Can Technology Help Us Talk to Animals? (vox.com) 50
"Today, tools like drones, digital recorders, and artificial intelligence are helping us listen to the sounds of nature in unprecedented ways," writes Vox, citing Karen Bakker, author of the new book Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.
But how far will this lead? Automated listening posts have been set up in ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the depths of the ocean, and miniaturization has allowed scientists to stick microphones onto animals as small as honeybees. "Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities," Bakker writes.
All those devices create a ton of data, which would be impossible to go through manually. So researchers in the fields of bioacoustics (which studies sounds made by living organisms) and ecoacoustics (which studies the sounds made by entire ecosystems) are turning to artificial intelligence to sift through the piles of recordings, finding patterns that might help us understand what animals are saying to each other. There are now databases of whale songs and honeybee dances, among others, that Bakker writes could one day turn into "a zoological version of Google Translate."
In an interview with Vox, the author points out that already "We can use artificial intelligence-enabled robots to speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication. Researchers are doing this in a very rudimentary way with honeybees and dolphins and to some extent with elephants.
"Now, this raises a very serious ethical question..." I'll give you one example. A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive. That robot is able to use the honeybees' waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it's able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source. The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth. And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive; we'll have essentially domesticated that hive in a way we've never done so before. This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there's a long history of the military use of animals, so that's one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells.
But how far will this lead? Automated listening posts have been set up in ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the depths of the ocean, and miniaturization has allowed scientists to stick microphones onto animals as small as honeybees. "Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature's sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities," Bakker writes.
All those devices create a ton of data, which would be impossible to go through manually. So researchers in the fields of bioacoustics (which studies sounds made by living organisms) and ecoacoustics (which studies the sounds made by entire ecosystems) are turning to artificial intelligence to sift through the piles of recordings, finding patterns that might help us understand what animals are saying to each other. There are now databases of whale songs and honeybee dances, among others, that Bakker writes could one day turn into "a zoological version of Google Translate."
In an interview with Vox, the author points out that already "We can use artificial intelligence-enabled robots to speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication. Researchers are doing this in a very rudimentary way with honeybees and dolphins and to some extent with elephants.
"Now, this raises a very serious ethical question..." I'll give you one example. A research team in Germany encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive. That robot is able to use the honeybees' waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it's able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source. The next stage in this research is to implant these robots into honeybee hives so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth. And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive; we'll have essentially domesticated that hive in a way we've never done so before. This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there's a long history of the military use of animals, so that's one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells.
talk to animals? (Score:2)
Re:talk to animals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on how you define "talk" too: TFA seems to focus mostly on giving them orders. This isn't about understanding what they have to say, their feelings or what they think of the Metaverse.
Re:talk to animals? (Score:5, Funny)
I talk to my dog all the time and he understands everything I say.
I think maybe he's pretending to understand you, because I'm a human being and I sure can't.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
I support fracking and I don’t I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking!!!
Re: (Score:3)
I talk to my dog all the time and he understands everything I say.
Same with my cat, but she chooses to reject most of what I say.
Re: talk to animals? (Score:2)
No (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Cute, but how many of our wars are due to a misunderstanding or lack of communication? And how many are due simply to greed, misplaced ambition, or religious zeal?
Yeah, that. A lot of willful misunderstanding is blamed on communications problems, but it's just an excuse for people doing what they wanted to anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But perhaps they could tech us how to talk to each other. Cross those geopolitical, gender and racial barriers.
Come one people there are darn wars going on right now!!!
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
The answer is in the summary (Score:3)
The question in the title was rhetorical, because even the summary gives examples of technology allowing humans to communicate with animals in ways we couldn't through natural means. The title of the article linked to in the summary is a bit more appropriate: "How tech is helping us talk to animals."
The thought provoking question is given later: "how far will this lead?" (which isn't a yes or no question) The answer is probably that technology will eventually provide us ways to communicate with animals in n
Maybe, depending on the animal (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like birds have regional languages, and they're some of the animals most skilled at speech (the song learning birds anyway.) So you're not just gonna teach software to speak e.g. crow language, you're going to have to teach it to speak whatever language the crows in your town speak. They literally have different dialects for such short distances. They also sometimes get together for big meetings though, so maybe they have a common language as well. The real question is, how complex is their communication? They make a lot of different noises, that's for sure, and they string them together in a broad variety of ways. Some of the smaller birds in particular make noises of complexity we literally can't even perceive, most of us anyway... not that this will stop a computer of course.
Re: (Score:2)
The complexity of their language won't be the limiting factor, it will be how much of their behavior is impacted by their communication. The only reason to communicate with animals is to either manipulate or predict their behavior. Our ability to do either is limited by how much the species relies on communication to adjust their own behavior and the behavior of others.
Doctor Doolittle says yes (Score:1)
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
Betteridge's Law says no.
Re: (Score:2)
Betteridge's Law says no.
Yet even the summary shows the answer is already yes.
Amazing! (Score:2)
What would be even more amazing is if we could use this technology to improve our communication with each other. Even those of us born into the same culture and language fail to get on the same page remarkably often. Yes, a lot of this failure is attitudinal; but some of it seems clearly to be a communication problem.
Re:Amazing! (Score:4, Insightful)
What would be even more amazing is if we could use this technology to improve our communication with each other
Oh we will, although I guess it depends on if you will always consider it an improvement. Writing would be an early example, and social media is one of the more recent.
The type of manipulation which is more analogous to the scenario described with bees is how technology will improve the efficacy of marketing and propaganda, by testing the limits of human free will. The hyper-partisan nature of today's politics is arguably due to improvements in how technology has allowed those in power to manipulate people to get angry or scared about certain topics with the goal of getting them to vote in a certain way. This technology is likely only to improve, both because of the increasing amount of data companies and politicians will obtain about us and because we are likely to start giving technology more access to our biological systems (implants and such).
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Did you somehow miss how that's exactly what we've already done? Google's AI translation engines (and probably competitors') somewhat famously [slashdot.org] have an internal representation of human communication.
No need (Score:5, Funny)
I've been talking to my cats for decades, I don't need help for that.
THEY might need help to answer.
Re: (Score:2)
Cats have three sentences:
"Food!"
"Pet!"
"Stupid human!"
Technology not needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have more meaningful conversations with my cat than I do with any humans.
Re: (Score:3)
I think that probably says a lot about you.
Re: (Score:1)
Or it says a lot about javascript. We shouldn't have to ask our cats why adding two numbers results in a taco emoji, but cats are the only people who truly understand this shit.
SQUIRREL!!! (Score:2)
Need I say more?
Gary Larsen (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
...And, Larsen is exactly correct, at least about dogs. Most people, not much different.
I'd rather talk to the trees. (Score:3)
I mean, I talk to the trees, but they never listen to me. They haven't time to stop and hear what I say.
Ethics breached years ago (Score:1)
Re:Ethics breached years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
This little ecosystem appears to have worked well for a while now - bee keepers care about where they put their bees, and ranch owners care about getting bees to pollinate their orchards. The people are already brokering these connections of bees Ã"> flowers. So making the commercial bees go somewhere you want doesnÃ(TM)t seem like it would have a major detrimental effect.
One of the major theories in colony collapse disorder is that moving hives around over much greater distances than the bees normally travel creates opportunities to spread mites and other problem species which infest bee populations. But you can't just not move the hives, because there's not enough food for them in the croplands when the crops aren't being produced. In part this is because Big Food has literally mandated the removal of surrounding wildlands and borders in an attempt to control contamination of food by animal feces. But a lot of that is actually due to farm workers shitting in the fields because they don't give them time to shit anywhere else...
Project Delphis (Score:3)
I remember reading in the late 90's / early 00's about something called Project Delphis that involved teaching humans and dolphins a common language to communicate with each other in by using touchscreens that were above water (for the humans) and below (for the dolphins' noses), and speech / whistle synthesizers. The dolphins were excitedly engaged in this process and apparently had even learned consistent new whistles that correlated to images on the screen that they would never have seen underwater.
https://earthtrust.org/flipper... [earthtrust.org]
Apparently the lab was closed in 2003, due to a change of ownership, right when they had plans to open the project up to allow the dolphins to use the equipment to communicate with Japanese schoolchildren. Darned shame, I think.
Re:Project Delphis (Score:4, Informative)
This is probably the best path forward for cetaceans. The best evidence I've read (this was years ago) seemed to indicate that much of the nouns in their languages are "sound pictures", direct or abstract reflections of the sonar images of the underlying objects. It would be mighty hard for us to "speak" that language when we lack the sensory organ to perceive it. It's a literal case of the philosopher's problem of explaining color to a blind man.
Sidebar: I've seen similar approaches for dogs, where buttons are associated with specific words and the dog types out phrases. That's Tik-Tok and YouTube stuff, not published research. I wonder if that's real? Hmmm.
Re: (Score:1)
Anthropomorphizing (Score:4, Interesting)
We humans like to imagine that animals are really "talking" to each other, and that if we could just learn their language, we could understand what they are trying to say.
The thing is, humans are actually *really* good at learning other languages and means of communication. Back in the days of modems, I could tell what speed I was connecting, by listening to the chirps and buzzes that came at the start of the call. Pet owners easily learn what the various types of barks and meows mean from their favorite animals.
In some cases, researchers have done in-depth studies and were able to determine how many words an animal could understand. In some cases it was up to a couple hundred.
But the reality is, language is not a primary tool for animals. They warn, cry, express fear, and a few other things. But their languages just aren't that subtle.
Training the AI (Score:2)
In order for AI to be any good, you have to train it first. If we don't already know the meanings of the "words," how are we going to train the AI? And if we train it based on what we do know, and it comes up with something we didn't train, how will we know it's right?