I've always agreed with this. The amount of confusion I see between two people from different cultures speaking the same language is amazing. 70% of communicat

I've always agreed with this. The amount of confusion I see between two people from different cultures speaking the same language is amazing. 70% of communication is body language. The rest appears to be shared assumptions about what the other person just said. I don't think we'll ever be able to have a conversation with a dolphin. We know they talk to each other, we know they're able to interact with us, but how would we ever communicate with them? Their world is so different from ours. To use the example above, a dolphin cannot "fall down", so any language concepts that we have around "falling" will be impossible for them to grok. Likewise we won't have mental concepts around sonar that they use every day, and so won't understand what they mean when they refer to that. We may be able to get to "hello, my name is Alice", but beyond that... nope. Same with "conversational" AI - it's going to need to understand what its like to have a body, so it can understand all the language around bodies. Simulating that, and being able to make references to "falling over" as a brain-in-a-box, is going to lead to misunderstanding, for exactly the reasons you describe. I hadn't thought about the measurements aspect, but it's true. There's been some research into trees communicating - could be a classic example. They talk (via fungal networks in their roots, apparently), but so slowly that we can't hear them. And yes, human emotion is linked to human physiology, and hormones. A lot of human communication is about recognising and empathising with human emotion. That's going to be a tough thing for a machine to do...