Humans could soon communicate with animalsas scientists around the world are using the artificial intelligence (AI) to talk to bees, elephants and whalesYes, but one expert fears that power could be used to manipulate wild species.
Speaking in an interview with Vox, Karen Bakker from the University of British Columbia said that a team of researchers in Germany is using AI to decode patterns in non-human sounds, like the dance of bees and the low-frequency noises of elephants, allowing technology to not only communicate but also control wild animals.
Bakker explained that the AI that talks to animals it can be added to robots that “can essentially break the barrier of interspecies communication”, but he also points out that the breakthrough raises ethical questions. Allowing humans to talk to different species could create a “deeper sense of kinship, or a sense of dominance and manipulability to domesticate wild species that we as humans have never previously been able to control.”
Humans have long sought the ability to talk to animals and have made several movies based on the idea, such as 1967’s Doctor Dolittle. The idea is no longer just a movie plot, and scientists have discovered successful methods of talking. animal language.
In 2018, researchers at the Dahlem Center for Machine Learning and Robotics in Germany designed the RoboBee that imitates the dance of bees, which It is used to transmit information between each other. The robot, which looks nothing like a real bee, is designed like a sponge with wings and attached to a rod that controls its movements. The team trained the robot to mimic the same movements of the wiggle dance, which consists of different forms of airflow and vibrations, and tricked the bees into “listening.”
Some of the bees were found to follow the RoboBee’s instructions, such as where to move within the hive or come to a complete stop. Bakker, who recently published a book titled ‘The sounds of life: how digital technologies are bringing us closer to the worlds of animals and plants’, told Vox that the next step of the German’s research is to plant several robots in different hives to see if the colony accepts the machines as their own.
‘And then we would have an unprecedented degree of control over the hive; we will essentially have tamed that hive in a way that we never have before,’ he told Vox. This is where Bakker discusses the ethical issues that could arise from the ability, noting that such technologies could lead to humans exploiting the use of animals.
However, he is hopeful that the abilities will be used to allow the average person to “tune in to the sounds of nature.” Elephants are known for their powerful roars where they throw their trunks into the air, but these majestic creatures also emit low-frequency sounds that go unheard by the human ear.
Bakker discusses the work of a zoologist and bioacoustics researcher, Katie Payne, who used artificial intelligence to capture infrasonic sounds. Payne described the sounds “like a strange throbbing in her chest, a strange uneasy feeling,” Bakker told Vox.
“And that’s how often, as humans, we can sense infrasound,” he continued.
Along with bees and whales, a team of international scientists recently launched an ambitious project to listen, contextualize and translate the communication of sperm whales, with the aim of “talking” with the majestic marine animals. This project, called Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is also using AI to interpret the clicking sounds, or ‘codas’, that sperm whales make to communicate with each other.
The team, which launched Project CETI in October 2021, uses natural language processing, or NLP, a subfield of artificial intelligence focused on processing written and spoken human language, to be trained on four billion sperm whale codas. .
The plan is to make the AI match each sound to a specific context, a feat that will take at least five years, according to the researchers. If the team achieves these goals, the next step would be to develop and implement an interactive chatbot that engages in dialogue with sperm whales living in the wild.
Bakker points out that humans have communicated with animals in the past, specifically primates, but they have done so from a “very human-centered vision”, How to teach animals sign language.
However, using AI is a way of using the creature’s own language to communicate. The technology analyzes unique signals linked to behaviors and patterns to create language.
“What these researchers are doing is not trying to teach these species human language, but essentially compiling signal dictionaries and then try to understand what those signals mean within those species,” he told the outlet, Bakker told Vox. .
Source: Eluniverso
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