Is there any prospect of using machine learning to converse with whales and dolphins?
Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK
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Douglas Adams dreamed up an organic universal translator called a Babel fish that could be popped into your ear. Though it is amazing how prescient science fiction can be, this won鈥檛 become a reality in the near future, if ever.
Communicating with other animals like whales and dolphins is challenging because we don鈥檛 have the equivalent of the , which would allow for direct translation. Decrees in ancient Egypt were inscribed onto stelae, essentially slabs of stone. Part of one stele was discovered in 1799. Now known as the Rosetta Stone, this was key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs because the same information was also written in ancient Greek and Demotic scripts.
However, it has recently become clear that words in a language can be represented by their location in three-dimensional space using techniques in natural language processing like word2vec. Words with a similar meaning are grouped together in natural language processing.
It turns out that can be represented by a very similar three-dimensional shape and these shapes can be made to occupy virtually the same space by rotating them so that the word for 鈥渄og鈥�, say, is in the same coordinates no matter the language. Subtracting the coordinates for 鈥渇ace鈥� from 鈥渟miley face鈥� would give 鈥渟miley鈥�, for example. Could the same be true of animal 鈥渓anguages鈥�?
This would support the notion that there is a universal hidden mathematical structure underlying everything, including communication, an idea discussed by theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner in his 1960 paper 鈥淭he unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences鈥�, something that is simultaneously breathtaking and slightly alarming.
Although animals experience a different 鈥渃ulture鈥�, they share much of the same self-awareness and many of the emotional responses that we take for granted, which increases the chance that we may be able to communicate with them one day.
In the same way that the telescope displaced Earth from the centre of the universe, machine learning might eventually let us communicate with other species. Hopefully, this would encourage greater humility among Homo sapiens and help us understand that we need to live in better harmony with the natural world.
However, there are ethical issues. Researchers might be tempted to use artificial intelligence to produce synthetic communication with wild animals. Part of the problem with this is that, initially at least, we wouldn鈥檛 understand what the chatbots were saying on our behalf. There is a danger this could disrupt natural communications, like the songs produced by humpback whales. For this reason, scientists should perhaps start by only communicating with captive animals.
Maybe some species are ahead of us. After all, the team behind the Blue Planet II documentary filmed false killer whales and common bottlenose dolphins hunting and socialising together in a superpod in the Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand, and they seemed to communicate with each other in a third language. Though there are more pressing questions, if I were Doctor Dolittle, I might ask an orca why they have adopted the habit of ramming and disabling yachts.
To answer this question 鈥� or ask a new one 鈥� email lastword@newscientist.com.
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