Speaker 1: Imagine that one of these centuries we make contact with
Speaker 1: an alien civilization.
Speaker 2: It's a big.
Speaker 1: Cosmos with quintillions of planets, so it's bound to happen
Speaker 1: at some point. But how the heck are we going
Speaker 1: to understand what they're saying? How are we going to
Speaker 1: decode their language? After all, they might not communicate with
Speaker 1: air compression waves. Maybe they do something visual, but in
Speaker 1: ranges of light we can't even pick up with our eyes.
Speaker 1: We won't have a Rosetta stone, So how are we
Speaker 1: going to decipher what they are trying to say to us?
Speaker 1: And this might seem speculative, but what I want to
Speaker 1: draw our attention to is that we currently are in
Speaker 1: the same position right now, right here at home, which
Speaker 1: is that we can't tell what a single one of
Speaker 1: the two million species on our planet are saying, not
Speaker 1: even the six six hundred species of mammals, which are
Speaker 1: presumably kind of like us. We're not having conversations with
Speaker 1: anyone but ourselves. With all these species, I'm willing to
Speaker 1: bet you don't listen to a single podcast not.
Speaker 2: Made by a human.
Speaker 1: But today we're going to see some hope, some pathways
Speaker 1: for how we might get to animal translation and relatively soon.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes
Speaker 1: I examined the intersection of science and our lives, and
Speaker 1: today we're going to talk about understanding animals. When I
Speaker 1: was a kid, I saw some episodes of Star Trek,
Speaker 1: the original one with Kirk and Spock, and the thing
Speaker 1: that always struck me was how every week on schedule
Speaker 1: they discovered new alien civilizations, which is not so crazy
Speaker 1: given that the universe is presumably teeming with life. There
Speaker 1: are about one hundred billion galaxies, and each of these
Speaker 1: has about one hundred billion stars, and most stars have
Speaker 1: some planets rolling around them, so it's extraordinarily unlikely that
Speaker 1: we are the only planet with life on it. But
Speaker 1: before I get into alien communication, let's quickly address something first.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard of the Fermi paradox, and if you haven't,
Speaker 1: it's a very important question. It's the question of why,
Speaker 1: if there's all this life in the cosmos, why have
Speaker 1: we not heard a peep from anyone. This paradox is
Speaker 1: named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who raised this question
Speaker 1: if there are so many potential alien civilizations, why haven't
Speaker 1: we detected any signals or encountered any of them. Yet
Speaker 1: we're living in a moment of history where there seems
Speaker 1: to be this very strange contradiction between the high probability
Speaker 1: of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of any shred of
Speaker 1: evidence for them. So over the decades, people have proposed
Speaker 1: all kinds of possible explanations for the Fermi paradox. The
Speaker 1: first is that maybe aliens don't exist, which is the
Speaker 1: simplest explanation but presumably not terribly likely given the size
Speaker 1: of the cosmos. So some people point out that maybe
Speaker 1: the problem just has to do with the enormous distances,
Speaker 1: the vastness of space, and the limitations of our current
Speaker 1: technology that might make it hard to detect other civilizations
Speaker 1: even if they exist, because the distances between stars are
Speaker 1: enormous and signals may take thousands or millions of years
Speaker 1: to reach us. Okay, so that's a possibility. Or A
Speaker 1: related idea is what's called the rare Earth hypothesis, which
Speaker 1: is that Earth like planets, which are capable of supporting
Speaker 1: complex life, are exceedingly uncommon in the universe, and that
Speaker 1: makes the emergence of intelligent civilizations a rare event. But again,
Speaker 1: given that there are something like seventy quintillion planets, that's
Speaker 1: a seven followed by nineteen zeros Earth like planets can't
Speaker 1: be too rare. So another idea is the technological singularity idea.
Speaker 1: Some thinkers have proposed that advanced civilizations might always end
Speaker 1: up reaching a technological singularity when their technology suddenly accelerates rapidly,
Speaker 1: and one possible outcome of this is that these civilizations
Speaker 1: tend to self destruct, and a related hypothesis is that
Speaker 1: when other civilizations hit this singularity, this leads them to
Speaker 1: a post biological existence. They're no longer products of nature,
Speaker 1: but instead they build themselves into other sorts of devices,
Speaker 1: which would be hard for us to detect given the
Speaker 1: ways that we're searching. And other people suggest that advanced
Speaker 1: civilizations intentionally avoid broadcasting their signals or their presence for
Speaker 1: fear of attracting unwanted attention or causing conflicts with less
Speaker 1: advanced civilizations. Or maybe they're just not interested in contacting us.
Speaker 1: They might be too busy with their own problems, or
Speaker 1: they simply don't see us as an interesting threat or ally,
Speaker 1: so there's no reason to pick up the phone. And
Speaker 1: then there's the possibility that they use extremely different communication
Speaker 1: methods than we do, so different that we can't currently
Speaker 1: understand them.
Speaker 2: Or even know what we should be looking for.
Speaker 1: So ultimately we don't know why we haven't heard from
Speaker 1: anyone yet. There may be other reasons, or maybe multiple
Speaker 1: of the reasons I mentioned, or all at play, but
Speaker 1: for now we just have to live with the fact
Speaker 1: that we haven't yet heard from anyone. So this was
Speaker 1: part of the appeal of Star Trek. Every week there
Speaker 1: spacewarping off to some new coordinates, and.
Speaker 2: Everywhere they go they meet new civilizations.
Speaker 1: Now, the thing that always struck me as funny and
Speaker 1: the point of this episode is that each week they
Speaker 1: end up meeting these new aliens. And often these aliens
Speaker 1: look like a female movie star in a cool jumpsuit,
Speaker 1: but with subtle differences like pointy ears and green skin.
Speaker 1: But the key thing is that all these aliens speak English.
Speaker 1: Usually it's a slightly broken English with a difficult to
Speaker 1: discern accent, but nonetheless pretty easily understandable, which is of
Speaker 1: course very lucky for these Star warsvoyagers who happen in
Speaker 1: several hundred years from now to speak English themselves. Now,
Speaker 1: why did the writers of Star Trek choose to make
Speaker 1: everyone speak just like we do?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: This is a basic constraint of storytelling. It's the only
Speaker 1: thing that will work for telling a narrative that people
Speaker 1: will tune into. It's hard to tell a story if
Speaker 1: the alien is some kind of weird fungus thing that
Speaker 1: doesn't speak or lives at a different timescale than we do,
Speaker 1: like a tree. If we land on a planet of mute,
Speaker 1: slow fungus creatures, it's not going to make good television.
Speaker 1: So the stories we tell will always have aliens that
Speaker 1: we can talk with and that serve as not so
Speaker 1: distant reflections of ourselves. Okay, so no problem, that's what
Speaker 1: storytelling requires. But in real life, it's much more likely
Speaker 1: that we're going to have a very very difficult time
Speaker 1: communicating much of anything to aliens when we find them.
Speaker 1: You might think that we can get by with something
Speaker 1: like take me to your leader or some sort of
Speaker 1: hand signals, but in fact none of that's going to work. Now,
Speaker 1: what's the reason that I say this? Why should we
Speaker 1: think that communication is going to be so difficult. Well,
Speaker 1: the aliens we find on other planets are going to
Speaker 1: have a totally different evolutionary history. They may not be
Speaker 1: based on DNA like all earthly creatures are, but instead
Speaker 1: may have found a completely different way of encoding information
Speaker 1: and managing replication and building societies. And it's possible they
Speaker 1: won't even be carbon based like all creatures on Earth are,
Speaker 1: but instead based on something like the element silicon, which
Speaker 1: also has a tetrahedral structure and can make lots of
Speaker 1: useful elements and so on. So there's a whole field
Speaker 1: of this called astrobiology, where astro refers to star and
Speaker 1: often known as exobiology, where exo means outside, and the
Speaker 1: idea with this area of study is to search for
Speaker 1: naturally evolved life in the universe, mostly on other planets
Speaker 1: in the habitable zone, that's the Goldilocks zone of planets
Speaker 1: who rotated just the right distance from their star so
Speaker 1: it's not too hot not too cold. I'll also mention
Speaker 1: there's a closely related field called zenobiology, which means alien
Speaker 1: or foreign biology, and that term is usually reserved to
Speaker 1: refer to biology that is synthetic, not found in nature
Speaker 1: that science has no clue about yet. The general idea
Speaker 1: is that astrobiologists try to detect and eventually analyze life
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the universe, while xenobiologists will attempt to design
Speaker 1: forms of life with a totally different biochemistry or different
Speaker 1: genetic code than on planet Earth. Now, when we search
Speaker 1: for life in the universe, I don't really see any
Speaker 1: reason to imagine a distinction between naturally evolved life on
Speaker 1: other planets and synthetic forms of life, because a planet
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ahead of us would be well on
Speaker 1: its way to building other species in the same way
Speaker 1: that our species existence might simply serve as the spark
Speaker 1: to build an artificial species that colonizes the Solar System.
Speaker 1: And so for this reason we should always be thinking
Speaker 1: about new biologies, new animals that could use a completely
Speaker 1: different kind of biochemistry. On this planet, all we've ever
Speaker 1: seen for coding information is DNA and RNA. We have
Speaker 1: twenty amino acids from which we build all our proteins,
Speaker 1: which are like little molecular machines. But instead of DNA,
Speaker 1: we might find elsewhere what we'll call XNA zeno nucleic acid.
Speaker 1: You might find a massively expanded genetic coat that uses
Speaker 1: other amino acids to build totally new kinds of proteins,
Speaker 1: or perhaps most likely, you could have something that's not
Speaker 1: like our genetic code at all. Something to considers that
Speaker 1: we only discovered the genetic code in nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: which is not that long ago. I actually worked with
Speaker 1: Francis Criek, the code discoverer of the structure of DNA,
Speaker 1: So this is massively recent and we don't know what
Speaker 1: we haven't thought of yet. So for this reason, I
Speaker 1: think of the whole endeavor of space biology as zenobiology,
Speaker 1: thinking about and looking for ways that life could be
Speaker 1: built that we haven't yet imagined yet. And by the way,
Speaker 1: it's thought exercises like this that make me wish I
Speaker 1: could see the text books that our descendants will read
Speaker 1: five hundred years from now or one thousand years from now.
Speaker 1: There's going to be so much known that we currently
Speaker 1: can't imagine. That's totally in our dark zone. Things we
Speaker 1: have I haven't even realized that we don't know. Okay,
Speaker 1: So all of this is to say life might be
Speaker 1: massively different than what we have here on Earth, and
Speaker 1: the question is will we figure out how to be
Speaker 1: like Captain Kirk and beam onto their planet and have
Speaker 1: a conversation with them.
Speaker 2: Now, maybe all this talk.
Speaker 1: About extraterrestrials seems abstract because we haven't discovered any yet.
Speaker 1: But I want to point out that we are surrounded
Speaker 1: by aliens. They are all around us, and they're making
Speaker 1: constant sounds. We have measured this alien language with our recorders,
Speaker 1: and at the moment we have no idea what they're saying.
Speaker 2: Now, that's the.
Speaker 1: Sound of whales on our planet, and lots of animals
Speaker 1: make noise, And the question is, are these animals that
Speaker 1: we're surrounded.
Speaker 2: With speaking a language.
Speaker 1: These are the aliens that we don't have to travel
Speaker 1: very far to listen to, And the question is can
Speaker 1: we understand them?
Speaker 2: So maybe so, maybe not?
Speaker 1: After all, these sounds could be like belches or like grunting,
Speaker 1: the way you do when you're home alone and you
Speaker 1: bang your knee the night before and you're going up
Speaker 1: the stairs and you make a sound, but it's not
Speaker 1: really meant for anyone in particular.
Speaker 2: It's just a noise that you're making.
Speaker 1: So how would we know if animals are actually implementing
Speaker 1: language and communicating meaning to one another. Well, this is
Speaker 1: an unanswered question right now, and it probably differs species
Speaker 1: by species. One thing biologists look at to try to
Speaker 1: address this is things like turn taking. Does one animal
Speaker 1: make some sound and then the other animal goes, and
Speaker 1: then the first one again, and then the second. That
Speaker 1: feels more like language, right something had said, there's some response.
Speaker 1: It feels like there's at least the possibility for some
Speaker 1: real meaningful conversations that way. But there are a lot
Speaker 1: of questions here. Even if we found that some species
Speaker 1: were speaking language, would we be able to understand the meaning?
Speaker 1: And I don't mean this in terms of this call
Speaker 1: means this thing, but in terms of what does that
Speaker 1: thing mean for a human? Imagine if a bee is
Speaker 1: talking about some experience that you really have to see
Speaker 1: in ultraviolet to understand, or your dog is experiencing something
Speaker 1: about smell that we couldn't possibly get from our experience,
Speaker 1: or a dolphin is talking about the joy of that
Speaker 1: moment where there's no more little fish, and so the
Speaker 1: whole pod suddenly turns upward and rockets through their world
Speaker 1: and breaks through some surface where everything is different. Might
Speaker 1: it be the case that there's simply no way we
Speaker 1: could totally understand what they mean. There may be things
Speaker 1: we can identify that they are talking about, but I
Speaker 1: think there's a spectrum of how close we would actually
Speaker 1: be in our interpretation. And by the way, I'll just
Speaker 1: note this is true with our fellow humans as well.
Speaker 1: Someone might tell you about an experience with hang gliding
Speaker 1: or stamp collecting, or psychedelic drugs or whatever, and even
Speaker 1: though you gnawd and you say, oh, I gotcha, I
Speaker 1: can relate that to my own experience. There's a spectrum
Speaker 1: of how closely you are actually capturing what they are describing.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you might have an analogous experience that puts you close,
Speaker 1: and sometimes your assumptions may be pretty distant. So back
Speaker 1: to animals, how much could we even understand in a translation,
Speaker 1: given that animals have such different sensory windows on the world,
Speaker 1: and so their concepts might be very different from ours. Now,
Speaker 1: even with all these caveats, how amazing would it be
Speaker 1: if we could get even a low dimensional, blurry glimpse
Speaker 1: of what they were talking about. People have always wanted
Speaker 1: to understand animals, and they've tried in the past. But
Speaker 1: we are at an amazing moment in history where I
Speaker 1: think the time is right around the corner. And I'm
Speaker 1: not saying this is a general claim. I'm saying this
Speaker 1: for two specific reasons. First, we have incredible technology now
Speaker 1: which makes it possible to do biologging. What is biologging.
Speaker 1: This is about collecting data from an animal with a small,
Speaker 1: lightweight device.
Speaker 2: These are called biologgers.
Speaker 1: You hook these up to an animal and that way
Speaker 1: you can collect data for long windows of time without
Speaker 1: humans being around. You can record sounds, and measure physiology
Speaker 1: and track movements, and this is how you get a
Speaker 1: secret window into an animal's world. Any thing is that
Speaker 1: it gives new, rich data that you just can't get
Speaker 1: otherwise about animals in their natural environment. Now, it's not
Speaker 1: always easy to attach to the biologgers to animals, especially
Speaker 1: if they're small and fast. But the main problem is
Speaker 1: that the data collected by the biologgers can be really
Speaker 1: complicated and difficult to analyze. So we humans have amassed
Speaker 1: a ton of rich data that we're sitting on. And
Speaker 1: that leads to the second specific reason why we're just
Speaker 1: on the verge of something amazing, and that's artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: AI has been used for years to translate and decode
Speaker 1: human languages, and now we have this incredible opportunity to
Speaker 1: leverage it for understanding animal communication. And I'm lucky enough
Speaker 1: to be friends with one of the people at the
Speaker 1: lead of the effort to decrypt these alien languages that
Speaker 1: were surrounded with So how does our modern technology give
Speaker 1: us hope for decoding animal language.
Speaker 3: So the insight originally came in twenty thirteen when I
Speaker 3: was listening actually to NPR and there was a researcher
Speaker 3: describing to a lot of monkeys.
Speaker 1: That's Asa Raskin. He's a writer and entrepreneur and inventor,
Speaker 1: and for the purposes of today, he founded the Earth
Speaker 1: Species Project ESP, which is a nonprofit focused on using
Speaker 1: AI to decode non human communication.
Speaker 3: And these animals are They're credible. They live in the
Speaker 3: Ethiopian highlands. They have like huge maines, red patches on
Speaker 3: their chests. And what I did realize is that, according
Speaker 3: to the researcher, they had one of the largest vocabularies
Speaker 3: of any primate except for US humans. In fact, the
Speaker 3: researchers swear that these animals talk about them behind their back.
Speaker 3: And so the thought back then was like, well, if
Speaker 3: people are just out there. The researchers are just out
Speaker 3: there trying to understand what these beings are saying using
Speaker 3: like a hand recorder in hand transcribing. Couldn't there be
Speaker 3: a better way? Couldn't we use like machine learning AI
Speaker 3: large scale microphone arrays. But of course, in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: that wasn't yet possible because machine learning couldn't do something
Speaker 3: that human beings couldn't already do. They couldn't translate a
Speaker 3: language without a Rosetta stone, without any examples. And that
Speaker 3: really changed in twenty seventeen when the machine learning community
Speaker 3: there were two papers that came up back to back
Speaker 3: and the Way this Thing Happens, that showed that you
Speaker 3: could translate between any two human languages without the need
Speaker 3: for examples or Rosetta stones. And I can dive into
Speaker 3: how that works, but that was the moment that we
Speaker 3: said we should get going and along the journey, I
Speaker 3: just should say, like, all right, is there even a
Speaker 3: there there? Like we say animal language, What does that mean?
Speaker 3: What is a rich complex communication structure? What would that
Speaker 3: look like? I just want to give a couple examples
Speaker 3: for your listeners. So off the coast of Norway, every
Speaker 3: year there's a group of false killer whales that all
Speaker 3: phenomenologically speak one way, and a group of dolphins that
Speaker 3: all speak another way, and they come together and they
Speaker 3: hunt in a superpod. And when they do this, they
Speaker 3: speak a third different way, which is just sort of crazy,
Speaker 3: right like. And it turns out that whales, you know,
Speaker 3: have a culture extending back thirty four million years. They
Speaker 3: have dialects that sort of split off, which they can
Speaker 3: understand each other with, and that can split all the
Speaker 3: way into mutually unintelligible languages. Another example is I learned
Speaker 3: this in twenty fourteen that for campell monkeys, hawk for
Speaker 3: them means eagle, crack means leopard, and hawk ooh means
Speaker 3: predator that's up, crack ooh means predator that's down. So
Speaker 3: now we have a simple syntax. And then one of
Speaker 3: my favorite studies is from the University of Hawaii in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four, and here they taught dolphins two gestures,
Speaker 3: and the first gesture was do something you've never done before,
Speaker 3: which is sort of a crazy thing to be able
Speaker 3: to communicate, but the dolphins will do it. And to
Speaker 3: remember to do that, that means they have to remember
Speaker 3: every single thing they've done before that session, understand the
Speaker 3: concept negation not one of those things. Then invent whole cloth,
Speaker 3: some new thing that they've never done before, but they
Speaker 3: can do it. And then they'll teach the dolphins a
Speaker 3: second gesture, do something you haven't done before. Together, and
Speaker 3: they'll say, at the same time, do something you haven't
Speaker 3: done before. Together. The dolphins go down, exchange sawnic information,
Speaker 3: come up and do the same trick they've never done
Speaker 3: before at the same time. And while that doesn't prove
Speaker 3: representational language, it certainly places I think Auckham's razor. On
Speaker 3: the other foot, it certainly seems that way. How do
Speaker 3: you know, though, when you're approaching these that there exists languages?
Speaker 3: For example, you said that whale culture or civilization is
Speaker 3: thirty four million years old, But how do we know
Speaker 3: that they're speaking a language that has the kind of
Speaker 3: structure that we have that is capable of passing on
Speaker 3: a culture or civilization. Yeah, great question, And of course
Speaker 3: it's hard if you can't listen in and understand. But
Speaker 3: you know, there are two hallmarks of language that human
Speaker 3: beings have, one of which is to be able to
Speaker 3: talk about something that isn't here and something that isn't now,
Speaker 3: can you refer to things that are in a different time,
Speaker 3: in a different place. And we can actually see already
Speaker 3: from the research that the answer is. It appears to
Speaker 3: be the case that at least some animals can do this.
Speaker 3: So Adrian Lumero is a researcher on great apes, and
Speaker 3: he's discovered in the last year or so that are
Speaker 3: tangs do have a version of a past tense. They
Speaker 3: can talk about things that are not now. And then
Speaker 3: dolphins have names that they called each other by, and
Speaker 3: Ian Yannick in twenty sixteen discovered that they will use
Speaker 3: those names in the third person. They can talk about
Speaker 3: one of their own that is not here. So now
Speaker 3: we have two of the hallmarks not here not now. Now,
Speaker 3: when we say language, we only have one example of
Speaker 3: a species that speaks what we call language humans and
Speaker 3: almost always like if you only know one color and
Speaker 3: then you learn a second color, you discover an entire
Speaker 3: rainbow in between. Like when we say language, you know
Speaker 3: we're using that to be a catch all for rich
Speaker 3: communication systems that can pass on cultural information.
Speaker 2: Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1: Let me jump back to the orangutans for one second.
Speaker 1: Is there any evidence that they have future tents.
Speaker 3: That's a great question. We do not know. That's what's
Speaker 3: so exciting about this field right now, is I think
Speaker 3: of this it's sort of like the invention of the
Speaker 3: Hubble telescope, right, It's like, and if you remember, I
Speaker 3: think it was back in nineteen ninety five they pointed
Speaker 3: the Hubble telescope and an empty patch in sky and
Speaker 3: what they discovered was the most galaxies that have ever
Speaker 3: existed in one spot. That's essentially what we're discovering here
Speaker 3: is that we just haven't had the tools to look
Speaker 3: and when we do, what we're discovering is much more
Speaker 3: than everything we discovered. What we're discovering is everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right, the deep field experiment. So how do
Speaker 1: we actually do it? How do we apply all the
Speaker 1: modern tools of science to see if we can decode
Speaker 1: a language?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Great question. So I'm going to start with this twenty
Speaker 3: seventeen technology, and I just want your audience to remember
Speaker 3: that twenty seventeen is essentially the Stone Age in AI.
Speaker 3: But I think it's a really useful conceptual tool to
Speaker 3: understand how it might work. So, how do you translate
Speaker 3: between languages that don't have Rosetta stones. And it turns
Speaker 3: out what you can ask AI to do is build
Speaker 3: a shape that represents a language. So you say, feed
Speaker 3: in all of Wikipedia, a whole bunch of text, and
Speaker 3: the AI generates a shape that represents a language. Imagine
Speaker 3: a galaxy where every star is a word, and words
Speaker 3: that mean similar things are placed near each other, and
Speaker 3: then words that share a sort of conceptual relationship get
Speaker 3: turned into sharing a geometric relationship. What does that mean?
Speaker 3: That means if you imagine king is to man as
Speaker 3: woman is to queen, then in this shape, king is
Speaker 3: the same distance direction to man as woman is to queen.
Speaker 3: And so you actually just subtract king minus man. That
Speaker 3: gives you a distance of direction. You add that to
Speaker 3: boy and that'll equal prince. You add that to girl
Speaker 3: eqal princess. You add that to woman and equal queen.
Speaker 3: And so if you think about all of the relationships,
Speaker 3: the internal relationships of a language, they think about the
Speaker 3: word dog. Dog has relationship to man and to howl
Speaker 3: and to wolf and to fer. If you it sort
Speaker 3: of fixes in a point in space, and if you
Speaker 3: solve this massive multi dimensional Sudoku puzzle of how every
Speaker 3: concept relates to every other concept that gets turned into
Speaker 3: a geometry, and out pops a rigid structure that represents
Speaker 3: a language. Now the computer doesn't know what anything it means.
Speaker 3: It just knows how they all relate to each other.
Speaker 3: The shape represents all of the internal relationships of a language,
Speaker 3: which is of course just a model of the world.
Speaker 3: All right, So you have this shape for English, and
Speaker 3: this is what the machine learners asked in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: Is it possible? They said that the shape which is
Speaker 3: English might be similar to or the same as, the
Speaker 3: shape which is German. And if you ask anthropologists, they'd
Speaker 3: be like, no, that's a silly thing to think, like.
Speaker 3: They have different ways of viewing the world, different cosmologies.
Speaker 3: But the machine is like, whatever, let's give it a try.
Speaker 3: And it turns out that it works. You can take
Speaker 3: the shape which is English and the shape which is German,
Speaker 3: and literally rotate one shape on top of the other.
Speaker 3: And even though there are words in one language that
Speaker 3: don't appear in the other, if you blew your eyes,
Speaker 3: the shapes are roughly the same, and the point, which
Speaker 3: is dog ends up in the same in both. Now
Speaker 3: you might be saying okay, but that's because English and
Speaker 3: German are very similar languages. But it turns out this
Speaker 3: works for Finnish, which is a really weird language, Turkish, Aramaic, Urdu.
Speaker 3: Pretty much every human language fits in a kind of
Speaker 3: universal human meaning shape, and the point, which is dog
Speaker 3: ends up in the same spot in all of them,
Speaker 3: and this lets you do translation without the need for
Speaker 3: any examples. And this is I think, such a beautiful,
Speaker 3: profound realization that there is a hidden structure underlying all
Speaker 3: of us that unites our way of seeing. So that
Speaker 3: was the sort of the core insight that said, well,
Speaker 3: maybe now it's time to start building that shape for
Speaker 3: animal communication, which by the way, is very hard because
Speaker 3: it takes denoising and working with many partners to collect
Speaker 3: like the years with the data that's required. But that's
Speaker 3: sort of what we started to do. Now I'll pausit
Speaker 3: for a second, but there are a couple other techniques
Speaker 3: that can add to the top of this.
Speaker 1: Great so let me jump in for one second. So
Speaker 1: the fact that all the human languages have a similar
Speaker 1: structure to them is in part because humans radiated out
Speaker 1: of Africa sort of yesterday and as a result, you know,
Speaker 1: we all have the same brain and it's not so surprising.
Speaker 1: And the question is what do we expect when we're
Speaker 1: looking at animal languages, which I'll come back to some
Speaker 1: more questions on that a second, But what do we
Speaker 1: expect in terms of the similarity there given that animals
Speaker 1: are picking up on different signals from the world they're
Speaker 1: umvelt is different the signals they can get and their
Speaker 1: concepts might be very different.
Speaker 2: How do you think about that?
Speaker 3: This is a great question. It's just to repeat what
Speaker 3: you're saying, is that the censorium, the way that animals
Speaker 3: perceive the world, like what it is like to be
Speaker 3: a bat, may be so completely different than what it
Speaker 3: is like to be a human because they're seeing in
Speaker 3: three D sound that we can never translate anything. And
Speaker 3: that may turn out to be the case, but you know,
Speaker 3: I think there's reason to believe that there may be
Speaker 3: some kind of overlap with our experience. And to just
Speaker 3: give a couple examples. You know, lemurs, for example, are
Speaker 3: known to bite down on centipedes, literally to take a
Speaker 3: hit off of centipedes to get high. They enter this
Speaker 3: very trance like state, they get super cuddly. It looks
Speaker 3: sort of like a scene from Burning Man. Dolphins too,
Speaker 3: are known to intentionally inflate pufferfish to get high after
Speaker 3: their venom and then pass them around literally puff pass.
Speaker 3: Great apes are known to like hang off of vines
Speaker 3: and spin to get dizzy. There is something about a
Speaker 3: transcendent state of conscious altering our state that is at
Speaker 3: least shared amongst the mammals, and so if they're communicating,
Speaker 3: they may well communicate about that, and that's something we'd share.
Speaker 3: Another example is something known as the mirror test. This
Speaker 3: is a test where you take an animal, you paint
Speaker 3: a dot on them where they can't see it. You
Speaker 3: give them a mirror. They look in the mirror, they
Speaker 3: see the dot, and they turn to the dot and
Speaker 3: they try to brush it off of themselves or investigate it.
Speaker 3: And in order for an animal to do that, they
Speaker 3: have to associate the image that's in the mirror with themselves.
Speaker 3: They have to look in the mirror and say like
Speaker 3: that's me. So that means there's a rich sense of interiority,
Speaker 3: like a self awareness. Dolphins past this test, elephants past
Speaker 3: the tests. A number of other species pass this test.
Speaker 3: So even the concept so profound as me self awareness
Speaker 3: that seems to be shared. You know, examples of people
Speaker 3: showing orangutangs magic tricks and they go crazy. It's worth
Speaker 3: just looking them up on YouTube to see these kinds
Speaker 3: of videos. Pilot whales carry they're dead young for three
Speaker 3: four weeks, like grief is a shared part of the experience.
Speaker 3: So if you imagine these shapes, where one of the
Speaker 3: shapes is like human language, is one of these is
Speaker 3: animal communication, I think we should expect to see some
Speaker 3: part of those shapes overlap, and that should be the
Speaker 3: part we should do direct translation. But then there's going
Speaker 3: to be a huge portion of the shape that can
Speaker 3: never be directly translated to human experience, and you'd sort
Speaker 3: of expect that to be sticking out, like where we
Speaker 3: can see complexity, but we don't know how to translate it.
Speaker 3: And I still don't know which one of these two
Speaker 3: is going to be more fascinating, the part where we
Speaker 3: can directly translate the part we don't, because, as I'm saying,
Speaker 3: human beings have been communicating vocally for one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: to three hundred thousand years, passing up culture. Whales and
Speaker 3: dolphins have been doing this for thirty four million years,
Speaker 3: and that which is oldest correlates with that which is wisest.
Speaker 3: So for something to survive thirty four million years, there
Speaker 3: has to be some deep kernel of adaptive truth in there.
Speaker 3: And whatever it is that is the solution to humanities problems, like,
Speaker 3: it's not in our imagination, because if it is, we'd
Speaker 3: probably be trying to do it. So this is a
Speaker 3: way of starting to get the first polaroid sort of
Speaker 3: blurry image pictures of that which is beyond our imagination.
Speaker 2: Now, let me ask you this. If we're just looking
Speaker 2: at the auditory.
Speaker 1: Information that we get from animals, we can do this
Speaker 1: kind of technique where we're looking to match one galaxy
Speaker 1: of stars to the other galaxy of stars and see
Speaker 1: what parts are sticking out and so on. But we
Speaker 1: may well need much more than just the audio right
Speaker 1: to understand the context of what the animal is saying
Speaker 1: in a particular situation. So how are people pursuing that?
Speaker 3: That's a great question. Even for humans, we know that
Speaker 3: so much of the information that we convey. If you've
Speaker 3: ever had to try to order food in a country
Speaker 3: where you don't speak the language and somehow you can
Speaker 3: do it, you can have communication without words the same
Speaker 3: thing may be true for animals. So in fact, chimpanzees
Speaker 3: are known to have sixty plus hand and feet gestures,
Speaker 3: which seems to be at least as far as we know,
Speaker 3: their predominant form of more symbolic communication.
Speaker 1: Plus, we have indefinite references to things all the time, right,
Speaker 1: So when I say she, I might be talking about
Speaker 1: Marie Curie, or I might be talking about Michelle Obama
Speaker 1: or something. But once I've introduced too I'm talking about
Speaker 1: I can just use the word she. But somebody trying
Speaker 1: to decode when I'm saying who doesn't speak English might
Speaker 1: have a hard time understanding what the references to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right, and what you're speaking to is
Speaker 3: the importance of context. In order to understand what someone
Speaker 3: is saying or what an animal is meaning, we have
Speaker 3: to understand the context. Otherwise, like the same grunt may
Speaker 3: mean like that monkey, or it may mean like I'm upset,
Speaker 3: and it all sort of depends on social context. So
Speaker 3: a lot of what we do now is multi mode.
Speaker 3: That is to say, we work with biologists that have
Speaker 3: tags on animals, that record often video, audio, and motion,
Speaker 3: and that lets us begin to translate between all of
Speaker 3: these different modalities, and in fact, with some of the
Speaker 3: species to work with, these tags are on multiple animals
Speaker 3: in the same group, so we can get social context.
Speaker 3: And I want to return for a second to this
Speaker 3: really interesting question you pose. You're like, well, maybe all
Speaker 3: human languages fit in the same shape because we share
Speaker 3: the same physical substrate, the same brains, in the same ears,
Speaker 3: and the same eyes. But there's something deeper going on
Speaker 3: in machine learning than just the ability to match the
Speaker 3: shapes of languages. Maybe your audience has heard of or
Speaker 3: seeing Dolly or mid journey or image diffusion where you
Speaker 3: type in text and outcomes an image that is never
Speaker 3: been seen before. How does that work? Well, these shapes
Speaker 3: are actually really helpful to have in your mind to
Speaker 3: understand how it works. So let's build now a shape
Speaker 3: on human faces, and once again you end up with
Speaker 3: a galaxy where every star now isn't a word, but
Speaker 3: is a human face. Faces that share similar relationships share
Speaker 3: geometric relationships. So if I take a picture of your face, David,
Speaker 3: and then I take a picture of your face that's smiling,
Speaker 3: there's this distance in direction that takes me between your
Speaker 3: face and your faces just smiling. I subtract those two
Speaker 3: as I get smilingness as a relationship. I can now
Speaker 3: add that to any other face in the shape and
Speaker 3: I'll get the smiling version of that face.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So now there's a direction that represents smiling, there's a
Speaker 3: direction that represents frowning, that represents age, that represents gender,
Speaker 3: more male, more female. You end up with a map
Speaker 3: of all the semantic relationships, and you can now do
Speaker 3: that not just for faces, you can do that for
Speaker 3: all of images. And now you have a shape that
Speaker 3: are presents images, a shape that represents languages. You look
Speaker 3: at image caption pairs on the Internet and you can
Speaker 3: align these two shapes. So now you have a way
Speaker 3: of translating between text, language and images. So now you
Speaker 3: just type in something like image I don't know, like
Speaker 3: portrait of the country Chile as a woman. It goes
Speaker 3: into the language space, gets translated to the image space,
Speaker 3: the computer generates the image that's there, and you get that.
Speaker 3: So that's how that technology works. There's something really deep
Speaker 3: actually happening because it's not just working on language. It
Speaker 3: seems to work on almost any modality out there. And
Speaker 3: I think just like there is the unreasonable effectiveness of
Speaker 3: mathematics where it's seems very strange. You go out on
Speaker 3: some branch of abstract mathematics, it seems like it has
Speaker 3: nothing to do with the world, and then it has
Speaker 3: something profound to say about the world. You invent complex
Speaker 3: numbers somehow that describes everything you're going to need to
Speaker 3: deal with electricity. Who knew that's going on? In deep learning,
Speaker 3: where there's an unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning, where the
Speaker 3: same techniques are working across every modality from DNA to
Speaker 3: fMRIs to language to audio to video to images to
Speaker 3: computer code. There's nothing that says that had to have worked,
Speaker 3: and yet it seems to be working. So we're learning
Speaker 3: something I think profound about the structure of our universe.
Speaker 3: But what that means for us specifically is that that
Speaker 3: means we can build these kinds of shapes and embed
Speaker 3: and translate between how an animal behaves and how it
Speaker 3: sounds and what its body post is. So we can
Speaker 3: say we're not quite there yet, but we're moving towards it.
Speaker 3: Generate me the audio of two elephants coming together, and
Speaker 3: that's going to view distribution of calls, some of which
Speaker 3: might mean like hello, some of which might mean, this
Speaker 3: is my name, some of which might mean I've missed you,
Speaker 3: you don't know, but has something to do with affiliation.
Speaker 3: Then you say, okay, now generate me the audio of
Speaker 3: two elephants coming together, but where one of them's flapping
Speaker 3: its ears and the other one's running quickly. What kind
Speaker 3: of sounds does that make? And you can see that
Speaker 3: this becomes a laboratory that lets you very quickly iterate
Speaker 3: to understand what animals are saying. When you get to
Speaker 3: do this in combination with the incredible biologists that are
Speaker 3: out in the field and have already built up a
Speaker 3: lot of that context from time, blood, sweat, and tears.
Speaker 1: Excellent, and I think the biologging is becoming more sophisticated,
Speaker 1: even right where they're looking at temperature and weather patterns
Speaker 1: and gyroscopes and accelerometers and so on, where you get
Speaker 1: all of this data from the animals, and in theory,
Speaker 1: there's no limit to how much we can biologue, as
Speaker 1: long as we can make it small and portable and
Speaker 1: gets it on the animals, and then we're able to discover, hey,
Speaker 1: these are the contextual cues that the animal is responding
Speaker 1: to with the language.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right. And in fact, a big shift
Speaker 3: that's happened in biology and conservation and ethology in the
Speaker 3: last five years is because of cell phones driving the
Speaker 3: cost of sensors lower. Biologists have gone from a world
Speaker 3: where they're often data starved to where they're data drowned,
Speaker 3: where they have access to terabytes of data, but they
Speaker 3: don't yet have the tools to understand them. And so
Speaker 3: our goal is to decode non human communication, translate animal language,
Speaker 3: and use that to transform our relationship with the rest
Speaker 3: of nature. But it's sort of like you're trying to
Speaker 3: go to the moon along the way you invent velcro.
Speaker 3: We're building the foundational tools that every biologist needs to
Speaker 3: understand the data that they have now. And our hope
Speaker 3: is that by building those foundational tools or nonprofit or
Speaker 3: open source, we try to give back as much as
Speaker 3: we can that that can broad scale accelerate all of
Speaker 3: like conservation science, which we hope can also accelerate conservation itself.
Speaker 1: Now, I have a technical question, which is if you
Speaker 1: are looking at human languages and making this high dimensional
Speaker 1: space of all the words when you're listening, when you're
Speaker 1: eavesdropping on whales or lemurs or whatever species. How do
Speaker 1: you know what a word is, what a unit of
Speaker 1: meaning is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a hard problem and there's no one easy solution.
Speaker 3: But one of the things that we can ask the
Speaker 3: AI to do is try chopping up the audio in many, many,
Speaker 3: many different ways and then see which one of those
Speaker 3: ends up making good predictions for what comes next. And
Speaker 3: so you can see if you're trying and varying and
Speaker 3: you're not saying, well, which thing contains meaning, but which
Speaker 3: things help make good predictions. When you try this on humans,
Speaker 3: you end up with phonemes that you get out and
Speaker 3: then those are then combinatorily built into words. So we're
Speaker 3: playing with those kinds of techniques, but we don't have
Speaker 3: like one surefire away yet.
Speaker 1: And when you're thinking about predictions, one of the ways
Speaker 1: that you could test a prediction is with playback, right,
Speaker 1: So tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this is the classic way that you test
Speaker 3: your predictions in the field, where I'll just go out
Speaker 3: and they will play a sound, often from the animal,
Speaker 3: and they'll see whether the animal looks and for how long.
Speaker 3: What we are starting to be able to do is
Speaker 3: just like you can build a chat bot in text
Speaker 3: that speaks Chinese without needing to speak Chinese. We are
Speaker 3: on the cusp of being able to build these kinds
Speaker 3: of chat bots, but that just directly speak in the
Speaker 3: language of animals. So it's sort of like, imagine you
Speaker 3: had a superpower, and your superpower was to go out
Speaker 3: meet someone whose language you don't understand. You sort of
Speaker 3: cock your head to the side and you listen for
Speaker 3: a little bit and you're like, I don't know what
Speaker 3: anything means, but I see that this sound pattern follows
Speaker 3: this sound platted and this context. You just start to
Speaker 3: babble and you have no idea what you're saying, but
Speaker 3: the other person's like crosses the arm, like yeah, wow,
Speaker 3: that's so meaningful. And at the end the person walks away.
Speaker 3: I think they've had a great conversation. You're like, I
Speaker 3: have no idea what I just said. I was just babbling.
Speaker 3: But that's what that's literally what Chatchipdi does, and that's
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that we are going to be
Speaker 3: able to build in the next you know, like twelve months.
Speaker 3: And what does that mean?
Speaker 1: Just so it's clear, can you give an example of
Speaker 1: playback and the kind of things that people are doing
Speaker 1: right now with that yeah.
Speaker 3: So an example of a playback might be one of
Speaker 3: our partners, Michelle Fournet, and you can, actually your listeners
Speaker 3: can go watch her incredible documentary Fathom. She was trying
Speaker 3: to determine how do you say hello to humpback whale
Speaker 3: and possibly include their name, So to say hello in
Speaker 3: hump back, it turns out, is something like poop And
Speaker 3: to test this, she recorded many different they're called whoop calls,
Speaker 3: but they're hellos, many different whoop calls, and then went
Speaker 3: out to Alaska, set up speakers underwater and would play
Speaker 3: the hellos in a very controlled condition and would see
Speaker 3: do the humpbacks respond? And the answer is yes, yes
Speaker 3: they do. When she said hello, they would respond in
Speaker 3: greater number of saying hello back. So that's an example
Speaker 3: of a playback experiment.
Speaker 1: I know you've thought a lot about the ethics involved
Speaker 1: in this so far what we've been talking about sounds amazing,
Speaker 1: and the question is what are the ethical things that
Speaker 1: we need to keep an eye on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is a great question because you know we
Speaker 3: are going to be crossing this barrier very very soon,
Speaker 3: which is I mean, this is the plot twist that
Speaker 3: we will be able to communicate before we fully understand
Speaker 3: what we're saying. That's again very surprising. I would have
Speaker 3: not have guessed this if we rewound the clock three
Speaker 3: or four years. What does this mean. This means that
Speaker 3: if you're working with a species which has vocal learning,
Speaker 3: well you might inject something that they say that then
Speaker 3: changes their culture. So, to give an example, humpback whales
Speaker 3: off the coast of Australia. For whatever reason, the Australian
Speaker 3: humpbacks seem to be like the K pop singers, and
Speaker 3: because they can sing halfway across an ocean basin and
Speaker 3: they migrate across the world, often the songs that are
Speaker 3: sung off the coasts of Australia will catch on and
Speaker 3: be sung by much of the world population within a
Speaker 3: couple of seasons. So it's, you know, the ultimate pop tune. Now,
Speaker 3: we don't know as humans what truly the function of
Speaker 3: humpback whale song is and how that culture works. So
Speaker 3: if we just create a synthetic whale that sings, we
Speaker 3: may infect a thirty four million year old wisdom tradition,
Speaker 3: you know, create some kind of viral meme a whale QAnon.
Speaker 3: We just don't know. So we have to be very
Speaker 3: careful as we approach this new responsibility of what does
Speaker 3: it mean to truly communicate with the other cultures of Earth?
Speaker 3: And that means we should not go out and start
Speaker 3: playing like two way communication real time. We should not
Speaker 3: do those kinds of experiments with wild populations that vocally learn.
Speaker 3: We have to think about what is it to have
Speaker 3: like a prime direct of a Geneva convention for cross
Speaker 3: species communication. And this is of course terrifying, and I
Speaker 3: should say, everything that our species does we do with
Speaker 3: biology partners and institutions. We are starting to work on
Speaker 3: what are the ground rules before we even have the
Speaker 3: technology for knowing when and how it is okay to
Speaker 3: have these prime directive first contact moments because first contexts
Speaker 3: have often not gone well for the beings being first contacted.
Speaker 3: So I think the change in the relationship for how
Speaker 3: we relate to nature is the point of our species
Speaker 3: and it's exciting that we're getting to the place where
Speaker 3: that becomes a necessity.
Speaker 1: And what's your prediction for how long it'll be, what
Speaker 1: year will have a meaningful conversation back and forth with
Speaker 1: the species? And which do you think will be the
Speaker 1: first species?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean This is science, so it's always very hard
Speaker 3: to make predictions like this, and different people on my
Speaker 3: team have different predictions, so I can just say mine,
Speaker 3: but know that answers very I think certainly by twenty
Speaker 3: thirty we will have had two way back and forth
Speaker 3: to what degree we understand unknown, But I think we
Speaker 3: will have a really good handle on it by then.
Speaker 3: It's just so exciting. My personal favorite is Belugas, and
Speaker 3: again everyone has their own personal favorite. But when you
Speaker 3: listen to Belugas communicate, it sounds like an alien modem.
Speaker 3: It sounds digital. There are lots of whistles in there.
Speaker 3: It turns out that you know dolphins, they say their name,
Speaker 3: their signature, whistle in a whistle. It's like a single band.
Speaker 3: This is like full modem pack. It encodes their name,
Speaker 3: it encodes their clan identity. And doctor Valeria Vergaro, with
Speaker 3: whom we work on Beluga communication, she's sort of like
Speaker 3: one of the preeminent scholars. It was her work that
Speaker 3: showed that they have names that they call each other by.
Speaker 3: And what blew my mind is that when she talks
Speaker 3: about her data, she's like she had to throw away
Speaker 3: ninety seven percent of her data in those studies because
Speaker 3: she couldn't tell which beluga was speaking or disentangle them.
Speaker 3: And that's because they are like forty belugas in a
Speaker 3: tight mass that are moving around super fast. It's very
Speaker 3: hard from a computational perspective. But that's where your listener's
Speaker 3: ears should perk up, because here we have the most
Speaker 3: vocal underwater species with the largest vocabulary that we know of,
Speaker 3: and the super majority of data, like ninety seven percent
Speaker 3: is unknown the ocean is what five percent explored Bluga
Speaker 3: communication or at least this data sets are three percent explored.
Speaker 2: Like this is.
Speaker 3: Where you get like brand new discoveries. This is the
Speaker 3: next frontier.
Speaker 1: And do Belugas do turn taking, by the way, which
Speaker 1: is one of the signatures of an actual language as
Speaker 1: opposed to just broadcasting noise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a number of species to do turn taking, from
Speaker 3: parrots to gelatas to many of the whale species.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: This is one of the signs that people look at
Speaker 1: to try to figure out, how would we know if
Speaker 1: this is actually a language versus they're just singing songs
Speaker 1: or they're doing whatever, but they're not listening back and forth,
Speaker 1: which leads to this question about if we find alien species,
Speaker 1: eventually we find life on other planets. The question is
Speaker 1: how much do we have to share with another species
Speaker 1: for us to have some meaningful interpretation of the language,
Speaker 1: Because fundamentally we're trapped in our internal model and a
Speaker 1: species that's so different, we will impose an interpretation on
Speaker 1: what they must mean by it. But I wonder when
Speaker 1: we find an alien species, how we will ever be
Speaker 1: able to know whether we understand enough of their language
Speaker 1: to say that we have a meaningful interpretation of it.
Speaker 3: I mean, when you say that, it just makes me wonder,
Speaker 3: how do we ever know that when we're communicating with
Speaker 3: each other's as humans, that we truly understand each other.
Speaker 3: There's almost this undeniably huge and yet invisible gulf, like
Speaker 3: the myth of communication is that it ever happened in
Speaker 3: the first place. We never truly know. We can only
Speaker 3: have clues that we are getting closer, that we're approaching knowing.
Speaker 3: I think it's really important to call out how much
Speaker 3: of our language is built on the metaphor of bodies.
Speaker 3: Almost all of it is body and space, right Like,
Speaker 3: even the things that we might think are really abstract,
Speaker 3: like cursor on your computer. What is the root of
Speaker 3: cursor in Latin, It's cursor the one who runs. It's
Speaker 3: the man who runs impeded, impeded against foot. It's like
Speaker 3: the deeper you look into language, the more you realize.
Speaker 3: And George Lakeoff does an incredible job in a book
Speaker 3: called Metaphors. We live by really deconstructing all of the
Speaker 3: ways that what we think of as our most abstract
Speaker 3: ideas can be traced back to a root of us
Speaker 3: having bodies and talking about our bodies in a physical world.
Speaker 2: And particular bodies, particular bodies. That that is true.
Speaker 1: What I mean is when we find an alien species,
Speaker 1: let's say they're more like slime, mold or something that
Speaker 1: might make it very difficult for us to understand their metaphors.
Speaker 3: That is exactly right. And I think the hope here
Speaker 3: is that because we are conditioned on and live in
Speaker 3: a physical world, that to the extent that there is
Speaker 3: an outside world in which we share, and that that
Speaker 3: will give the kind of grounding that's needed to do
Speaker 3: some kind of translation. But I think it would be
Speaker 3: wrong to say that the translations are going to look
Speaker 3: like Google Translate. You're going to get word forward to
Speaker 3: English it might end up looking like a translation is
Speaker 3: more like a piece of art or poetry, where the
Speaker 3: translation is very ambiguous, but if you spend enough time
Speaker 3: with it, you start to get a felt sense of
Speaker 3: what it's like. Or maybe you're right, maybe it'll be
Speaker 3: so different that we'll never There's just some things we
Speaker 3: will never be able.
Speaker 1: To work right in between, will and pose an interpretation
Speaker 1: even though it will be incorrect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is true, And at least here on Earth.
Speaker 3: There are sort of two failure modes. One is anthropomorphizing,
Speaker 3: which is what you're talking about, is assuming that we can, well,
Speaker 3: we can only relate to the experience of others through
Speaker 3: our own experience. That's the only way to ever happened.
Speaker 3: It's very simple to say, but it's actually profound when
Speaker 3: you think about it. So there's a over projection of
Speaker 3: ourselves onto others. And then the other side is human exceptionalism,
Speaker 3: where we assume that our experiences are completely unique to
Speaker 3: ushen we share nothing with other animals. And obviously the
Speaker 3: answer that the truth is in between the two. And
Speaker 3: then we have to have the self honesty to understand
Speaker 3: and the way of asking questions that lets us determine
Speaker 3: when we are over projecting.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, And I'm really interested when and this might
Speaker 1: not happen in our lifetimes, but when we discover completely
Speaker 1: alien life, I mean as in living on other planets
Speaker 1: that might be so different.
Speaker 2: Maybe they don't have DNA, maybe they.
Speaker 1: Have a different coding system, maybe they have very different bodies.
Speaker 1: The question is how much is Earth exceptionalism true? You know,
Speaker 1: in Star Trek they go around and they communicate with
Speaker 1: all these aliens and they have a good time, and
Speaker 1: you know, really understand each other to some degree. And
Speaker 1: the question is whether that will be the case or not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean if you start thinking about I think
Speaker 3: in Star Trek they have the crystalline entity, which is
Speaker 3: a giant being the size of a whole planet. And
Speaker 3: at that point, I think I'd come a little more
Speaker 3: along your lines that the scale of which that being
Speaker 3: is feeling and sensing is so broad. We probably share
Speaker 3: very little but anything of roughly our size. And if
Speaker 3: they have family structures, like then there is like hunger,
Speaker 3: there's being tired, there's like safety, there's like familiar relationships,
Speaker 3: there is gossip, and those things are probably conserved across many,
Speaker 3: many different types of beings.
Speaker 1: So we're entering a really exciting time, but the challenges
Speaker 1: are real and there are still a lot of question marks.
Speaker 1: For example, in the scientific literature, there's an ongoing debate
Speaker 1: about which species might have languages. Some researchers listen to
Speaker 1: a particular species and say that seems like that could
Speaker 1: be language, and others listen and they say, no, way,
Speaker 1: that's not language because there's no turn taking, and also
Speaker 1: because the order of the sounds doesn't seem to make
Speaker 1: any difference. And these are all valid debates because we
Speaker 1: don't actually know what qualifies as a language and what doesn't.
Speaker 1: Some species, for example, some songbirds do what's called dueting,
Speaker 1: where they're singing at the same time. Does this mean
Speaker 1: they're not doing language or is it possible? Are very
Speaker 1: different ways of doing language. I'll give you a concrete
Speaker 1: example of a different way of doing language, which is
Speaker 1: sign language. It turns out that the temporal order doesn't
Speaker 1: matter very much. In sign language. You can switch up
Speaker 1: the order of the words and it can still mean
Speaker 1: the same thing. And there are aspects of it that
Speaker 1: are spatial. So, for example, an American sign language, you
Speaker 1: can indicate that something happened in the past by doing
Speaker 1: the signs slightly to your left, and if you make
Speaker 1: the same signs over on your right side, that means
Speaker 1: you're talking about the future. So it's the same signs
Speaker 1: with this subtly different spatial position, and it can mean
Speaker 1: different things. And I call it subtle because if someone
Speaker 1: didn't know to watch for a slight spatial change, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't even notice it. And even a language that only
Speaker 1: uses sounds can be very difficult to decode because so
Speaker 1: much of it depends on shared assumptions about meaning. So
Speaker 1: just as an example, if I'm talking about someone named Aviva,
Speaker 1: I use her name once, and in the next sentence
Speaker 1: I just say her, and you know who I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: I'm referencing Aviva. But if you are an alien working
Speaker 1: to decode my language, you might be confused because one
Speaker 1: minute later you hear me use the same utterance her,
Speaker 1: but now I'm referring to someone else entirely.
Speaker 2: I'm now talking about Sarah, but I.
Speaker 1: Still use the word her, So the same word can
Speaker 1: refer to totally different things. And the alien would be
Speaker 1: very confused if it had concluded that her was the
Speaker 1: word for Aviva, and in the same way when we
Speaker 1: hear a whale make the same sound that we always hear,
Speaker 1: it might be talking about something totally different than the
Speaker 1: last time that used that sound. The context matters, and
Speaker 1: this issue of context, in other words, what's going on
Speaker 1: around the animal. This is why biologuers are interested in
Speaker 1: collecting things beyond and just the audio data. Good biologuing
Speaker 1: now uses video and gyroscope and altimeter and GPS and
Speaker 1: any other measure they can get their hands on. And
Speaker 1: this matters because so much of communication is about context,
Speaker 1: and by the way, a lot of it is nonverbal.
Speaker 1: Consider how you pick up stress from someone else even
Speaker 1: without words, body language, the tightness of their facial muscles,
Speaker 1: the way they're walking, and so on, and animals presumably
Speaker 1: have many equivalents to this. Just think about smells and pheromones.
Speaker 1: Take a close look at your dog the next time
Speaker 1: you're on a walk. It's obvious that a lot of
Speaker 1: your dog's language is happening silently. So all this is
Speaker 1: to say that language can be complicated, and much of
Speaker 1: it can be nonverbal, and this is why the challenge
Speaker 1: of decoding animal language is a big one. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I'm always on the lookout
Speaker 1: for is whether we can see any evidence that animals
Speaker 1: engage in something like storytelling. One of the classes that
Speaker 1: I teach at Stanford is the Brain and Literature, and
Speaker 1: I teach how weird it is that we go to
Speaker 1: the theater or the movies or a lecture and someone
Speaker 1: speaks and whosh, we get immediately transported into a different
Speaker 1: space and time.
Speaker 2: It's like a guided dream.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do an episode on this issue soon,
Speaker 1: but for now, I just want to point out that
Speaker 1: we don't see bears congregating like hundreds of them on
Speaker 1: a Saturday night listening to one bear grunt along. And
Speaker 1: I'm not certain that we see that in any species,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. But these are the kinds of
Speaker 1: clues we would look for as we move forward. These
Speaker 1: are the questions of not just do they have some
Speaker 1: simple language, but what they can do with their language.
Speaker 1: This is a tougher problem and one that we need
Speaker 1: to keep our eye on. So plenty of remaining question
Speaker 1: marks all around us, but what's clear is that technology
Speaker 1: like biologuers and artificial intelligence are leveling us up into
Speaker 1: a very exciting time. Not all species are going to
Speaker 1: have something interesting to say, but many might. And if
Speaker 1: we find we can decode animal language due to the
Speaker 1: labors of Aseraskin and his co founders Katie and brit
Speaker 1: and dozens of other people in this exciting field of
Speaker 1: animal communication, that will give us a very different view
Speaker 1: of ourselves and our species on this planet. Our grandchildren
Speaker 1: will grow up and they'll feel amazed that we considered
Speaker 1: ourselves the only ones and it wasn't even necessarily because
Speaker 1: of species chauvinism, but instead because we can only hear
Speaker 1: our own voices, and therefore we thought we were the
Speaker 1: only ones in the room. And with enough time, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll have enough technology and practice at decoding animal languages
Speaker 1: that eventually, in the more distant future, we can tackle
Speaker 1: extra planetary communication, and our great great grandkids will be
Speaker 1: amazed that there was a time when we thought we
Speaker 1: were the only ones in the galaxy.
Speaker 2: We maybe look back upon.
Speaker 1: As the era of loneliness, surrounded by voices of all
Speaker 1: types that we just didn't know how to hear.
Speaker 2: Please join me at eagleman.
Speaker 1: Dot com, slash podcasts more information and links to various
Speaker 1: animal communication projects and further reading. Send me an email
Speaker 1: at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion,
Speaker 1: and I'll be making an episode soon in which I
Speaker 1: address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this
Speaker 1: is Inner Cosmos.