technology that could allow us to communicate with non-human species. Which language will we use, and what are we going to learn from animals who’ve been around for millions of years? What are the ethical implications of disrupting their cultures?
To understand how this two-way communication with animals works, it’s important to know about the organisation known as Earth Species Project — a non-profit dedicated to using artificial intelligence to decode non-human communication with the ultimate goal of changing the way we relate to the rest of nature.
With the 2017 breakthrough in machine learning technology that allowed computers to learn a geometric representation of an entire language, the folks behind Earth Species Project began to wonder if the same geometric shapes can unlock communication with other species. Their research builds off many decades of bioacoustics and behavioural ecology research which has already uncovered complex communication systems in other species, and combines it with advanced machine learning to decode different forms of communication. Essentially, a Google Translate for the animal kingdom spawn.
Recent advancements in AI have been exponential, leading Earth Species Project’s co-founder Aza Raskin to claim that, "…in the next 12 to 36 months, we should be able to imitate whale or crow communication in such high fidelity that we will be able to build a synthetic whale or a synthetic crow or synthetic beluga or synthetic seal that they won't know is not one of them."
Up until now, decoding animal communication has mostly relied on painstaking observation but now technology allows us to put sensors on the animals, both on land and in the oceans, and process huge amounts of data.
Besides the Earth Species Project, there are other research teams looking into this area. In a study published last year, researchers from the University of Copenhagen, ETH Zurich and the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment recorded 7,414 sounds from 411 pigs in different scenarios. Then, they developed an algorithm to decode pigs’ emotions, and discovered that pigs typically vocalise high-frequency calls such as screams or squeals in negative situations, while low-frequency calls such as barks and grunts occur when pigs experience both positive and negative emotions.
Apart from pigs, University of Washington researchers are looking into rats and have unveiled a new algorithm, known as DeepSqueak, which automatically identifies, processes, and sorts rat and mouse squeaks. Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is yet another scientist-led nonprofit organisation applying advanced machine learning and gentle robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales.
What makes the work of Earth Species Project different is that they aim to decode all non-human communication, "from worms to whales". But the way AI has evolved, they may be able to communicate first before even understanding what it is that they are saying. And the sheer scale of this intervention will have huge implications. If we end up communicating with whales and dolphins, who have cultures that have been around for 34 million years, imagine what we may be able to learn? Researchers discovered that the songs of humpback whales can go viral, meaning a song sung off the coast of Australia can get picked up and sung across the rest of the population within a year. In that case, our ability to transmit messages to them before even understanding what it is we are saying could interrupt and influence their ancient cultures.
Fascinating as these discoveries may be, what is comforting is to know that this organisation is keen to consider the ethical implications of their research and are following, what they call, the three rules of technology:
When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities;
If that technology confers power, it’ll start a race; and
If you don’t coordinate, that race will end in tragedy.
In this case, the technology to communicate with non-human species could start a race among ecotourists or poachers, who may attract these animals for clients and, or profits. So if we do find ourselves on the brink of this discovery, we have to keep reminding ourselves how we have exploited 'the other' in the past, and make sure we don’t do the same again. And, who knows, maybe this discovery will reveal that humanity is not the centre of the universe after all.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
A dolphin handler makes the signal for “together” with her hands, followed by “create”. The two trained dolphins disappear underwater, exchange sounds and then emerge, flip on to their backs and lift their tails. They have devised a new trick of their own and performed it in tandem, just as requested. Watch how two dolphins communicate with each other:
…and now what?
When I had dogs as a kid, my parents and I loved interacting with them and trying to communicate with them as much as we could. My mother, who loved to talk, had full conversations with our dog whom we had for 17 years. Often she would say: "if only dogs could talk!" My reply was always the same: "but they do, just in their own way.”
Through their eyes (oh, those puppy dog eyes!), the position of their ears, their tails and just with their overall demeanour, dogs are capable of saying so many things to be understood by humans. I often joke (but actually I’m quite serious) when I say: “I learned a lot about human communications by doing dog training.”
Communication has never been an issue with many animals, but only those who have lived with us for so long that they have developed very complex ways of communicating with us. But there are so many things we’re missing, like what they share among themselves. What about those who are not living with us as pets? We know enough about whales and other intelligent species to get a glimpse of what we’re missing.
So what will we discover eventually when we are able to talk to them? Are whales discussing the weather too? Can bears wonder about the beauty of the northern lights? Are dolphins making fun of each other, or us? The difficulty here is making sure we’re not personifying these animals by assuming our conversation with them will go the same way as it goes with our next door neighbour.
Yet, we may be surprised by what we find out. And once we do, what will it do to us? Of course, there are fears of exploitation. I’m pretty sure some weird wealthy person would want to have a “conversational animal” at home just for their own pleasure. But what if we realise that more animals are conscious than we think? What if we realise that they develop abstract thinking in ways that could compete with us?
Our societies have evolved with this intrinsic feeling that we were 'oh so special' because of our intelligence. But so far this is the case only because we can’t prove other beings are too, only because we can’t understand them!
How will this impact the conversation around animal rights? Will we protect them more because we will discover they are closer to us now that we can understand them? Or will this familiarity put them more in harm’s way?
Researcher Brian Hare, who wrote the book 'Survival of the Friendliest' and is a leading researcher in dog and animal cognition, refers to this as the "uncanny valley" of similarity. He shows how much humans are capable of rejecting 'the other' when the other is close enough to resemble us but not enough to look like us. In this “uncanny valley” of similarity, humans tend to be the most hateful. As if similarity creates an uneasiness and questions our own humanity to a point where we’re not comfortable and so we just get rid of the problem.
As with any kind of progress, we are on the edge and our ability to anticipate the consequences of our own decisions will decide the fate of those animals who are unarmed in front of us, even if they are highly intelligent. When we think about how slow we have been in recognising the humanity of other human beings, this is a valid concern to have.
What is ironic here is also the fact that this ability to communicate with animals will be allowed by a tool that has the potential to disrupt even our human society as we know it: artificial intelligence. A tool that makes us question our self, our identity, the basic definition of intelligence, humanity and consciousness.
This is a great time to potentially rethink who we are and what we do. And maybe, as we finally decipher the language of other species, we may find a way to understand each other better. "Human, what weird animals they are," those whales must be thinking. Are we reading to hear them think this out loud?
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury