Artificial intelligence has learned to talk to animals. Human is next

In the near future, people will be able to communicate with animals, as artificial intelligence has already learned how to do this. This was reported by the Daily Mail with reference to a publication in Vox.

Researchers at the Dahlem Center for Machine Learning and Robotics (Germany) have created RoboBee, a bee robot that can mimic the movements that bees use to communicate. The robot is a sponge with wings attached to a rod that controls its movements. The language of bees is a kind of dance, performing which insects, for example, protect their hives from strangers or inform each other about where the food source is located, what is the distance to it and how much nectar and pollen is there. Scientists trained a robot to mimic these movements, and it was able to trick some bees into moving in a certain direction or stopping. Now German researchers are working to install several robots in different hives and ensure that the bee colony accepts them into its community. If successful, people will have full control over bee hives, domesticate them.

Bioacoustic scientists at Cornell University are using artificial intelligence to capture the infrasound sounds emitted by elephants. It is known that these animals communicate with the help of not only roars, but also low-frequency sounds that the human ear is not able to pick up. The sounds of elephants can be caught by a person only subconsciously - as an unusual pulsation in the chest, causing a feeling of anxiety. This is how humans can perceive infrasound.

In October 2021, the international scientific project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative, or the Cetacean Translation Project) was launched. Its participants, employees of Oxford, Cornell, New York universities, the International Geographical Society and other leading world institutions, are engaged in listening, contextualization and translation of the language in which sperm whales communicate with each other. The ultimate goal is to learn how to talk to these animals. Sperm whales communicate with themselves using codes - sequences of clicks. At the same time, they have not one, but several different dialects spoken by different groups of animals.

CETI participants are trying to teach artificial intelligence these codes using NLP, a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on processing written and spoken human language. The goal is to teach the AI four billion different codes, teaching it to associate each sound with a specific context. According to the researchers, it will take at least five years. The scientists will then try to develop and implement an interactive chatbot that will engage in dialogue with sperm whales living in the wild.

People have tried many times to establish communication with animals, especially with primates, but they did it from an anthropomorphic point of view - they taught animals sign language, for example. With artificial intelligence, everything is different - it is an attempt to use their own language to communicate with animals. To do this, it is necessary to develop technologies that are able to analyze the signals associated with behavior and patterns, compiling a kind of dictionary from them, and communicate using these signals.

However, if successful and overcome the barrier of interspecies communication, ethical problems may arise. It is possible that humans will use these technologies to assert their dominance and manipulate animals, domesticating wild species that were previously impossible to control.