9 ms·

A parrot has a question for humans

185 points by dnetesn 7y ago

ggambetta 7y ago
> If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention. Pretty much the plot of Contact (or at least its inciting incident). Both the book (by Carl Sagan) and the movie (with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) are really good.
- Razengan 7y ago
  We often miss all the ways animals right here on Earth try to get our or each other's attention. A truly alien species might communicate in ways we cannot even detect, or think of detecting, like say magnetic fields or some other medium that almost nothing on Earth uses. Furthermore, even if they used the same "channels" and frequencies as us, their minds may just be too different. Even fundamental concepts like time and numbers or the notion of self may be perceived too differently by them for their languages to have any convenient analogues to ours.
  - close04 7y ago
    I think we're hoping (even if it's a double edge sword) that the aliens are smart enough to communicate with us not the other way around. We have been unable to fully decipher the "language" of dogs beyond some body language. And they have lived with us for millennia. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/
    - vermilingua 7y ago
      I doubt many dog owners would agree with you that we have not deciphered the language of dogs. We viscerally understand how they communicate, it’s simply hard to systematically describe it.
      - close04 7y ago
        > We viscerally understand But that's a very superficial understanding of a language. Maybe we have different concepts of what understanding a language means. Dogs are smart enough to grasp relatively advanced concepts, do you think you would understand the response if you asked "do you want food A, B, C, or D"? And I'm not talking about body language (them pointing at the thing) or training them to react in a specific way because that's actually you teaching them a language. Another example: listen to 2 dogs barking at each other. To what level can you understand what they are "saying"? Yes, you can say "aggressive" or "submissive". But is it fair to call that understanding the language? There has to be more to their language than just basic emotions. Take this list of languages [0] (or any language that is completely foreign to you). If someone is speaking one of them to you and you can only guess things from body language or tone is it fair to say you understand that language? The meaning of a lot of human languages or alphabets is completely lost even if they were conceived by humans almost identical to us biologically. Hoping to understand alien languages without the aliens helping us is a pipe dream. [0] https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2018/02/rare-languages-spoken-10757/ https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2018/02/rare-languages-...
        cetalingua 7y ago
        >The meaning of a lot of human languages or alphabets is completely lost even if they were conceived by humans almost identical to us biologically. Hoping to understand alien languages without the aliens helping us is a pipe dream. There has been limited success with parts of Voynich Manuscript (some plants names?) and some interesting developments with rongorongo, but overall, yes, super hard. Hopeflly, Natural Language Processing might help, some promising results were reported for Linear B. (https://neurohive.io/en/news/researchers-use-machine-learning-to-automatically-translate-long-lost-languages/ https://neurohive.io/en/news/researchers-use-machine-learnin...)
        close04 7y ago
        I'm not sure the manuscript really qualifies as a language but it does highlight the difficulties in understanding an artificial construct, coming from an intelligent mind. We understand natural constructs because we kind of understand the natural laws that govern them. We're nowhere near understanding the laws that govern the intelligent, conscious mind. Even our own. P.S. Good luck with your project. Sounds very interesting and right on the money for this conversation.
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    Dolphins seem particularly promising!
    - cetalingua 7y ago
      Yet, after nearly 5 decades of research we are still unable to crack their code. We do know however that some sequences they make do not seem to be random.Our problem is to penetrate the communication system that is not visually based,and is purely acoustical. Shameless self-plug: we are working on it, combining citizen science and AI. Our plarform goes live in a few weeks.
      - arwineap 7y ago
        I'll pull the plug; any suggestions for further reading? > Our problem is to penetrate the communication system that is not visually based,and is purely acoustical. Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this
        cetalingua 7y ago
        >any suggestions for further reading? "Deep Thinkers" is a good recent book, you can check it out (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27346780.html https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27...) >Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this Our challenge is that we are visual species who are trying to understand “acoustic” species. (see ”What it is like to be a bat? https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum...) Yes, we can describe their vocalizations in terms of peak frequencies, RMS, center frequencies, duration, intensity, inter-click-intervals for burst pulses or sperm whale codas, but what does it all mean? The biggest struggle is not even that, but how to conceptualize their communication system. Naturally, being humans, we want it to have semantics, grammar, pragmatics and phonetics, and if it does not, they must be dumb (i.e. Chomsky’s argument). So we search for the smallest unit (a phoneme) and naturally we cannot find it. Additionally, we know that dolphins have at least 2 sound generators (and possibly up to 4) that could work simultaneously and independently, potentially producing very complex utterances. On top of that, we have an animal that “sees” the world through sound, it must have at least some contribution to how the communication system is set up. The conventional belief as of now is that echolocation is separate from communication, although Dr. John Lilly was convinced that dolphins could use echolocation to describe things in their environment (to be clear, we have no scientific support for this hypothesis). That is why describing dolphin whistles and other sounds terms of duration, peak frequencies, infliction points, etc., does not help at all, as it does not help us to understand how the communication system is set up and what this whistle actually means (and why is it used). The only positive thing in all that is that there must be some sort of communication system. If you ever encounter a pod (especially the offshore species) you would be amazed at their constant chat. So much energy is spent on all these utterances they must be important and must have at least some meaning.
  - hindsightbias 7y ago
    Derrick Jensen touches on this in A Language Older Than Words with his experiences running a farm.
PaulHoule 7y ago
If I had billions I would retreat to an island somewhere and try to bring back the dinosaurs by breeding super ostriches or something like that.
- cogburnd02 7y ago
  > bring back the dinosaurs There are several movies about why this is a bad idea.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    There are also several movies about faster-than-light spaceships which are crewed by humans even during combat. Movies should not be the basis for an argument.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      I very much want to see a sci-fi where combat begins with the captain (aka the token human) saying, "Ship, you are weapons-free. Lethal force is authorized." Then their acceleration pod seals, and fills up with perfluorodecalin. The rest of the action is the ship AI trying to save itself, its crew, and the cargo. If you have a FTL spaceship, the modal weapon will likely be FTL torpedoes, armed with thermonuclear warheads or better, and guided by kamikaze AI. Engagement distance will not be in visual range. Unguided weapons will miss, unless the targeting system can predict where the target will be when the weapon reaches it. So at some level, it will be combat computers trying to "Iocaine Powder" each other, by predicting the other's offensive and defensive strategy. The AI that can be more unpredictable, while better predicting what the other AI will do, will win.
      - svachalek 7y ago
        I remember a book that went exactly like that back in the 80s. I just can't place what it was other than it was sci-fi of the variety that didn't take itself too seriously (maybe one of the Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh novels?).
      - 7y ago
jatsign 7y ago
The author, Ted Chiang, recently released his book of short stories, Exhalation. This story is included in the book. It's good, but not as good as his first book, imo, "Story of Your Life and Others". Story of Your Life was the inspiration for the movie "Arrival". That book was amazing.
- kaliatech 7y ago
  The first story though, in Exhalation, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", is one of my favorites. It's also available standalone.
  - jatsign 7y ago
    That is a really good story. I think I kind of downgraded "Exhalation" a bit because I'd read that story before so it wasn't new to me.
    - r3bl 7y ago
      In any case, thanks for mentioning it. Thoroughly enjoyed Story of Your Life and Others and had no idea he released a second short story collection a few months ago. It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. I am part way through Exhalation, and I just bought “Story of Your Life and Others”. I really liked the movie Arrival - it is one of the few movies that I have purchased so I can watch it whenever I want. We really do live in a world with so much great entertainment in the forms of literary art and movies.
jhbadger 7y ago
Parrots get the attention because they are the classic imitators of human voices, but among birds, corvids (crows and their relatives) are the ones that have been shown to have mammalian-level intelligence.
- jcims 7y ago
  They aren’t bad speakers either. https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg
  - blarg1 7y ago
    Also this one https://youtu.be/BbRS9K4rZ8Y https://youtu.be/BbRS9K4rZ8Y
- dTal 7y ago
  They are so smart that it seems rather unfair to term it "mammalian-level intelligence". Most mammals are not as smart as crows.
- rotexo 7y ago
  It is probably the result of some kind of cognitive bias, having heard similar things for a long time, but I have been captivated by crows ever since I moved to the bay from Austin. In Austin, the resident blackbirds (grackles) just seem like mean-looking pigeons. Here, the crows seem to have personalities, moods, just generally complicated internal lives.
brownbat 7y ago
Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food. Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping for. The precise expectations we have for such an exchange may say something about the Fermi paradox. Very similar intelligences can still be so different as to render communication, a real exchange of ideas, impossible.
- crookshanked 7y ago
  Thanks for your post. Reading about the Fermi paradox brightened my morning.
- 542458 7y ago
  On Koko... Koko's not all she's cracked up to be. Although there is a lot of non-scientific media that talks about her language abilities, there actually aren't very many scientific/peer reviewed articles on her, something that is the source of some contention. With Koko/many other talking apes the handler does a LOT of interpretation for the sign language, to the point that it starts to feel a bit like reading tea leaves. With Koko, I often feel that the handler goes way too far in this. For example: Interviewer: Koko, do you feel love from the humans who have raised you and cared for you? Ely35150 asked that. We'll see what she says! Dr. Patterson: She's reading a birthday card. Koko: lips, apple give me Dr. Patterson: People give her her favorite foods. Koko: love, browse drink nipple Dr. Patterson: Browse is like... the little foods/snacks we give them. Koko: koko loves that nipple drink, go Dr. Patterson: She's kissing her alligator. Koko: lights off good At one point Koko signs "nipple", which her handler interprets as "people" since they rhyme. Seeing as how Koko can't speak english, the idea that she understands english rhymes feels like more than a bit of a stretch to me. Many other scientists have approached the ape speaking thing through a bit more of a skeptical lens, and produced (IMHO) much better work. The work on Nim Chimpsky in particular is interesting - they found that while Nim could associate words with concepts (forming phrases like "give food me eat"), anything resembling syntax, creating new phrases, or a sustained conversation was simply out of his reach.
DonHopkins 7y ago
From Richard Stallman's Rider: https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt >If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too. >DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210 https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...
- tapland 7y ago
  I love birds. Volunteered at a wild bird rescue, wish I had 100 of them, love visiting any place with parrots when travelling. But I would never buy a bird. Offering a better place for one who no longer has anyone to take care of it is great, but promoting breeding and sales of captive intelligent animals feels very wrong.
  - mark_l_watson 7y ago
    As a long time parrot owner, sadly I must agree with you. I devote about two hours a day to my parrot, and even at that he wants even more attention. Volunteering at a parrot rescue organization is probably the better alternative to owning a parrot.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      This might be ignorant, but in this case would it be more humane to own two so they can entertain each other?
      - 7y ago
cetalingua 7y ago
Speaking of dolphins (and whales for that matter), there is a reason why it has been so hard to not just "communicate" with them but to even understand the function and the meaning of a number of calls they make.It appears that it is very hard for a human mind to understand a consciousness so different from our own. We are visual species, and even though our language is acoustic, it reflects our nature as visual species. Dolphins' primary modality is sound, so if they have any communication system, it will reflect that. Will we be able to crack their code someday? Hopefully, the answer is yes.
- stuntkite 7y ago
  We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. The ocean is basically a noisy internet with their calls like alien packets that are mixed with a complex natural langue. Elephants have a similar thing. They make long sub-bass vocalizations that they can feel for miles with their feet. As far as I know, prarie dog [0] is the closest we've come to a rosetta stone for another species. We can translate things like "brown fox north" and such. [0] https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discov...
  - cetalingua 7y ago
    >We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. Well, not exactly.In fact, we still know surprisingly little. For the humpback song, one of the most studied topics up to date, there is still a major disagreement if it is a reproductive display or something else.Humpbacks make tons of other sounds as well, those have not been studied as much as their songs. For bottlenose dolphins, the most studied species, we sort of know the function of the signature whistles (again, not everyone agrees), but know very little about the function/meaning of other whistles and other sounds like burst pulses or LFNs.Echolocation has been studied a lot, still, we do not know if it is used in communication in any way.
    - stuntkite 7y ago
singingwolfboy 7y ago
You be good. I love you.
- onychomys 7y ago
  Just to be clear, he said that to whoever was putting him to bed each night. I worked in the Pepperberg lab as an undergrad back in the day, and he said that to me a hundred times too.
  - 420basteit 7y ago
    Very cool that you worked in that lab! Did you say I love you back when putting him to bed?
KingMob 7y ago
Back in grad school, I used to TA for Dr. Mischel of Nim Chimpsky fame. A lot of researchers badly wanted to prove language in chimps back in the 70's, but it all amounted to naught, and other than a few holdouts, the field moved on. People got excited about animal communication, but confused that with language. Language has a syntax, such that one can utter a sentence you've never spoken before and you can understand a sentence you've never heard before. Language is impossible under conditioning-based learning, but most of the chimp "utterances" could still be explained by conditioning. E.g., chimp Washoe infamously signed "water" and "bird" when a swan happened to be nearby, but that could be explained with operant conditioning: she associated signing "water" and "bird" in the presence of waters and birds with getting treats. Eventually, researchers started taking a sober look at the "corpuses" generated by animals. When cherry-picking individual phrases, things looked impressive; but when they really started to analyze these statistically as a whole, the results were unimpressive, closer to random utterings designed to elicit treats, rather than communication.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Nice, I read the whole thing before noticing that Ted Chiang wrote this. Off topic, but I have really been his and sci-fi from China. I have owned a Meyers Parrot for over 15 years. We got him from a local breeder as a baby and hand fed him. I question the morality of owning such smart animals as pets, but that aside, he is a great pet. Parrots do require at least a few hours of interaction time a day from their owners. Right now mine is next to me beating up on his bell toy. He will only do this when someone is watching him. Anyway, don’t get a parrot unless you have a lot of free time.
erinaceousjones 7y ago
Relevant - "My Reading Pets" is a facebook page I follow, a doctor of early childhood development (iirc) tried out teaching her bored cockatoo Ellie reading simple words to help occupy Ellie's mind -- fast-forward several years later and she's teaching several parrots to read and in the process convey some pretty complex internal concepts via word-cards. Not vocalization, and using predefined call-and-response (generally the birds are answering questions with a fixed set of answers), but I find the whole thing astounding and fascinating nonetheless. https://www.facebook.com/myreadingpets/ https://www.facebook.com/myreadingpets/
carapace 7y ago
FWIW, our estrangement from Nature is easy to overcome if you try. Here's the beginning of the scientific basis for understanding e.g. what they do at Findhorn: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
viach 7y ago
I can't think of an interesting and important question one could ask a non-human, except (if it's an alien) "how to do cold fusion" or "how to live forever", ie specific technological stuff. Really, what do we expect to hear from monkeys and dolphins deciphering their language? Give them a small talk on the current Bitcoin prices or ask what they think about the next elections? I suspect in the end it'll lead to something like "How are you? I'm fine!" Maybe it's just me though.
- jatsign 7y ago
  You could ask them the same things you ask any human, but get radically different (and perhaps very interesting) answers. You could look at their art, listen to their music, learn their philosophy - assuming they have any of that, and that it's comprehensible to us.
  - viach 7y ago
    Agree, new art, new music, new philosophy (I personally don't expect it to be much different from ours). But will it have any important effect on average human life ever?
  - TJSomething 7y ago
    I would be unsurprised if some other species had oral histories. It seems that elephants and crows are able to communicate about specific locations and people while their referents aren't around.

185 points by dnetesn 7y ago

> If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention. Pretty much the plot of Contact (or at least its inciting incident). Both the book (by Carl Sagan) and the movie (with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) are really good.

Razengan 7y ago
We often miss all the ways animals right here on Earth try to get our or each other's attention. A truly alien species might communicate in ways we cannot even detect, or think of detecting, like say magnetic fields or some other medium that almost nothing on Earth uses. Furthermore, even if they used the same "channels" and frequencies as us, their minds may just be too different. Even fundamental concepts like time and numbers or the notion of self may be perceived too differently by them for their languages to have any convenient analogues to ours.
- close04 7y ago
  I think we're hoping (even if it's a double edge sword) that the aliens are smart enough to communicate with us not the other way around. We have been unable to fully decipher the "language" of dogs beyond some body language. And they have lived with us for millennia. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/
  - vermilingua 7y ago
    I doubt many dog owners would agree with you that we have not deciphered the language of dogs. We viscerally understand how they communicate, it’s simply hard to systematically describe it.
    - close04 7y ago
      > We viscerally understand But that's a very superficial understanding of a language. Maybe we have different concepts of what understanding a language means. Dogs are smart enough to grasp relatively advanced concepts, do you think you would understand the response if you asked "do you want food A, B, C, or D"? And I'm not talking about body language (them pointing at the thing) or training them to react in a specific way because that's actually you teaching them a language. Another example: listen to 2 dogs barking at each other. To what level can you understand what they are "saying"? Yes, you can say "aggressive" or "submissive". But is it fair to call that understanding the language? There has to be more to their language than just basic emotions. Take this list of languages [0] (or any language that is completely foreign to you). If someone is speaking one of them to you and you can only guess things from body language or tone is it fair to say you understand that language? The meaning of a lot of human languages or alphabets is completely lost even if they were conceived by humans almost identical to us biologically. Hoping to understand alien languages without the aliens helping us is a pipe dream. [0] https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2018/02/rare-languages-spoken-10757/ https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2018/02/rare-languages-...
      - cetalingua 7y ago
        >The meaning of a lot of human languages or alphabets is completely lost even if they were conceived by humans almost identical to us biologically. Hoping to understand alien languages without the aliens helping us is a pipe dream. There has been limited success with parts of Voynich Manuscript (some plants names?) and some interesting developments with rongorongo, but overall, yes, super hard. Hopeflly, Natural Language Processing might help, some promising results were reported for Linear B. (https://neurohive.io/en/news/researchers-use-machine-learning-to-automatically-translate-long-lost-languages/ https://neurohive.io/en/news/researchers-use-machine-learnin...)
        close04 7y ago
        I'm not sure the manuscript really qualifies as a language but it does highlight the difficulties in understanding an artificial construct, coming from an intelligent mind. We understand natural constructs because we kind of understand the natural laws that govern them. We're nowhere near understanding the laws that govern the intelligent, conscious mind. Even our own. P.S. Good luck with your project. Sounds very interesting and right on the money for this conversation.
- ggambetta 7y ago
  Dolphins seem particularly promising!
  - cetalingua 7y ago
    Yet, after nearly 5 decades of research we are still unable to crack their code. We do know however that some sequences they make do not seem to be random.Our problem is to penetrate the communication system that is not visually based,and is purely acoustical. Shameless self-plug: we are working on it, combining citizen science and AI. Our plarform goes live in a few weeks.
    - arwineap 7y ago
      I'll pull the plug; any suggestions for further reading? > Our problem is to penetrate the communication system that is not visually based,and is purely acoustical. Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this
      - cetalingua 7y ago
        >any suggestions for further reading? "Deep Thinkers" is a good recent book, you can check it out (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27346780.html https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27...) >Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this Our challenge is that we are visual species who are trying to understand “acoustic” species. (see ”What it is like to be a bat? https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum...) Yes, we can describe their vocalizations in terms of peak frequencies, RMS, center frequencies, duration, intensity, inter-click-intervals for burst pulses or sperm whale codas, but what does it all mean? The biggest struggle is not even that, but how to conceptualize their communication system. Naturally, being humans, we want it to have semantics, grammar, pragmatics and phonetics, and if it does not, they must be dumb (i.e. Chomsky’s argument). So we search for the smallest unit (a phoneme) and naturally we cannot find it. Additionally, we know that dolphins have at least 2 sound generators (and possibly up to 4) that could work simultaneously and independently, potentially producing very complex utterances. On top of that, we have an animal that “sees” the world through sound, it must have at least some contribution to how the communication system is set up. The conventional belief as of now is that echolocation is separate from communication, although Dr. John Lilly was convinced that dolphins could use echolocation to describe things in their environment (to be clear, we have no scientific support for this hypothesis). That is why describing dolphin whistles and other sounds terms of duration, peak frequencies, infliction points, etc., does not help at all, as it does not help us to understand how the communication system is set up and what this whistle actually means (and why is it used). The only positive thing in all that is that there must be some sort of communication system. If you ever encounter a pod (especially the offshore species) you would be amazed at their constant chat. So much energy is spent on all these utterances they must be important and must have at least some meaning.
- hindsightbias 7y ago
  Derrick Jensen touches on this in A Language Older Than Words with his experiences running a farm.

PaulHoule 7y ago

If I had billions I would retreat to an island somewhere and try to bring back the dinosaurs by breeding super ostriches or something like that.

cogburnd02 7y ago
> bring back the dinosaurs There are several movies about why this is a bad idea.
- ben_w 7y ago
  There are also several movies about faster-than-light spaceships which are crewed by humans even during combat. Movies should not be the basis for an argument.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    I very much want to see a sci-fi where combat begins with the captain (aka the token human) saying, "Ship, you are weapons-free. Lethal force is authorized." Then their acceleration pod seals, and fills up with perfluorodecalin. The rest of the action is the ship AI trying to save itself, its crew, and the cargo. If you have a FTL spaceship, the modal weapon will likely be FTL torpedoes, armed with thermonuclear warheads or better, and guided by kamikaze AI. Engagement distance will not be in visual range. Unguided weapons will miss, unless the targeting system can predict where the target will be when the weapon reaches it. So at some level, it will be combat computers trying to "Iocaine Powder" each other, by predicting the other's offensive and defensive strategy. The AI that can be more unpredictable, while better predicting what the other AI will do, will win.
    - svachalek 7y ago
      I remember a book that went exactly like that back in the 80s. I just can't place what it was other than it was sci-fi of the variety that didn't take itself too seriously (maybe one of the Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh novels?).
    - 7y ago

jatsign 7y ago

The author, Ted Chiang, recently released his book of short stories, Exhalation. This story is included in the book. It's good, but not as good as his first book, imo, "Story of Your Life and Others". Story of Your Life was the inspiration for the movie "Arrival". That book was amazing.

kaliatech 7y ago
The first story though, in Exhalation, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", is one of my favorites. It's also available standalone.
- jatsign 7y ago
  That is a really good story. I think I kind of downgraded "Exhalation" a bit because I'd read that story before so it wasn't new to me.
  - r3bl 7y ago
    In any case, thanks for mentioning it. Thoroughly enjoyed Story of Your Life and Others and had no idea he released a second short story collection a few months ago. It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. I am part way through Exhalation, and I just bought “Story of Your Life and Others”. I really liked the movie Arrival - it is one of the few movies that I have purchased so I can watch it whenever I want. We really do live in a world with so much great entertainment in the forms of literary art and movies.

jhbadger 7y ago

Parrots get the attention because they are the classic imitators of human voices, but among birds, corvids (crows and their relatives) are the ones that have been shown to have mammalian-level intelligence.

jcims 7y ago
They aren’t bad speakers either. https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg
- blarg1 7y ago
  Also this one https://youtu.be/BbRS9K4rZ8Y https://youtu.be/BbRS9K4rZ8Y
dTal 7y ago
They are so smart that it seems rather unfair to term it "mammalian-level intelligence". Most mammals are not as smart as crows.
rotexo 7y ago
It is probably the result of some kind of cognitive bias, having heard similar things for a long time, but I have been captivated by crows ever since I moved to the bay from Austin. In Austin, the resident blackbirds (grackles) just seem like mean-looking pigeons. Here, the crows seem to have personalities, moods, just generally complicated internal lives.

brownbat 7y ago

Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food. Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping for. The precise expectations we have for such an exchange may say something about the Fermi paradox. Very similar intelligences can still be so different as to render communication, a real exchange of ideas, impossible.

crookshanked 7y ago
Thanks for your post. Reading about the Fermi paradox brightened my morning.
542458 7y ago
On Koko... Koko's not all she's cracked up to be. Although there is a lot of non-scientific media that talks about her language abilities, there actually aren't very many scientific/peer reviewed articles on her, something that is the source of some contention. With Koko/many other talking apes the handler does a LOT of interpretation for the sign language, to the point that it starts to feel a bit like reading tea leaves. With Koko, I often feel that the handler goes way too far in this. For example: Interviewer: Koko, do you feel love from the humans who have raised you and cared for you? Ely35150 asked that. We'll see what she says! Dr. Patterson: She's reading a birthday card. Koko: lips, apple give me Dr. Patterson: People give her her favorite foods. Koko: love, browse drink nipple Dr. Patterson: Browse is like... the little foods/snacks we give them. Koko: koko loves that nipple drink, go Dr. Patterson: She's kissing her alligator. Koko: lights off good At one point Koko signs "nipple", which her handler interprets as "people" since they rhyme. Seeing as how Koko can't speak english, the idea that she understands english rhymes feels like more than a bit of a stretch to me. Many other scientists have approached the ape speaking thing through a bit more of a skeptical lens, and produced (IMHO) much better work. The work on Nim Chimpsky in particular is interesting - they found that while Nim could associate words with concepts (forming phrases like "give food me eat"), anything resembling syntax, creating new phrases, or a sustained conversation was simply out of his reach.

DonHopkins 7y ago

From Richard Stallman's Rider: https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt >If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too. >DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210 https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-public/2011-October/007647.html https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...

tapland 7y ago
I love birds. Volunteered at a wild bird rescue, wish I had 100 of them, love visiting any place with parrots when travelling. But I would never buy a bird. Offering a better place for one who no longer has anyone to take care of it is great, but promoting breeding and sales of captive intelligent animals feels very wrong.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  As a long time parrot owner, sadly I must agree with you. I devote about two hours a day to my parrot, and even at that he wants even more attention. Volunteering at a parrot rescue organization is probably the better alternative to owning a parrot.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    This might be ignorant, but in this case would it be more humane to own two so they can entertain each other?
    - 7y ago

cetalingua 7y ago

Speaking of dolphins (and whales for that matter), there is a reason why it has been so hard to not just "communicate" with them but to even understand the function and the meaning of a number of calls they make.It appears that it is very hard for a human mind to understand a consciousness so different from our own. We are visual species, and even though our language is acoustic, it reflects our nature as visual species. Dolphins' primary modality is sound, so if they have any communication system, it will reflect that. Will we be able to crack their code someday? Hopefully, the answer is yes.

stuntkite 7y ago
We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. The ocean is basically a noisy internet with their calls like alien packets that are mixed with a complex natural langue. Elephants have a similar thing. They make long sub-bass vocalizations that they can feel for miles with their feet. As far as I know, prarie dog [0] is the closest we've come to a rosetta stone for another species. We can translate things like "brown fox north" and such. [0] https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discov...
- cetalingua 7y ago
  >We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. Well, not exactly.In fact, we still know surprisingly little. For the humpback song, one of the most studied topics up to date, there is still a major disagreement if it is a reproductive display or something else.Humpbacks make tons of other sounds as well, those have not been studied as much as their songs. For bottlenose dolphins, the most studied species, we sort of know the function of the signature whistles (again, not everyone agrees), but know very little about the function/meaning of other whistles and other sounds like burst pulses or LFNs.Echolocation has been studied a lot, still, we do not know if it is used in communication in any way.
  - stuntkite 7y ago

singingwolfboy 7y ago

You be good. I love you.

onychomys 7y ago
Just to be clear, he said that to whoever was putting him to bed each night. I worked in the Pepperberg lab as an undergrad back in the day, and he said that to me a hundred times too.
- 420basteit 7y ago
  Very cool that you worked in that lab! Did you say I love you back when putting him to bed?

KingMob 7y ago

Back in grad school, I used to TA for Dr. Mischel of Nim Chimpsky fame. A lot of researchers badly wanted to prove language in chimps back in the 70's, but it all amounted to naught, and other than a few holdouts, the field moved on. People got excited about animal communication, but confused that with language. Language has a syntax, such that one can utter a sentence you've never spoken before and you can understand a sentence you've never heard before. Language is impossible under conditioning-based learning, but most of the chimp "utterances" could still be explained by conditioning. E.g., chimp Washoe infamously signed "water" and "bird" when a swan happened to be nearby, but that could be explained with operant conditioning: she associated signing "water" and "bird" in the presence of waters and birds with getting treats. Eventually, researchers started taking a sober look at the "corpuses" generated by animals. When cherry-picking individual phrases, things looked impressive; but when they really started to analyze these statistically as a whole, the results were unimpressive, closer to random utterings designed to elicit treats, rather than communication.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Nice, I read the whole thing before noticing that Ted Chiang wrote this. Off topic, but I have really been his and sci-fi from China. I have owned a Meyers Parrot for over 15 years. We got him from a local breeder as a baby and hand fed him. I question the morality of owning such smart animals as pets, but that aside, he is a great pet. Parrots do require at least a few hours of interaction time a day from their owners. Right now mine is next to me beating up on his bell toy. He will only do this when someone is watching him. Anyway, don’t get a parrot unless you have a lot of free time.

erinaceousjones 7y ago

Relevant - "My Reading Pets" is a facebook page I follow, a doctor of early childhood development (iirc) tried out teaching her bored cockatoo Ellie reading simple words to help occupy Ellie's mind -- fast-forward several years later and she's teaching several parrots to read and in the process convey some pretty complex internal concepts via word-cards. Not vocalization, and using predefined call-and-response (generally the birds are answering questions with a fixed set of answers), but I find the whole thing astounding and fascinating nonetheless. https://www.facebook.com/myreadingpets/ https://www.facebook.com/myreadingpets/

carapace 7y ago

FWIW, our estrangement from Nature is easy to overcome if you try. Here's the beginning of the scientific basis for understanding e.g. what they do at Findhorn: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

viach 7y ago

I can't think of an interesting and important question one could ask a non-human, except (if it's an alien) "how to do cold fusion" or "how to live forever", ie specific technological stuff. Really, what do we expect to hear from monkeys and dolphins deciphering their language? Give them a small talk on the current Bitcoin prices or ask what they think about the next elections? I suspect in the end it'll lead to something like "How are you? I'm fine!" Maybe it's just me though.

jatsign 7y ago
You could ask them the same things you ask any human, but get radically different (and perhaps very interesting) answers. You could look at their art, listen to their music, learn their philosophy - assuming they have any of that, and that it's comprehensible to us.
- viach 7y ago
  Agree, new art, new music, new philosophy (I personally don't expect it to be much different from ours). But will it have any important effect on average human life ever?
- TJSomething 7y ago
  I would be unsurprised if some other species had oral histories. It seems that elephants and crows are able to communicate about specific locations and people while their referents aren't around.