[HN Gopher] Can we talk to whales?
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Can we talk to whales?
Author : fortran77
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-09-04 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I wish we could talk to orcas and explain to them at which level
| of overkill we could retaliate and exterminate them if they don't
| stop attacking our boats.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| If I would ever find myself in that situation (chance is slim
| but has increased to non-zero for me), I'd be tempted to pull
| out a skippy ball & see if they're up for a game of water polo.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Well, if you spend enough time on duo lingo, and get past the "I
| fucking love the rrrrugby" stage, then you can totally talk to
| all sorts of people from whales in their native language.
| [deleted]
| tzs wrote:
| Suppose some villain had an eventual need to be able to
| understand whales (or dolphins) communications, but has several
| years solve the problem. I'm talking about the kind of villain
| who does not care if what and how they do this is ethical so all
| that matters to them is whether or not it works.
|
| Think someone like the High Evolutionary as portrayed in the
| third Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but limited to present day
| Earth technology and knowledge.
|
| Suppose that villain took several human babies, gave them hearing
| aids or cochlear implants that pitch shift and compress
| whale/dolphin sounds down to where humans can hear them, and
| raised them in a mixed human/whale environment so that from their
| first weeks they were seeing whales and hearing while speech as
| much they were seeing humans and hearing human speech.
|
| Would some of those human babies end up learning to understand
| whale the same way babies raised in bilingual extended families
| often end up learning both languages?
| dools wrote:
| Social interaction plays a major role in language development.
| If you take away the reinforcement of everyone being really
| excited when the baby goes "da-da" instead of "gur-gur" you
| would lose the learning. It's also much more difficult for
| blind babies to learn to speak because they can't see the mouth
| shapes being made by their parents which is a deliberate
| training exercise. I don't think they'd learn to speak whale
| any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural
| environment. IANAL (Linguist), IANAB.
| seszett wrote:
| > _I don 't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than
| kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural
| environment._
|
| I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work either, but kids do learn
| the sounds of other animals and they love to reproduce them.
| Many kids can make dog or duck sounds before they can even
| speak like humans.
|
| The problem is that of course, dogs, cats, ducks don't
| actually have a language, just a few different sounds, so
| that doesn't prove anything about kids' ability to understand
| a hypothetical actual animal language.
| cogman10 wrote:
| My question, why focus on "can we talk with whales" when we
| already have the problem of "can we talk with humans" that has a
| known right answer?
|
| We can have a spanish speaker (or speakers) sit down, feed us
| with hours and hours of content (heck, that's already there) and
| then work with AI to try and create a black box interpreter that
| can turn spanish to english.
|
| Has anyone done this? If the goal is universal translator why not
| start off with a simple case?
|
| My worry with trying to do this first with whales or other
| animals is we don't know the answer. Nobody can look at the whale
| AI translation and say "You know what, this was a good
| translation". Sort of the "Mars attacks" problem.
|
| All this said, I do recognize that this creates a "human bias".
| The way humans talk may not readily translate to animal speech
| (But perhaps it would for other simians?).
| ben_w wrote:
| > Has anyone done this?
|
| Kinda. As I recall this happened by accident with French in
| (GPT-2? Not confident which LLM) -- even though it wasn't meant
| to be in the training set, there were phrases just lifted
| directly from the other language.
|
| "Hasta la vista" et cetera have a certain _je ne sais quoi_ ,
| but I suggest a better _Gedankenexperiment_ would be the
| language of the people of the North Sentinel Island -- with
| whom you cannot interact by both law and them being homicidally
| xenophobic, and will therefore be limited to remote sensing
| with parabolic or laser microphones only.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Ideally, you'd use a language with native speakers who can
| ultimately verify the translation efforts. Perhaps a language
| like Icelandic, Celtic, or Korean would be better. Languages
| with little cross over into english while also having
| accessible translators.
|
| North Sentinel island would be a good stress test, but not a
| good first step as we can't ask them if we got the language
| right.
| [deleted]
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| I wonder how much animal body language could help with that.
| Maybe instead of trying to focus purely on the language (like
| with human language translation), the algorithm could try to
| observe and infer the meaning from more than just audio? Dogs
| were domesticated long ago and can communicate with humans,
| sometimes purely through "facial" expressions and body
| movement.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'd think it would depend a lot on the animal. Whales, for
| example, don't really have great eyesight. They depend a lot
| more on sound and have been observed communicating over long
| ranges (particularly because water carries sound quiet well).
| So it seems natural to conclude that whales would communicate
| more primarily through sound than other mechanisms.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| That's a great point, didn't think about that!
| ethanbond wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there are dozens of startups doing AI-based
| translation, including just general LLMs which seem to be
| extremely good at this already.
| vasco wrote:
| Those are trained differently, being exposed to translations
| in the training. My understanding of the person you are
| replying to is proposing "discovering the meaning" of Spanish
| by just using audio without any translations in the training.
| Pretending we don't know Spanish as if it were an
| animal/alien language.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Ah I see now! Thanks for the clarification.
| cogman10 wrote:
| They are solving a different problem. They are doing the
| "white box" translation, that is knowing good inputs and
| outputs.
|
| I'm talking about something more akin to what these
| researchers are doing. Without feeding the AI information
| about the correct translation, can we make an AI that can
| translate spanish to english? That is, what the researchers
| are trying to do with this whale translation.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I see now! Interesting idea. Thanks for clarifying :)
| og_kalu wrote:
| You don't need Parallel corpora for all language pairs in a
| "predict the next token" LLM.
|
| What I'm saying is that if an LLM is trained on English,
| French and Spanish and there is Eng to French data, you
| don't need Eng to Spa data to get Eng to Spa translations.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Spanish may have been a bad first language, but others
| like Korean, Icelandic, or even Russian would work as
| there is very little cross over or related languages.
|
| You'd have to be careful with the input data, though, as
| it would be easy to corrupt your dataset with
| translations if you try and do this fast.
| theptip wrote:
| But the problem is not a black box. Presumably at least some
| (likely most) of whale conversation is things like "I see some
| fish to our left" where you can measure a result, ie does the
| pod go left. (Some whales perform highly complex coordinated
| hunting strategies, which you'd think includes some verbal
| coordination.)
|
| Or at least, you shoot for that and maybe discover that 99% is
| philosophizing you can't understand. But maybe you can
| bootstrap from present tense to suggest they are reminiscing
| about previous fish seasons. And so on.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Perhaps, though I could see there being issues like "I see
| fish on our left" "well, you're always wrong so we are going
| right" being an issue. There's even the issue with
| "shorthand" that might not be universalizable. For example,
| with a hunting strategy you could imagine "Execute the
| Janeway protocol" being an issue for translation.
|
| You can see some of the hunting strategy problems play out
| with sheep dogs. A well trained sheep herding dog can execute
| really impressive actions based only on specific whistles
| trained by the handler. [1]. It'd be wrong to conclude a
| specific element of language for all dogs based on the
| whistles.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YKAOMqZENo
| ramblenode wrote:
| > Perhaps, though I could see there being issues like "I
| see fish on our left" "well, you're always wrong so we are
| going right" being an issue.
|
| This isn't a black box because the whalesong encodes some
| type of behavior that we could, in theory, observe and
| decode even if we didn't understand the atomic pieces of
| the whalesong. It's how you study any unknown language--you
| learn a few relations and then gradually build up a richer
| lexicon and grammar that gives finer-grained understanding.
|
| I'm not sure what the dog whistle example is intended to
| demonstrate, as even human language has a significant
| learned component.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| The problem with this type of thinking is that it undervalues
| the role that non-vital communication has in social species.
| Look at uncontacted peoples around the world. They've had
| music and dance even though their tribes consisted of a
| couple hundred people. These forms of communication serve a
| role in their communities but it isn't "there are fish in the
| pond over there" it's more special and abstract.
|
| If we are to treat whalesong the same way then we can't
| immediately assume that they're just trying to communicate
| base concepts.
| ramblenode wrote:
| In any given human language, at least, most vocabulary
| tends to be concrete objects or physical processes. The
| parent is suggesting that we begin by looking for that
| subset of the language by correlating the speech sounds of
| whales with their behavior to objects in their environment.
| blaze33 wrote:
| I once read that whale's songs could be used to transmit a 3d
| image from one whale to another which doesn't sound so crazy
| considering that echolocation can activate the visual cortex.
|
| I don't remember the article and anyway there wasn't much more
| detail but I always found this idea quite interesting. Could be
| that looking for words, sentences or grammar in a whale's song is
| a misguided and anthropocentric approach to the problem. They may
| instead have a visual language that just so happen to be
| transmitted by sound.
|
| Like, do you see what I mean? But, literally.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Cymatics is very interesting.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| The shrew like common mammalian ancestor was a night animal and
| could echolocate. The 3d perception could have been the driving
| force behind the evolution of the large brain.
| Figs wrote:
| I remember commenting on an article related to that here so I
| went digging through my comment history and found this post
| about dolphin visual language:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314056
|
| Given that that was all the way back in 2011 and didn't lead to
| any big world changing events I assume it was just cranks being
| cranky and a lot of people getting their hopes up.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| That is a fascinating idea. We do have a tendency
| (understandably) to try and understand the universe through our
| own lens. Our thinking is heavily tied to our sensory input, so
| it is challenging to imagine what having echolocation or
| magnetic senses might be like.
|
| But there is no reason we should expect other species to
| communicate and think in the same way we do.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| That's fascinating!
|
| In the thread of this thought, to search for intelligent life
| off-planet sort of misses the point, doesn't it? Here we have
| an intelligent species with a common ancestor, which we may
| assume to be easier to communicate with than an extra-
| terrestrial being. And we have hardly begun to attempt to
| communicate with our earthly neighbor in a meaningful way, but
| we have projects probing the cosmos for signals from space.
| xg15 wrote:
| Followup question, do we _want_ to talk to whales, given what we
| 're currently doing to the oceans?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Controversially my suspicion is what we're doing to the oceans
| and the rest of the planet will cause more suffering to humans
| than any other species, which will mostly just die out without
| really understanding what's happening to them. We all know what
| human suffering feels like, and we're all able to communicate
| with other humans one way or another, yet none of us seem able
| to accept we might have to change our lifestyles or reevaluate
| our priorities to help minimise that suffering in others.
| Still, I'd be fascinated whether whales actually had any
| interesting (and comprehensible!) thoughts to share about human
| behaviour, and whether we might learn at least something from
| them.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Yes, certainly!
|
| It's those OTHER people doing bad things to animals & their
| environment, not you. Right? (wink wink)
|
| Most whales would probably fall for that (or give you benefit
| of the doubt).. many humans do.
| [deleted]
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Yes. We want some good scolding from whales.
| thereisnojesus wrote:
| No you scold the whales. More of a sear actually
| LegitShady wrote:
| There is no we. Both are different groups of people. And also
| yes, they're almost unrelated.
| xg15 wrote:
| Feel free to explain that to the whales.
| qprofyeh wrote:
| Can we talk to any animals using LLM translation?
| NERD_ALERT wrote:
| What does that mean?
| quonn wrote:
| No? I mean it seems like a stretch. Where would the LLM learn
| the initial English-to-Moo mapping for cows?
|
| Maybe if we would have a mapping we could use that to train an
| LLM.
|
| In the meantime you can try asking ChatGPT if a cow has buddha
| nature and ask for a one word reply. It have an idea what it
| might say.
| gizajob wrote:
| "Yes"
| og_kalu wrote:
| You don't need Parallel corpora for all language pairs in a
| "predict the next token" LLM. What I'm saying is that if an
| LLM is trained on English, French and Spanish and there is
| Eng to French data, you don't need Eng to Spa data to get Eng
| to Spa translations.
| lgas wrote:
| Very nearly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tUXbbbMhvk
| [deleted]
| alexpotato wrote:
| In the 1990s show seaQuest DSV, there was a "talking" dolphin
| that spoke to the humans via a computer interface that the boy
| genius character had created.
|
| In one of the episodes, the ship's computers get wipe so the boy
| has to rebuild the dictionary of the translation system by
| showing the dolphin flash cards.
|
| I remember thinking that was an interesting way to build a
| translation layer between two different species with a BIG
| assumption that the dolphin could understand the symbols on the
| flashcards.
|
| The internet, being what it is, even has a Wikia link about this:
| https://seaquest-dsv.fandom.com/wiki/Vocorder
| dharmab wrote:
| Spoiler for Project Hail Mary
|
| A large part of the book is the human crew figuring out how to
| communicate with blind aliens who communicate with a sort of
| musical chirping. The humans eventually write a program to
| input English vocabulary and play a rudimentary form of the
| music.
| greesil wrote:
| Bridger!
| plusfour wrote:
| Do whales forgive?
|
| The Memory Palace has done a moving episode on sperm whales.
|
| https://thememorypalace.us/keyhole/
|
| If you're not familiar with the podcast, the episodes are
| incredibly well written and narrated humanity-focused vignettes.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Start with laboratory mice, and then move on to dolphins I
| reckon.
| jonathanoliver wrote:
| Why would you start with the two-smartest species on the
| planet? [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Brainiest by brain/body ratio:
|
| Mice 0.5/25 g Human 1.3/70 kg Sperm whale. 8.0/60000 kg
|
| We humans get to chose the allometric coefficient that makes
| us seem "smartest" but D Adams knew the truth ;-)
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| Crazy but intriguing stuff. Surprising (to me) thing to note -
| the first goal is to be able to construct "sentences" in Sperm
| Whalish not necessarily understand them. The next step is to
| figure out what they mean.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
|
| --Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Philosophical Investigations' (1953)
| calderknight wrote:
| If a lion could speak, we could understand him.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Oh no, I don't know what to believe anymore.
| [deleted]
| scythe wrote:
| In context, W is talking about how we infer internal states
| based on external speech. So when he says "we could not
| understand him", he isn't saying that we couldn't understand a
| lion saying "the book is on the table" but rather that we could
| not infer what is going on "inside the lion's head".
|
| >"I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a
| picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It
| does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not
| readily accessible.
|
| >If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
|
| >It is possible to imagine a guessing of intentions like the
| guessing of thoughts, but also a guessing of what someone is
| actually going to do. To say "He alone can know what he
| intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will
| do", wrong. For the prediction contained in my expression of
| intention (for example "When it strikes five I am going home")
| need not come true, and someone else may know what will really
| happen.
| WesSouza wrote:
| Is the answer yes or no?
| dools wrote:
| [flagged]
| lucb1e wrote:
| Similar to asking whether we can do nuclear fusion: probably
| yes, you just have to tell me how. So basically no(t yet).
|
| Also, are you sure you don't read the article? It contains lots
| of vital information that we all came here to read, such as
|
| > Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager
| smile and a pronounced Canadian accent
|
| (Nothing against Gero, this just happened to be the part my
| scroll wheel broke)
| beardyw wrote:
| Well, we can recognise danger calls in birds, usually repeated
| sharp "chip" sounds. Going beyond that we start assuming that
| some organised signals correspond to our ideas of communication.
| I tend to doubt it. If there is something more complex it may be
| very different to what we are used to.
| [deleted]
| gizajob wrote:
| "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" -
| Wittgenstein
| [deleted]
| nelsontodd wrote:
| [dead]
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