Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 151 posts

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#141

Post by throwup238 »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #119
efitz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals. At the same time, I want to be as humane as practical; I don’t want to cause needless suffering to any creature. If I kill a bug, I don’t want it to suffer. Same with food animals. The more like me an animal is, the less I want to eat it. There are a lot of humans. Any action to forcefully reduce the number of humans or…

> Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals. This is akin to saying ''humans are violent, so i am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to commit violence''. So just be honest: you WANT to eat meat because you like it, consequences be damned. And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even…

> And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.

This myth needs to die. Two thirds of all farmland on this planet is pasture [1] that isn’t fertile enough to grow food for humans except by raising animals on it. If we were to switch to a plant based diet, the vast majority of our farmland as a civilization becomes unusable. Most of the world uses animals to generate calories from unproductive land, first via dairy and then slaughtering the animals for food.

Not to mention, animals have been crucial sources of sustainable fertilizer for many thousands of years, without which agriculture would never have been as productive.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#142

Post by 542354234235 »

explodes wrote: post #92
stevage wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you respond if asked you to explain why a tobacco company sponsoring a kid's sporting event might be anything less than wonderful?

The dolphins aren't causing cancer in children.

But they might be planning to. We won't know until we are able to ask them.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#144

Post by 9dev »

kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #123
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals. This is akin to saying ''humans are violent, so i am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to commit violence''. So just be honest: you WANT to eat meat because you like it, consequences be damned. And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even…

Do you also have this negative attitude towards all other non-vegitarian animals, or is it just for humans since they have more capability to cause more ecological harm?

Most importantly, humans have the ability to reflect their actions and decide differently. Both to minimize suffering, and to keep the plant hospitable to humans.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#145

Post by 9dev »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #125
patcon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross.

What’s gross is the idea that plants are “lower” and thus less deserving of value to life. Either embrace radically life denying Jainism, anti-natalism, voluntary extinction movement, and benevolent world exploder theory - or admit that you are just as cruel as those you implicitly claim to be better than (as a presumably non gross person) But white vegans aren’t prepared to actually reckon with the logical conclusio…

I never understood that line of reasoning. Plants do not have a central nervous system and, as of the current scientific consensus, are not aware of their subjective experience like animals are. Humans are omnivores, capable of thriving on a plant-based diet. The logical consequence, if you try to minimise suffering, is to eat plants instead of animals.

Life is a game of shifting carbon. To stay alive, you need to kill. But you can try to limit that to the least amount of killing required, and to killing those life forms without sentience as we understand it. This is the foundation of any ethical reasoning.

Having said all that, I also reject the vertical ordering of life on the tree of evolution. Plants are just very different from us, not necessarily higher or lower. Considering we have to make a choice as to what we are ready to sacrifice to survive, we can still choose those life forms that likely are not capable of suffering like we do, before turning to those more similar to us.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#146

Post by glacier5674 »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #62
srean wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults. If you had read this part -- "But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means. To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree." it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corp…

That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_. You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement. AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it…

> shared experiences and emotions

I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.

Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#147

Post by amy214 »

zoogeny wrote: post #53

Not directly related, but one of those stories that is so bizarre you almost can't believe it isn't made up. There was a NASA funded attempt to communicate with Dolphins. This eccentric scientist created a house that was half water (a series of connected pools) and half dry spaces. A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them. Things went comp…

It's funny you were thinking that, because I was thinking, "how would you teach a japanese man english?." The obvious answer is to jerk him off and give him high doses of LSD first. I immediately came to the same conclusion with this AI-dolphin stuff. Have they tried jerking off the dolphin and giving it LSD first? Apparently - yes.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#148

Post by ruthvik947 »

finnh wrote: post #50
ruthvik947 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." ( https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5 )

Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.

Sorry, it's not really, just a personal nickname for him. Although I think I recall that Austin would call him Witters (very much to this annoyance).

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#149

Post by awwaiid »

reptilian wrote: post #136
amarant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trendy to hate Google, and even more trendy to hate anything AI. The cynicism on display here is little more than virtue signalling and/or upvote farming. Sad to see such thoughtless behaviour has reached even this bastion of reason.

Google is where great technology and innovation goes to die. Please give me one example in the last decade where meta or Google research has led to actual products or open-sourced technologies, and not just expensive proprietary experiments shelved after billions were spent on them? I'll wait.

The llama models

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#150

Post by patcon »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #125
patcon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross.

What’s gross is the idea that plants are “lower” and thus less deserving of value to life. Either embrace radically life denying Jainism, anti-natalism, voluntary extinction movement, and benevolent world exploder theory - or admit that you are just as cruel as those you implicitly claim to be better than (as a presumably non gross person) But white vegans aren’t prepared to actually reckon with the logical conclusio…

Specifically, this gave me the reaction, bc it seems in bad company with other ideologies:

> I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.

Deep history exists in our "biological" context and is critical reality, but arguing some "biological imperative" to act on it, that strikes me as a strange place to start

Context: am biochemist, and I think about biology and biochemistry as a very integrated part of my worldview. But I don't harken to any biological imperative for my actions and choices. It explains them, it doesn't command them. Distorting our biology and psychology is what makes us human and agentic imho

Post reply on HN