<story><title>Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back</title><url>https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Misdicorl</author><text>God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don&amp;#x27;t understand why we haven&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you&amp;#x27;ll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn&amp;#x27;t relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren&amp;#x27;t as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; 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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tsol</author><text>I mean.. hate to be a party pooper, but just because we created a the equivalent of gpt3 for whales, does that mean we can do anything useful? Like talking to whales.. we haven&amp;#x27;t even established how their language works.&lt;p&gt;What language even is, is a good question. I read it once demonstrated as this; some species of monkey has a specific call they do when they see a panther, and it results in all the monkeys who hear it to run up their trees. Now what does this call mean? It could mean &amp;quot;jaguar alert!&amp;quot;, pointing to a very specific concept-- a certain animal is here and we all know they&amp;#x27;re dangerous.&lt;p&gt;It could also mean &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m scared!&amp;quot;, and maybe it&amp;#x27;s just monkey see monkey do. It could also mean something more abstract, like a blood curdling scream-- there&amp;#x27;s no one thing that it means, but as humans we instinctively know that people don&amp;#x27;t scream like that unless something legitimately awful is happening. So maybe the call communicates emotion rather than an intellectual concept-- it&amp;#x27;s a call of fear that makes other monkeys who hear it also scared.&lt;p&gt;Just breaking down what animal language even _is_, is a challenge. I&amp;#x27;m not optimistic on hearing any oral histories of whales,  or even that they record history. I mean humans only started recording history for its own sake like 2000 years ago with herodotus. Before then we have tablets to keep track of stock, letters, and murals which were often made to depict the strength of the reigning emperor and the foes he vanquished. So maybe if we talk to whales it&amp;#x27;ll be a little like if aliens came to ancient Egypt to talk to the pharaoh; we&amp;#x27;ll just get a dictator whale telling us about all the other whales he&amp;#x27;s killed and how he&amp;#x27;s the greatest.. haha probably not that, though.</text></comment>
<story><title>Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back</title><url>https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Misdicorl</author><text>God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don&amp;#x27;t understand why we haven&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you&amp;#x27;ll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn&amp;#x27;t relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren&amp;#x27;t as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; 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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franky47</author><text>&amp;gt; Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.&lt;p&gt;Somehow I pictured whales as the engineers in this sentence. It makes it even better.</text></comment>