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Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

on.natgeo.com

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Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#5

Post by dolphinsce »

Personally, My main motivation for learning about artificial intelligence has been to break thE barrier of being able to communicate with dolphins . At this point I only understand the principles of machine learning and pattern recognition and this challenge should be overcome soon . I think there could be more advances in communications with other creatures.

Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#6

Post by logicallee »

late2part wrote: post #3

Dolphins are marvelous creatures. I don't quite think they rise to the sentience of human, but it's hard to imagine them as 'dumb animals.'

This is absolutely true. If you look through github, you will not see a lot of higher-level abstractions, class hierarchies, lambda abstractions, or higher-order functions from dolphins. (I don't mean to generalize here, this is just my experience.)

However, this could also just be a matter of educational opportunities, as most dolphins spend their time swimming around in the sea. Even in captivity they are often made to perform and do not usually have a lot of time to code or for self-study, and obviously enrolling in computer science programs and attending lectures, despite ADA, is logistically prohibitive.

Someone should do a kickstarter to give captive dolphins access to Udacity or Coursera education. There is a large educational gap here and it would be interesting to see what they come up with.

Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#7

Post by foz »

There was a great RadioLab episode [1] that followed Denise Herzing during one of her tests. Also in the same episode they discussed the controversial co-habitation communication research done by Margaret Howe in the 1960s. A really fascinating episode for anyone interested in this topic.

1. http://www.radiolab.org/story/hello/

Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#10

Post by snowwrestler »

Imagine that you're a football (aka soccer) player. And of course all your teammates are football players too.

To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on those inferences. That's how players running at full speed are able to improvise complex plays involving long passes.

This is how I think of the communication between smart social animals like wolves or dolphins. They are like a football team. Every individual is an athlete, with essentially similar physical characteristics and skills. And they interact to accomplish essentially athletic goals, like hunting, or asserting dominance, or mating.

So, I'm not holding out hope that dolphins have a secret rich language, or even an interest in developing one. Heck, even among humans, professional athletes do not have a strong reputation as deep thinkers. But they think a lot about their particular sport.

The movie Avatar, while terrible overall, got this right, I think. Scientists failed utterly to make a connection with the big blue natives. It wasn't until a warrior (by accident) took on the task that the connection was made. The big blue natives were themselves warriors, so of course that is the type of communication they valued most.

Edit just for fun:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrzuj_the-life-aquatic-wit...

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