61–70 of 151 posts
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…
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The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible. You also probably don't have kids. For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins…
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…
There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.
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…
Paraphrasing carl sagan: "You don't go to Japan and kidnap a Japanese man start jking him off, give him fing acid, and then ask him to learn English!"
Wow, there's a lot of cynicism in this thread, even for HN. Regardless of whether or not it works perfectly, surely we can all relate to the childhood desire to 'speak' to animals at one point or another? You can call it a waste of resources or someones desperate attempt at keeping their job if you want, but these are marine biologists. I imagine cross species communication would be a major achievement and seems like…
Wow, there's a lot of cynicism in this thread, even for HN. Regardless of whether or not it works perfectly, surely we can all relate to the childhood desire to 'speak' to animals at one point or another? You can call it a waste of resources or someones desperate attempt at keeping their job if you want, but these are marine biologists. I imagine cross species communication would be a major achievement and seems like…
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.
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I'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds. If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask…
I am all for the Disney utopian fantasy of us living with animals. However if universal communication was to be made. Don't you think that animals are going to be pretty pissed to discover what we have done with their kingdom? "Hi Mr Dolphin, how's the sea today?" "Wet and a plastic bottle cap got lodged in my blowhole last night..."
What's going on down the the sea over there? Would you mind pulling that thing from here to there?
Or whatever - I don't know what we'll figure out to do, but certainly something.
As far as them being mad at us, I doubt they will be, but I'd be interested to get their perspective - if they have one.
I do not believe we can expect anything resembling a human level of intelligence to be discovered.
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I'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds. If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask…
I was just reading how fishing industry’s longlines have caught many dolphins and other bycatches. It would be great to be able to give them warnings, or even better, to ask them to keep other big animals away from the longlines.
Tangential, but this brings up a really interesting question for me. LLMs are multi-lingual without really trying assuming the languages in question are sufficiently well-represented in their training corpus. I presume their ability to translate comes from the fact that there are lots of human-translated passages in their corpus; the same work in multiple languages, which lets them figure out the necessary mappings b…
My hunch is it would work somewhat, but poorly. Languages encode similar human experiences, so their conceptual spaces probably have natural alignments even without translation examples. Words for common objects or emotions might cluster similarly. But without seeing actual translations, a model would miss nuances, idioms, and how languages carve up meaning differently. It might grasp that "dog" and "perro" relate to…
And it gets even more complex because the connotations of "dog" in the USA in 2025 are unquestionably different from "dog" in England in 1599. I can only assume these distinctions also hold across languages. They're not a direct translation.
Let alone extreme cultural specificities... To follow the same example, how would one define "doge" now?
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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…
Not at all.
I believe just throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.
I quote myself again -- 'But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means".
Note the emphasis on the word alone.
What needs to happen is to build shared experiences, perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML training process. If this succeeds this exercise of building shared experience will do heavier lifting than the LLM.
Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not hold high hopes.
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That is a surprisingly cynical take; the marine biologists in question seemed pretty enthusiastic in the video!
I'm not saying this is the case here, but every time I've been in internal or promotional videos related to my work, I've been performing for a camera. I'm not playing a theater character, but it's also not what you'd get if you dropped by my desk and asked me the same questions. Calling it acting might seem strong. But it's not not acting. So it's acting.
Separately, could invoking it anytime someone appears excited be described as distrustful of human sincerity or integrity?
After working through these exercises, my answers are no/yes, which leaves me having to agree its clearly cynical. (because "define:cynical" returns "distrustful of human sincerity or integrity")