[HN Gopher] Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, ...
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Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
Author : Vindl
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-10-31 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hakaimagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hakaimagazine.com)
| booleandilemma wrote:
| The idea of finally talking to something we've been killing for
| resources for centuries is kinda weird.
| candlemas wrote:
| I can't wait for Moby Dick to be translated into spermwhalese.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We should probably pick "whoops, our bad" as one of the early
| translation goals.
| Shorel wrote:
| Then the whales will learn not to trust anything we say.
|
| Happened to indigenous people in the Americas.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That seems like it _should_ be lesson #1 when dealing with
| humans; that we lie, effortlessly.
| ncmncm wrote:
| "White Man speak with forked tongue".
| cute_boi wrote:
| But now these clever people will bring incentives etc to
| entice these creatures. Just depends on how much economic
| incentive these whales bring to the table.
|
| Happens to many politicians by rich/powerful people across
| the world.
| riffraff wrote:
| we've done that with people for a very long time.
|
| Even today, there are reports of african pygmies still being
| treated as slaves or hunted for both sport and cannibalism[0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies#Enslavement,_c...
| coldtea wrote:
| Not that different to talking to colonized people and ex-slave
| descendants...
| hirundo wrote:
| Only the "finally". We've been talking to other humans and then
| killing them for resources for a very long time.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| We've always been able to talk with those humans though and
| most of the times we fight them for their resources, not
| their bodies.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| To hunt a species to extinction is not logical.
|
| Edit: Because the topic is about communicating with Whales and
| my response was to a comment about hunting them, I thought it
| would be appropriate to reference something Spock said in Star
| Trek IV. Colloquially known as "The one with the whales".
| version_five wrote:
| There are many (maybe all) examples from nature in which
| resources will get consumed until they are gone. "Logic" has
| nothing to do with it. That doesn't mean we should hunt
| species to extinction, but its definitely a natural thing to
| do.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| One of the things that separates many humans from other
| kinds of animals is the ability to choose against instinct.
| To hold a hot cup for a little longer, enduring the pain so
| we don't drop it and break it. There are even some
| arguments that consciousness evolved to allow humans to do
| exactly that sort of thing; contradict hard-wired impulses.
|
| That we are so terrible at modesty of consumption in groups
| is the real tragedy.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > "Logic" has nothing to do with it.
|
| I guess the GP post is simply a direct quote from "Star
| Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (where IIRC Spock says something
| along those lines while he and Kirk visit a 20th century
| museum).
|
| Whales, their extinction and communicating with them was
| central to the plot of that film.
|
| EDIT: Ok, I looked it up. This exact quote is in the movie,
| _verbatim_ , in the scene I mentioned. At around 00:47:39
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| Correct. I think we're entering an era where Star Trek is
| largely forgotten.
|
| As opposed to two decades ago (right column):
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/icq-2001
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Aye, it's a 35 year old movie. Which is stunning for me.
| I recall going to the theater to see it with my parents.
| It was the last movie we all saw together.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Game Theory would probably say that it is logical, though at
| the end self-defeating.
|
| Usually the species is hunted for something valuable, and
| that means that the species becoming rarer translates to
| higher prices. So the people who successfully kill the very
| last specimens will get rich from them; an absolutely logical
| motivation, even if it has disastrous consequences down the
| line. If you can get ten million dollars for the very last
| whale on Earth, it is better than spending your life hunting
| some ubiquitous not-whales for 5000 dollars each.
|
| Of course, the end result is bad - the entire industry
| disappears - but so it is in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
| oblak wrote:
| Wow, new heights in game theory nonsense
|
| I know you're simply explaining the logic but it's still a
| psychopath's logic
| mc32 wrote:
| Not really. This happens pretty frequently. Hunting
| species to extinction, cutting down trees for fuel, etc.
| oblak wrote:
| Well, I didn't say we have a shortage of psychos, did I?
|
| Hunting the white rhinos to extinction is totally fine.
| It's just game theory, you guys.
| [deleted]
| b3morales wrote:
| Well, the Tragedy of the Commons can also be modeled in
| game theoretic terms. This is logical only in the
| extremely oversimplified given scope. If you ignore all
| externalities (possibly including your own future needs),
| resource exploitation can _appear_ to be a rational
| course of action.
|
| But ignoring them, I would say, is not in fact logical or
| rational.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| some mystics have said plainly for a long while that logic-
| reason by itself enables insane conclusions and perhaps
| actions. I agree.
| coldtea wrote:
| I don't see any logical issue with that.
|
| Logic makes no moral judgements, and also logic doesn't care
| about the future, if it doesn't include the invididual.
|
| (Here logic is also a stand-in for "maximizing benefit").
|
| If one/a group hunts whales to extintion and makes a huge
| profit (say, enough to retire), they would be logically sound
| (if morally bankrupt) to not care less if there are no whales
| left.
| User23 wrote:
| It's a shame that the explicit study of logic, ethics, and
| aesthetics isn't really part of the secondary school
| curriculum anymore. Everyone should be able to tell whether
| a problem falls in the domain of logic or ethics.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yeah. And even "maximizing benefit/utility" is not logic
| (I went with that, since at best, it's what many mean by
| "makes logical sense").
|
| Logic could as well be used perfectly well for minimizing
| benefit, it's just a tool for forming and evaluating
| syllogisms based on a set of axioms.
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| It is logical if the species poses an existential threat.
| Consider our efforts to eradicate certain diseases caused by
| bacteria.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Viruses, anyway.
|
| Nobody who knows basic biology has any illusions about the
| prospect of driving even a single species of bacteria to
| extinction.
|
| And anyway Russia probably still stockpiles literal tons of
| smallpox virus frozen underground in Siberian laboratories.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Most indigenous tribes were hunted to extinction by colonial
| settlers. Now some of the descendants of the colonial
| settlers subsume their heritage to get preferential access to
| colleges and jobs.
| drewolbrich wrote:
| Could this technology be used to communicate with teenagers?
| dazc wrote:
| Does the teenager want to be communicated with though?
| Misdicorl wrote:
| 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't understand why we haven'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.
|
| Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are,
| you'll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the
| size of the brain isn't relevant, its the ratio of the brain size
| to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn't apply to
| squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales
| probably aren't as smart as humans, but its due to the
| environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw
| capability. Whales have the capability to _far_ 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Brain size may not necessarily correlate with intelligence
| because it isn't the number of neurons, it's the organization
| and optimization of them.
|
| Just like we make much more powerful CPU chips in the same
| volume of silicon as before.
|
| And it could be that it just isn't necessary for whales to
| optimize brain density, like it is for humans and crows.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Agreed! But afaik the neuron process "node" across species is
| not so different. The relevant metaphor I would think is
| humans have pcie and a large register count while many (all?)
| others are still on pata and register starved. Maybe a real
| biologist can come in with more facts and less bad metaphors
| taneq wrote:
| I've read various stats about the human brain using a
| surprising percentage of our overall energy budget. I wonder
| how much energy a whale brain uses (overall and per kg)?
| While it's not the only relevant stat, TDP does provide a
| clue as to processing power.
| tsol wrote:
| 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't even
| established how their language works.
|
| 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 "jaguar alert!", pointing to a very
| specific concept-- a certain animal is here and we all know
| they're dangerous.
|
| It could also mean "I'm scared!", and maybe it's just monkey
| see monkey do. It could also mean something more abstract, like
| a blood curdling scream-- there's no one thing that it means,
| but as humans we instinctively know that people don't scream
| like that unless something legitimately awful is happening. So
| maybe the call communicates emotion rather than an intellectual
| concept-- it's a call of fear that makes other monkeys who hear
| it also scared.
|
| Just breaking down what animal language even _is_, is a
| challenge. I'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'll be a little like if aliens
| came to ancient Egypt to talk to the pharaoh; we'll just get a
| dictator whale telling us about all the other whales he's
| killed and how he's the greatest.. haha probably not that,
| though.
| klipt wrote:
| > Their oral histories must be incredible.
|
| Everything was idyllic in the before times. Then the human
| ships arrived and ruined everything. Some of them killed us.
| Others ignored us but polluted the ocean with noise so we
| couldn't hear each other's whale songs anymore.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Maybe! But I find that an awfully self centered view. I
| imagine humans (boats?) will play a (perhaps significant)
| aspect in their vision of the world. But I'd be surprised if
| it was any bigger than e.g. malaria is for humans.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There have been a number of Orca attacks on yachts in the
| Mediterranean and the Gulf of Cadiz/Portugal area recently.
|
| Perhaps they're hungry. Perhaps they're pissed. No one
| knows.
|
| Historically, orca attacks on humans - outside of captivity
| - have been _very_ rare.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I would say that's lowballing it considerably[1]. Whaling
| nearly drove sperm whales to extinction until they were
| protected in the 1970s.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#Relationship_w
| ith_...
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Fair enough
| aahortwwy wrote:
| > If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
| franky47 wrote:
| > Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems
| please.
|
| Somehow I pictured whales as the engineers in this sentence. It
| makes it even better.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| That was the intent!
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You can do it today with other species. We are lucky to still
| be surrounded by all kinds of animals: mammals, birds, and even
| insects.
|
| Of course, in order to talk, you have to spend a lot of time
| listening first. And what they say cannot often be translated
| to human talk.
|
| In order to make friends, you have to give first. Our society
| teaches us to stay away from nature and leave it be, so you
| have to break past that.
|
| The rewards are breathtaking and totally worth the effort.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Your point stands, but I want something wholly different from
| that. I want the equivalent of the LHC for cross species
| communication. You're telling me to go do some communing with
| physics, because we've already got some good textbooks on
| quantum mechanics.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| They will sing us the song of the great holocaust of the 1800s,
| of the day the metal surface whales turned the skies red and
| nothing could save them.
| lovecg wrote:
| Personally I want to know if they still tell tales of the
| hero whale who killed one of the ships in 1820:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
| peebz wrote:
| Perhaps they should call the system 'Gavag-AI"
| spoonjim wrote:
| Gosh why can't we leave them alone. This is like impersonating
| someone's spouse with a deepfaked voice and then having an
| intimate conversation with them.
| quotha wrote:
| Guarantee they just want us to shut the fuck up.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not sure why this is getting downvoted; it's probably very
| true.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mammals_and_sonar
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noi...
|
| > Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and
| general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright
| death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest --
| whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton.
| Other effects include impairing animals' hearing, brain
| hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds
| important for survival, experts say.
|
| > A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer
| than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds
| of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side.
| Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton
| provide a food source for everything from great whales to
| shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other
| animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker
| News? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we're hoping for
| something different here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| plutonorm wrote:
| He's saying we are making so much noise in the ocean that
| it's hard for them to go about their business - which is
| absolutely true. Military sonar might even be partly to blame
| for whale strandings.
| throwaway05112 wrote:
| Please refrain from knee-jerk reactions to short comments
| containing "bad words".
|
| The comment is actually substantive if you think about it for
| a second. Heuristics are right most of the time until they
| aren't.
|
| Also see pg essay "Succinctness is Power":
| http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
| dang wrote:
| It has to do with comment quality, not bad words.
| unanswered wrote:
| > really transformational cultural moments
|
| Prediction: an astonishingly large portion of animal utterances
| will have to do with reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that
| humans pour into the atmosphere. You heard it here first.
| qayxc wrote:
| Aye, turns out the whales are close friends with Koko and agree
| with everything she, um... said.
| franky47 wrote:
| Does the AI training dataset involve dropping a whale from great
| heights ?
|
| "Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's
| my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?"
|
| https://www.thecharacterquotes.com/the-whale
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Whale: "Hey, I found some fish."
|
| Whale Eliza: "Interesting. How does that make you feel?
|
| Whale: "What the fuck?"
| samirillian wrote:
| lol, the opposite of this actually
| geenew wrote:
| You should look up the Far Side comic where a professor invents
| a dog translator. Turns out the only thing dogs say is 'Hey!
| Hey! Hey!'.
| notahacker wrote:
| I can easily believe that's actually true.
|
| Dogs would probably be equally disappointed to learn that
| they only thing we glean from how they smell is that they
| need a shower!
| kace91 wrote:
| Not sure if it's the case with whales, bit as far as I know
| there is no recorded use of questions in the animal kingdom -
| all communication seems to be enunciative, or orders. Questions
| are exclusive to humans...
| glogla wrote:
| Allegedly the famous parrot Alex asked what color he is. But
| the whole line of research is doubted by a lot of people.
| PeterisP wrote:
| TIL - I expected that the chimpanzee sign language
| experiments would be a counterexample, but apparently the
| (IMHO surprising) lack of question usage was one of their
| outcomes.
| kace91 wrote:
| Yup. I knew it because I fell in a Wikipedia rabbit hole
| about animal intelligence not long ago.
|
| It was very intriguing to me, as someone with no previous
| knowledge, how this was assumed to be an only human trait
| yet the fact was pretty much glossed over.
|
| I find fascinating the idea of a step between being stuck
| with the information that others emit and being able to and
| request arbitrary information at will, being part of what
| made us what we are. Once you think about it, it really is
| an amazing advantage.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I'm working on a sort-of language as a side project and
| have fallen down many of the same rabbit holes that you
| have. I don't think questions are one of the key features
| that make language special because in the language I'm
| working on questions are an emergent property.
|
| There are two structural words in my language, "propose"
| and "tell". From these words you can build complicated
| ideas such as lying ("I propose to you: you propose to
| him: [malicious plan]. [real plan]."). Asking a question
| can be done with "I propose you tell me ...". Instead of
| saying "I think", you say something like "I tell myself".
|
| The feature of language that seems the most surprisingly
| powerful is placeholder words. The words like "someone",
| "somewhere", "somehow". I call these the entropy words
| because they are the words for the information you don't
| have. They represent sets of possible things rather than
| a literal specific thing.
|
| "someone moved to Silessia".
|
| In fact you can generally substitute a set of things
| anywhere you would use a literal thing. Any set will do.
| For example
|
| "John/George/Ringo/Paul played in the Beatles."
|
| Adjectives can be understood as just specifying a set
| using set-builder notation. For example "short man" is
| "{x in Men such that short(x)}".
|
| Just from set builder notation, first order logic comes
| along for free. I originally thought my language would
| need logic words, but this is not the case.
| jd115 wrote:
| This is because humans are the only living thing which feels
| inadequate enough to ask questions. No other creature feels
| like it lacks knowledge.
|
| And yes, I'll take it a step further: the reason science
| glorifies questions is because science is human beings
| systematically mass-hypnotising each other into greater and
| greater inadequacy.
|
| You ever notice how you never get enough answers in science?
| Every "answer" you get scientifically only seems to bring
| about more and more questions? We call it "scientific
| curiosity" and pretend to marvel at it, but come on, how
| shallow is that.
|
| What every other living creature (and every newborn human)
| intrinsically knows is that it knows all it needs to know.
| And that whenever it needs to know more, it will know it.
| That's it. There is no scientific process, no philosophical
| inquiries, no questioning. No doubt. No lack.
| glogla wrote:
| To ask questions, you have to 1) understand that others
| have minds 2) understand that there are things you don't
| know 3) understand that others might know things you don't
| 4) understand that you may ask them and they will tell you.
|
| That's actually a lot of advanced cognition, even if it
| doesn't look that way to us.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| You must not have a dog waiting for you when you come home
| late
| jd115 wrote:
| Yes, great point - but this is only because the animals
| we domesticate have been brainwashed by us humans into
| feeling (almost, but never quite) as inadequate as we do.
| chippy wrote:
| what the eat
| gnarbarian wrote:
| "If a lion could speak we wouldn't understand him." -
| Wittgenstein
|
| https://ideasandaction.com/if-a-lion-could-speak/
| amelius wrote:
| Wouldn't simple sentences with the structure subject-verb-
| object be universal to any rational speaker?
|
| A lion could say "I want food", or "I see dog", or "dog eats
| food".
|
| I don't see why a lion's worldview could be so different from
| ours that this wouldn't be possible.
| tsol wrote:
| Just to problems off the top of my head;
|
| In order to understand "I" you have to be able to
| understand there's an "other". Do lions understand others
| are also fully capable beings? Or are they kinda of
| "egotistical" the way a human baby is, where they just
| don't really understand the concept of "other people".
|
| And do they understand what "seeing" is, so that they can
| use it in a sentence like that? That's also abstract, it
| communicates that you as a being are using your sense of
| sight to see a certain thing. Are lions conscious of the
| fact that they're seeing, or do they just see things?
| amelius wrote:
| Well, perhaps the lion has more primitive cognitive
| capabilities, but the premise was that we wouldn't
| understand the lion (not the other way around).
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| SVO isn't even universal in human languages.
| amelius wrote:
| The order is not important. The structure is that the
| sentence has a subject, verb and object.
| [deleted]
| pvaldes wrote:
| Hum, is interesting but, trying to talk with sperm whales has its
| own special type of risks. The whale reply could kill you.
| pvaldes wrote:
| We are talking about being shoot with 230 decibels and this
| will kill any human diving near the whale. More than 185 Db are
| lethal. Is a defense system when startled.
| spfzero wrote:
| David tried this in the movie Prometheus, didn't work out well.
| psukhedelos wrote:
| I wonder if this type of research itself might at some point
| influence an animal's language.
|
| In this study, if the researchers were to consistently play a
| particular call when a school of fish were nearby I wonder if
| younger whales might learn the human produced call to mean a
| school of fish. Is it possible this research could instead lead
| to us presenting a species with our interpretation of their
| language which we would then have a much clearer understanding
| of?
|
| Rather that just us understanding them, I wonder how this might
| help them understand us.
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