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Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
- joshu 5y agoi thought this was about advertising.
- dx7tnt 5y ago"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" — Ludwig Wittgenstein Using AI, or deep learning, or whatevers trendy this year, won't work, because we don't have any way of breaking into the whale corpus or of deciphering their logical grammar. The article says that the whales communicate at distance, in the dark, so there would be no behaviour that we could even tie to the clicks themselves to try and generate a meaning.
- peebz 5y agoPerhaps they should call the system 'Gavag-AI"
- ceejayoz 5y agoWhale: “Hey, I found some fish.” Whale Eliza: “Interesting. How does that make you feel? Whale: “What the fuck?”
- gnarbarian 5y ago"If a lion could speak we wouldn't understand him." - Wittgenstein https://ideasandaction.com/if-a-lion-could-speak/ https://ideasandaction.com/if-a-lion-could-speak/
- amelius 5y agoWouldn't simple sentences with the structure subject-verb-object be universal to any rational speaker? A lion could say "I want food", or "I see dog", or "dog eats food". I don't see why a lion's worldview could be so different from ours that this wouldn't be possible.
- IIAOPSW 5y agoSVO isn't even universal in human languages.
- amelius 5y agoThe order is not important. The structure is that the sentence has a subject, verb and object.
- tsol 5y agoJust to problems off the top of my head; In order to understand "I" you have to be able to understand there's an "other". Do lions understand others are also fully capable beings? Or are they kinda of "egotistical" the way a human baby is, where they just don't really understand the concept of "other people". And do they understand what "seeing" is, so that they can use it in a sentence like that? That's also abstract, it communicates that you as a being are using your sense of sight to see a certain thing. Are lions conscious of the fact that they're seeing, or do they just see things?
- amelius 5y agoWell, perhaps the lion has more primitive cognitive capabilities, but the premise was that we wouldn't understand the lion (not the other way around).
- samirillian 5y agolol, the opposite of this actually
- chippy 5y agowhat the eat
- torben-friis 5y agoNot sure if it's the case with whales, bit as far as I know there is no recorded use of questions in the animal kingdom - all communication seems to be enunciative, or orders. Questions are exclusive to humans...
- jd115 5y agoThis is because humans are the only living thing which feels inadequate enough to ask questions. No other creature feels like it lacks knowledge. And yes, I'll take it a step further: the reason science glorifies questions is because science is human beings systematically mass-hypnotising each other into greater and greater inadequacy. You ever notice how you never get enough answers in science? Every "answer" you get scientifically only seems to bring about more and more questions? We call it "scientific curiosity" and pretend to marvel at it, but come on, how shallow is that. What every other living creature (and every newborn human) intrinsically knows is that it knows all it needs to know. And that whenever it needs to know more, it will know it. That's it. There is no scientific process, no philosophical inquiries, no questioning. No doubt. No lack.
- rsj_hn 5y agoYou must not have a dog waiting for you when you come home late
- jd115 5y agoYes, great point - but this is only because the animals we domesticate have been brainwashed by us humans into feeling (almost, but never quite) as inadequate as we do.
- glogla 5y agoTo ask questions, you have to 1) understand that others have minds 2) understand that there are things you don't know 3) understand that others might know things you don't 4) understand that you may ask them and they will tell you. That's actually a lot of advanced cognition, even if it doesn't look that way to us.
- geenew 5y agoYou should look up the Far Side comic where a professor invents a dog translator. Turns out the only thing dogs say is 'Hey! Hey! Hey!'.
- notahacker 5y agoI can easily believe that's actually true. Dogs would probably be equally disappointed to learn that they only thing we glean from how they smell is that they need a shower!
- booleandilemma 5y agoThe idea of finally talking to something we’ve been killing for resources for centuries is kinda weird.
- ceejayoz 5y agoWe should probably pick “whoops, our bad” as one of the early translation goals.
- Shorel 5y agoThen the whales will learn not to trust anything we say. Happened to indigenous people in the Americas.
- ncmncm 5y ago"White Man speak with forked tongue".
- cute_boi 5y agoBut now these clever people will bring incentives etc to entice these creatures. Just depends on how much economic incentive these whales bring to the table. Happens to many politicians by rich/powerful people across the world.
- ceejayoz 5y agoThat seems like it should be lesson #1 when dealing with humans; that we lie, effortlessly.
- nzmsv 5y agohttps://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6787874-on-20-july-1969-neil-armstrong-and-buzz-aldrin-landed https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6787874-on-20-july-1969-nei...
- hirundo 5y agoOnly the "finally". We've been talking to other humans and then killing them for resources for a very long time.
- quotha 5y agoGuarantee they just want us to shut the fuck up.
- ceejayoz 5y agoNot sure why this is getting downvoted; it's probably very true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mammals_and_sonar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mammals_and_sonar https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noi... > Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest — whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton. Other effects include impairing animals’ hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival, experts say. > A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side. Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton provide a food source for everything from great whales to shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.
- dang 5y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we're hoping for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- throwaway05112 5y agoPlease refrain from knee-jerk reactions to short comments containing "bad words". The comment is actually substantive if you think about it for a second. Heuristics are right most of the time until they aren't. Also see pg essay "Succinctness is Power": http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
- dang 5y ago
- drewolbrich 5y agoCould this technology be used to communicate with teenagers?
- dazc 5y agoDoes the teenager want to be communicated with though?
- unanswered 5y ago> really transformational cultural moments Prediction: an astonishingly large portion of animal utterances will have to do with reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that humans pour into the atmosphere. You heard it here first.
- qayxc 5y agoAye, turns out the whales are close friends with Koko and agree with everything she, um... said.
- pvaldes 5y agoHum, is interesting but, trying to talk with sperm whales has its own special type of risks. The whale reply could kill you.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Misdicorl 5y agoGod I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don't understand why we haven't invested significant resources in trying to communicate with the other animals on our own planet. What an incredibly weird and non translatable experience it will be to (finally?!) start this adventure with whales. Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you'll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn't relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn't apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren't as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to far outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.
- WalterBright 5y agoBrain size may not necessarily correlate with intelligence because it isn't the number of neurons, it's the organization and optimization of them. Just like we make much more powerful CPU chips in the same volume of silicon as before. And it could be that it just isn't necessary for whales to optimize brain density, like it is for humans and crows.
- Misdicorl 5y agoAgreed! But afaik the neuron process "node" across species is not so different. The relevant metaphor I would think is humans have pcie and a large register count while many (all?) others are still on pata and register starved. Maybe a real biologist can come in with more facts and less bad metaphors
- stubish 5y agoSo far it is looking like the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex is the best indicator of intelligence. http://mitp.nautil.us/feature/227/the-paradox-of-the-elephant-brain http://mitp.nautil.us/feature/227/the-paradox-of-the-elephan... We started as basic primates, started cooking our food, getting more nutrition, allowing our guts to shrink, allowing us to spend more energy on our brains, growing more and more neurons in the important bits, at which point things spiraled away using our new language and technology to make better technology. (Not a real biologist)
- psukhedelos 5y agoI wonder if this type of research itself might at some point influence an animal’s language. In this study, if the researchers were to consistently play a particular call when a school of fish were nearby I wonder if younger whales might learn the human produced call to mean a school of fish. Is it possible this research could instead lead to us presenting a species with our interpretation of their language which we would then have a much clearer understanding of? Rather that just us understanding them, I wonder how this might help them understand us.
- spoonjim 5y agoGosh why can’t we leave them alone. This is like impersonating someone’s spouse with a deepfaked voice and then having an intimate conversation with them.
- franky47 5y agoDoes the AI training dataset involve dropping a whale from great heights ? "Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?" https://www.thecharacterquotes.com/the-whale https://www.thecharacterquotes.com/the-whale
- awakeasleep 5y agoThis sounds like a nightmare for the whales, to have an AI babbling into the whales shared communication channel.
- jtbayly 5y agoHey y’all, over by the Horn of Africa there’s a big school of diamond-studded squirrels. Break a leg.
- monkeycantype 5y agoFinally, we'll be able to charge them fair market rates for their access to our fishing rights
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JoeyBananas 5y agoSounds nice but they'll probably end up creating a psychological warfare weapon for use against whales. The whales will be confused and disoriented by non-sense sounds coming from a fake whale.
- freygibbs 5y agoImagine talking and communicating with other whales through frequency waves is something. If this is quite possible, we should understand how they speak and have a language different from other animals and sea creatures.
- RattleyCooper 5y agoAI doesn't understand context. I highly doubt AI will be able to convey anything meaningful, and if they can how would we know?
- short12 5y agoThe first commercial use will be slamming them with advertising