When will we talk to other animals?
We’ve long imagined through literature that we could talk to other animals. If you have a pet at home, you probably talk to it and often wonder, what they’re thinking. We humans have long tried to separate ourselves from animals, to think we are something non-animal. But we too, are animals. Always have been, always will be.
We do communicate in various degrees and ways, with other animals. Such as through sign and body language with gorillas, chimps, dolphins, orangutangs and bonobos. We have techniques we use with dogs and cats. And parrots. We communicate with our fellow animals in more ways than we think. And animals watch us. Much more than we think.
What if we could actually talk to, or communicate intelligibly to other animals? To gain a deeper understanding between species?
Here’s the thing. We are trying to talk with whales, bees. bats and more. We’re using various tools of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do this. There are a few projects going on around the world right now. There are over at least 8 million species on our planet. We only know how to communicate amongst one. Us.
In the USA, there’s a non-profit called Earth Species. They’re working to apply AI to find ways to communicate with other species. It’s an ambitious project, but they are making headway. Then there’s Project CETI, which is focusing on using AI to communicate with whales specifically and they’ve made some astounding progress just in figuring out how. Then there’s the researcher who’s delivering evidence that bees are sentient. In the UK, there is a push to recognise lobsters, octopi and other crustaceans and cephalopods as sentient.
All of this of course, brings up a lot of ethical questions. If we do figure out how to communicate with whales and they tell us to please lower the engine noise on container ships and stop using sonar to look for oil, will we? Humans developed language to help in social organisation so that we could survive as a species.
Going back far into human history, our relationships with fellow animals has evolved and varies greatly even to this day. In Hindu belief, cows are sacred. The Inuit have great respect for whales and seals even as they need them for sustenance and survival. Indigenous societies around the world have deep, meaningful relationships with the other animals in their world and do not, like westerners, tend to see themselves as “other than” animal.
In the developed world, aside from our pets and farmers, for most of us, our relationship with meat is based on a grocery store trip. People are increasingly turning to vegan or vegetarians diets. But here’s another interesting thing, new research shows plants make sounds of distress too. Are they sentient? Some suggest not, and if they are, not in the way we think of sentience. How do we define sentience then?
We know too, that trees and plants have means of communicating through mycelium networks, what has been termed The Wood Wide Web. It is fascinating.
If we do figure this out, perhaps the best question to ask them would be “how are you?” which would tell us a lot more than asking “what do you think of us, anyway?”
We are embedding huge amounts of sensors into plants, animals, trees. We are building ever more sophisticated satellites and other tools that can look ever deeper beneath our planet’s surface. We are sending probes deeper into our oceans and finding life where we thought none could possibly exist.
When humans meet other humans, when we’ve learned to communicate with one another, to understand each other, we tend to find ways to get along more than fight one another. We’ve also screwed this up by inventing inane, yet incredibly cruel social constructs like racism. But history shows, things change a lot when we start to communicate and become aware and accepting of others. Humans are kinder to each other than we are often led to think.
How might this play out when we sit on a kayak and use our smartphone and a Bluetooth speaker to have a chinwag with a dolphin or a whale? Or when we’re swimming and use a device that asks Mr. Shark not to eat us, please? Humour aside, it does raise some heavy, existential questions around humanity and our relationship with, well, everything.
In these opening days of the Digital Age, we are already redefining what it means to be Homo Sapiens, our place in the ecosystem of the world and our universe as we also go deeper into space and launch more probes. It is an incredibly fascinating time to be alive.
