IMHO translation of anything interesting requires the cultural background for context. To do it with a new language requires the translator to "go native". The mega fauna gets media attention, but they would have more chance of success with one of the many dolphin pods that live up close and personal with humans. For example Shark Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Mia
In the 1990s we had field linguists interested, but the tech sucked. It's good to try again, but a lit search might help.
I'm also fascinated by what we'd actually say, beyond "hello".
Humans from different cultures have problems communicating clearly. How would we say anything meaningful to creatures who don't share any part of our worldview?
A whale's world is upside down from our point of view - there's a flat upper limit, but no effective lower limit. They are stuck near the surface in the same way we're stuck near the ground. But they live in a much more 3-dimensional world than we do - it's much easier for them to swim down than it is for us to fly up. That's got to affect their thinking and language in ways we can't know. They will have expressions and terms that are relatable to other whales but incomprehensible to us because we don't have that same shared experience.
I think it's great that we're trying, but I'm expecting a pretty dull conversation at the end, purely because we can't say anything more meaningful in a way that they'd understand, and vice versa.
I don't want to poopoo this research because I think it's really cool. I just want to urge some caution. There are three distinct risk categories with this research that I think should trigger a halt if certain pre-specified conditions are breached.
(1) Animal welfare. The researchers are aware of the animal welfare issues at stake, but a collection of metrics around pod culture, stress, and reproduction should be tracked across experiments to make sure we're not hurting the animals. If thresholds are exceeded across multiple experimebts with this tech, the research should stop.
(2) Acoustic -> semantic gap. There's a green lumber problem with this research. We may be able to predict animal responses in playback tests, but we don't have a way to map that back to semantic meaning. This is probably fine for now, but if we don't have adequate semantic theory or if we have multiple competing semantic theories that all explain the patterns equally well, the we're just manipulating the animals, not communicating with them. (eg, It's not even really clear to me that "whale concepts" and "human concepts" would be commensurable.)
(3) Bad incentives. Between media sensationalism, the normal problems and biases that come with funding science today, and potentially terrible usages of "whale tech" (eg, clearing out shipping lanes, warfare), it seems to me there are some extra ethical considerations with this research such that there may be a point where the outcome space is overwhelmingly negative. It would be nice if mechanisms existed such that research could be stopped if these bad incentives activate.
Regarding #2, reminds me of Wittgenstein's claim that, "If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him", because for Wittgenstein meaning is use, and lions would have different use for words than we do since there is no shared culture or biology. It would likely be even more incommensurable for sea creatures who don't share dry land with us.
I have some problems with Wittgenstein's philosophy when applied to human rationality (I think cross-game invariant structures do exist) but here I think it's an apt observation and you could very well be right. Nice!
You might be right. I dont think its certain though. Humans seem to be able to communicate across language gaps in ways we can't with animals. Things really could be that different. For example, all human languages that we know about have some idea of a who doing something to a whom, even if they express it in drastically different syntax. For all we know (I'm just making this up, don't take it too seriously), whales might experience the world as a stream of objects. Maybe that's perfectly fine for whale existence. But we can't even really conceptualize that! And how would we know, anyway?
Eh, if I were a mad scientists with a unaligned AI and a wetlab I'd keep jamming more and more language related genes in animals to see if anything interesting happens. I know there's been some work around the NOVA1 gene that is showing interesting results.
If they are intelligent and curious, imagine if they let us come tell them tales of the world, works of fiction, musings of space, what if they swim around just letting us tell them of all the fascinating things we find out. Humanity may travel the cosmos, only to come home to tell our whale friends everything we learned. I wonder if there will be a whale someday with the dream of going to space.
They will say "no no, there's no problems we're having with pollution, and we think AI Godtech supremacy is a wonderful idea, and you should definitely pour all of humanities resources into going into space, and liquidate anyone who defies you".
That wasn't until the late 24th century, after they adopted technobabble and then held on to it while letting go of the consultants keeping it coherent and plausible. In Kirk's time, they just put "Space" in front of everything. "Space madness", "Space baby", ...
I suspect they're more intelligent than that. By, like, a lot.
When I was a teenager, I took a rowboat out onto what was then called Scammon's Lagoon, in Baja California, where the Grey whales raise their young. A mother whale -- several times the size of our boat -- and her calf approached. The calf was curious but cautious, so the mother nudged it into approaching the boat, close enough that we could reach over and rub its nose, which everyone on the boat did in turns.
What did the whales get out of this? Certainly nothing tangible -- nobody was feeding them or anything like that. But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
I'm certain the mother whale knew what she was doing. She was recruiting us to her side. MUCH more effective, in the long term, than merely running away.
How does a whale read a group of humans in a boat? A normal-shaped body underneath and a wild mess of heads and flappy things above? We are the shoggoths...
I know the story of a farmer whose wife trained one of their pigs to be living inside the house like a dog. part of everyday activity.
But the farmer still killed the pig at the end of the season, because it was the thing to do.
So i think the japanese might not have the same cultural appreciation for the emotional connection with "food"
its a wall many vegan and animal activists are struggling often
> But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
Comment you're replying to is saying that this is optimistic; most people are capable of doublethink, and will quite happily "love" one individual of a species while being completely indifferent to the death and suffering of the rest of that species. I've observed the same phenomenon.
Crows can remember a human face for 17 years, and pass this knowledge through their murder (group).
We know animals communicate with each other, and the trend is we generally discover more and have underestimated what many animal species practice and can do.
Everyone agrees that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis have talked together and lived (and bred) together; what makes inter-species communication (assuming a translator or device) impossible?
No, I don’t think “universal translators” are outside the domain of science fiction; but I think us building a device that enables two-way communication between one species and us, is probably more likely than not.
I pissed off a crow once, not a good idea. It got its revenge and it was crazy how its murder group would destroy my property. Luckily they have moved on but I make friends with them now and understand them much better.
There's a classic "This American Life" episode along those lines. Poor sap ended up wearing a fake beard and glasses on the back of his head just be be able to leave the house. Bonkers.-
I think you are very naïve about how complicated language is. I'm not saying animals lack any intelligence whatsoever, but I don't see how remembering faces means you'll be able to talk. The crows could just have acted hostile to the masked people in front of each other. Communicating is not the same thing as language which is vastly more expressive than any non-human animal is capable of.
Not everyone agrees that Neanderthals possessed language like us either, although evidently they are much, much closer evolutionarily to us than crows or whales, and it is vastly more plausible that they talked. Having Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean that we talked with them though, it needn't have been even consensual, unfortunately.
Lots of animals communicate with each other, I think we agree. If we can automatically translate their communicative utterances into English (or any other utterances that we understand), in general, that would be remarkable, and useful! Who cares whether those utterances qualify as "language".
My whole point is what we could communicate would be profoundly limited. It's like how we can communicate with dogs to a certain extent, but we're not telling them bedtime stories. The comment I responded to originally is fantasising an absurd degree of complexity in communication which is profoundly unrealistic.
> Younger signers had developed a richer vocabulary for mental states—concepts like believe, remember, forget, understand. They were much better than the original older signers at tasks requiring them to reason about what another person thinks or knows. Later, as the older signers picked up those mental-state terms from younger people, some of them improved on the same tests. Senghas describes it as language giving them new insight into other people’s thinking and motivations.
I see several likely stories:
* Much animal communication is practical, descriptive of the present (nothing abstract, or very few abstract concepts)
* If a species could expand its communication, it would give it more powerful tools and allow for more meaningful conversation with humans
* If such a thing is possible, it will be extremely disruptive to that species
I think if you could communicate about abstract ideas with your dog, you could exchange bedtime stories. However, I don't think such a thing is possible today, and it's not clear what species (if any, besides humans) will, in fact, be able to learn such things
Nicaraguan sign language is evidence for an innate language capacity, not that it is an invented technology and certainly not evidence for Sapir Whorf.
Communication is a two-way street, with both parties negotiating and evolving some "communication protocol" over time. We won't know how far we'll be able to go until we're able to try.
Except when we do, but it doesn't make for flashy press releases. Pet owners, vets, farmers throughout history - anyone who lives alongside animals, cares for them, and is open to developing an emotional relationship with them, knows animals are more than just small finite state machines made of meat. But it takes time to spot and learn the patterns of behavior, and as I said, it's a two-way street; the animal has to "open up" and learn you as much as you have to learn them.
It is a kind of thing that's difficult to cleanly verify and reproduce, and it's also kinda mundane. The cases that made headlines look like Clever Hans the other commenter mentioned.
I imagine that a better classifier, some general AI system that gets to learn and observe the animals, would be able to tease out the patterns and then translate them to English, and then that would be reproducable and make for flashy headlines.
Imagine trying to explain to animals the story behind those images. You'd have to explain human concepts like ego, greed, brutality (the ability to dehumanize others), technological development of weapons, up to nuclear weapons...
And the main comment thinks the whales will have the brains to understand something like space travel or why we desire it?
Then again, you give me an inkling what humans trying to talk to whales will be faced with.
Maybe ? I know you're trying to make a distinction between communication and language which is fair but all signs we have point to there being a distinct possibility that one of our ocean friends, in the whale and/or cetacean class do have language. It's nowhere near as absurd as you're making out.
I don't speak whale, so it is hard to make a claim. I am sure linguists can estimate the complexity of an animal's utterances with the help of machine learning, using quantitative tools like Zipf's Law, Menzerath's Law, Conditional Shannon Enropy, and Repertoire Size.
Whale and Dolphin "languages" (or substitute "utterances" if the hypothesis is so antithetical to you) score remarkably complexly, close to Human "utterances" (again, if animal language is so offensive a notion) on some of these measures. Dog utterances do not:
Zipf's Law (Data Efficiency)
• Humans: -1.0 slope showing an optimal balance of information and physical effort.
• Whales & Dolphins: -1.0 slope matching the exact mathematical curve of human speech.
• Dogs: No -1.0 slope, heavily skewed toward isolated, repetitive alert spikes.
Menzerath's Law (Physical Pacing)
• Humans: Present; internal sounds get shorter as the total sequence grows longer.
• Whales & Dolphins: Present; highly efficient pacing across multiple species.
• Dogs: Absent; vocalizations lack the structured phrase sequences required for this law.
Shannon Entropy (Predictability)
• Humans: High; complex grammatical dependencies stretch across long sentences.
• Whales & Dolphins: Moderate-High; governed by structural rules and click patterns.
• Dogs: Very Low; individual sounds are isolated events with no grammatical rules.
Repertoire Size (Signal Diversity)
• Humans: Infinite vocabulary built from tens of thousands of words.
• Whales & Dolphins: High diversity with hundreds of whistles and thousands of clicks.
• Dogs: Very small vocal pool limited to roughly 10 distinct sounds.
I'd say, it's difficult to say, but calling the hypothesis of whale language "absurd" sounds like something someone might have said (and still might say, incorrectly) about the concept of evolution by natural selection. I think you are overselling your argument.
I think understanding the conversation without seeing what the speakers do will be very limiting. The concepts will probably need to be built from the ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language unless we have a large amount of data on which we can train GPT
"He believed that making people fall in love with another species might do more for the ocean than any policy paper ever could."
This got my wheels turning. Charismatic megafauna (like whales) already drive the top of the funnel for ecological awareness. Imagine what the cetacean equivalent of the staples baddie could do.
I haven’t read the article, but how are they going to do training. The data requires an input along with the outcome and I don’t think this data includes outcomes because it would be near impossible to record and interpret.
Log all codas to a blockchain (with actual audio) would be cool. I like how this researcher only releases peer reviewed data and doesn't over-promise. Very cool. I think most of knew this was happening but could never prove it like he has.
It seems pretty clear that this is a serious scientific endeavor. I think it's fine for you to be skeptical, but it doesn't feel particularly "in the hacker news spirit" to sarcastically write it off like this
Humans from different cultures have problems communicating clearly. How would we say anything meaningful to creatures who don't share any part of our worldview?
A whale's world is upside down from our point of view - there's a flat upper limit, but no effective lower limit. They are stuck near the surface in the same way we're stuck near the ground. But they live in a much more 3-dimensional world than we do - it's much easier for them to swim down than it is for us to fly up. That's got to affect their thinking and language in ways we can't know. They will have expressions and terms that are relatable to other whales but incomprehensible to us because we don't have that same shared experience.
I think it's great that we're trying, but I'm expecting a pretty dull conversation at the end, purely because we can't say anything more meaningful in a way that they'd understand, and vice versa.
(1) Animal welfare. The researchers are aware of the animal welfare issues at stake, but a collection of metrics around pod culture, stress, and reproduction should be tracked across experiments to make sure we're not hurting the animals. If thresholds are exceeded across multiple experimebts with this tech, the research should stop.
(2) Acoustic -> semantic gap. There's a green lumber problem with this research. We may be able to predict animal responses in playback tests, but we don't have a way to map that back to semantic meaning. This is probably fine for now, but if we don't have adequate semantic theory or if we have multiple competing semantic theories that all explain the patterns equally well, the we're just manipulating the animals, not communicating with them. (eg, It's not even really clear to me that "whale concepts" and "human concepts" would be commensurable.)
(3) Bad incentives. Between media sensationalism, the normal problems and biases that come with funding science today, and potentially terrible usages of "whale tech" (eg, clearing out shipping lanes, warfare), it seems to me there are some extra ethical considerations with this research such that there may be a point where the outcome space is overwhelmingly negative. It would be nice if mechanisms existed such that research could be stopped if these bad incentives activate.
For example; I hate to think of cows being tortured or otherwise abused. I do like a good hamburger.
We are animals too
No, we can't understand lions because lions are kinda stupid. We can't understand lions also because we haven't researched them enough.
My bet: once "beings" cross an IQ threshold, they can start to understand each other.
And of course I can't wait to have the cat translator. That's a big startup idea BTW, just a bit too early still.
Granted those were humpbacks (whales, not people).
When I was a teenager, I took a rowboat out onto what was then called Scammon's Lagoon, in Baja California, where the Grey whales raise their young. A mother whale -- several times the size of our boat -- and her calf approached. The calf was curious but cautious, so the mother nudged it into approaching the boat, close enough that we could reach over and rub its nose, which everyone on the boat did in turns.
What did the whales get out of this? Certainly nothing tangible -- nobody was feeding them or anything like that. But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
I'm certain the mother whale knew what she was doing. She was recruiting us to her side. MUCH more effective, in the long term, than merely running away.
I know the story of a farmer whose wife trained one of their pigs to be living inside the house like a dog. part of everyday activity. But the farmer still killed the pig at the end of the season, because it was the thing to do.
So i think the japanese might not have the same cultural appreciation for the emotional connection with "food"
its a wall many vegan and animal activists are struggling often
> But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
Comment you're replying to is saying that this is optimistic; most people are capable of doublethink, and will quite happily "love" one individual of a species while being completely indifferent to the death and suffering of the rest of that species. I've observed the same phenomenon.
We know animals communicate with each other, and the trend is we generally discover more and have underestimated what many animal species practice and can do.
Everyone agrees that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis have talked together and lived (and bred) together; what makes inter-species communication (assuming a translator or device) impossible?
No, I don’t think “universal translators” are outside the domain of science fiction; but I think us building a device that enables two-way communication between one species and us, is probably more likely than not.
[1]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
Not everyone agrees that Neanderthals possessed language like us either, although evidently they are much, much closer evolutionarily to us than crows or whales, and it is vastly more plausible that they talked. Having Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean that we talked with them though, it needn't have been even consensual, unfortunately.
There is a well-known story about this discussed in Radiolab [2010] https://radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words/transcript
Here's ChatGPT summarizing one section:
> Younger signers had developed a richer vocabulary for mental states—concepts like believe, remember, forget, understand. They were much better than the original older signers at tasks requiring them to reason about what another person thinks or knows. Later, as the older signers picked up those mental-state terms from younger people, some of them improved on the same tests. Senghas describes it as language giving them new insight into other people’s thinking and motivations.
I see several likely stories:
* Much animal communication is practical, descriptive of the present (nothing abstract, or very few abstract concepts)
* If a species could expand its communication, it would give it more powerful tools and allow for more meaningful conversation with humans
* If such a thing is possible, it will be extremely disruptive to that species
I think if you could communicate about abstract ideas with your dog, you could exchange bedtime stories. However, I don't think such a thing is possible today, and it's not clear what species (if any, besides humans) will, in fact, be able to learn such things
I don't think it's particularly controversial to say "written language is a meaningful technology advancement for a civilization", though!
They're pretty damn interesting. Cats sometimes think hard about their responses. And they use metaphors. And express emotions.
There's always the suspicion this is a fake marketing exercise. But if it is, it's a very ornate and extended one.
I have no idea how we're supposed to communicate with aliens if we can't communicate with other mammals.
"They're really stupid and can't do calculus or invent FTL travel" isn't much of an excuse.
Except when we do, but it doesn't make for flashy press releases. Pet owners, vets, farmers throughout history - anyone who lives alongside animals, cares for them, and is open to developing an emotional relationship with them, knows animals are more than just small finite state machines made of meat. But it takes time to spot and learn the patterns of behavior, and as I said, it's a two-way street; the animal has to "open up" and learn you as much as you have to learn them.
It is a kind of thing that's difficult to cleanly verify and reproduce, and it's also kinda mundane. The cases that made headlines look like Clever Hans the other commenter mentioned.
I imagine that a better classifier, some general AI system that gets to learn and observe the animals, would be able to tease out the patterns and then translate them to English, and then that would be reproducable and make for flashy headlines.
The real lesson we should have learned is that horses are stupid and we should have been testing a Border Collie.
And the main comment thinks the whales will have the brains to understand something like space travel or why we desire it?
Then again, you give me an inkling what humans trying to talk to whales will be faced with.
Whale and Dolphin "languages" (or substitute "utterances" if the hypothesis is so antithetical to you) score remarkably complexly, close to Human "utterances" (again, if animal language is so offensive a notion) on some of these measures. Dog utterances do not:
Zipf's Law (Data Efficiency) • Humans: -1.0 slope showing an optimal balance of information and physical effort. • Whales & Dolphins: -1.0 slope matching the exact mathematical curve of human speech. • Dogs: No -1.0 slope, heavily skewed toward isolated, repetitive alert spikes.
Menzerath's Law (Physical Pacing) • Humans: Present; internal sounds get shorter as the total sequence grows longer. • Whales & Dolphins: Present; highly efficient pacing across multiple species. • Dogs: Absent; vocalizations lack the structured phrase sequences required for this law.
Shannon Entropy (Predictability) • Humans: High; complex grammatical dependencies stretch across long sentences. • Whales & Dolphins: Moderate-High; governed by structural rules and click patterns. • Dogs: Very Low; individual sounds are isolated events with no grammatical rules.
Repertoire Size (Signal Diversity) • Humans: Infinite vocabulary built from tens of thousands of words. • Whales & Dolphins: High diversity with hundreds of whistles and thousands of clicks. • Dogs: Very small vocal pool limited to roughly 10 distinct sounds.
I'd say, it's difficult to say, but calling the hypothesis of whale language "absurd" sounds like something someone might have said (and still might say, incorrectly) about the concept of evolution by natural selection. I think you are overselling your argument.
This got my wheels turning. Charismatic megafauna (like whales) already drive the top of the funnel for ecological awareness. Imagine what the cetacean equivalent of the staples baddie could do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_translator
> Don't be snarky
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html