belbalady.net In the seventies of the last century, a gorilla called Koko caught the world’s attention thanks to her ability to use human sign language, as trainers were able to teach her American Sign Language, and she communicated with humans using more than a thousand signs of sign language. But skeptics assert that Coco and other animals that learn, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, do not understand the meaning of what they express in signs, and that attempts to teach other types of animals human language are, in fact, attempts doomed to failure.
While a team of scientists believes that instead of trying to find out if animals can communicate in human language, it is more useful to understand how these creatures communicate with each other.
Among these scientists is Karen Bakker, a researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada and a fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, who says: “We need to understand non-human communication on its own terms, so scientists are now using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence techniques to monitor blades.” Communicate with and understand a wide range of organisms, including plants as well.”
This area of digital bioacoustics is the subject of Packer’s new book, Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Brings Us Closer to the Animal and Plant Realms.
In an interview with Scientific American, Karen Packer talks about how technology can help humans communicate with creatures like bats and honeybees, and how these conversations are forcing us to rethink our relationship with other species. It also recounted the history of human attempts to communicate with animals.
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“There were many attempts in the mid-twentieth century to teach human language to non-human species, especially primates, such as: Gorilla Coco, but these attempts were supported by the assumption that language is unique to humans, and that if we want to prove that animals have language, we will have to prove that she can learn human language and back in time; This is a completely human-centered viewpoint.”
Packer thinks it’s best to think about the capabilities of these creatures living with us on the planet to engage in complex communication styles on their own terms. “We can’t expect honey bees, for example, to speak the language of humans, but these insects actually communicate an interesting language based on vibrations, movements and positioning,” she says.
Here, scientific development, which has become less human-centered, helps us. As the science of (digital bioacoustics) Digital Bioacoustics – which is the science that studies the sounds made by living organisms – is developing greatly and unveiling wonderful results about the communication of living organisms with each other.
She added that this scientific approach does not ask: Can animals speak like humans? Rather, a more important question arises: Can animals communicate complex information to each other, and how do they do it?
Research today takes a very different approach, as it begins by recording the sounds made by animals and even plants, then uses artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to analyze huge amounts of data to discover patterns and link them to behaviors to try to determine whether there is complex information conveyed by the sounds made by these creatures.
What researchers are doing today is not trying to teach these species human language, but rather putting together a dictionary of the signals and sounds that these species make, and then trying to understand what those signals and sounds mean to the species.
How do researchers do this?
Digital bioacoustics depends on the use of very small, portable and lightweight digital recorders, similar to miniature microphones, and scientists install them in various wild places from the Arctic to the Amazon forests, where they can be installed on turtle shells or the backs of whales, and can be placed in the depths of the ocean, or Linking them to birds, they can record the sounds these creatures make continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in remote places that scientists cannot easily reach.
These devices record vast amounts of data, and that’s where artificial intelligence comes in, because the same natural language processing algorithms that we use to such effect in tools like translation can also be used to detect patterns in non-human ways of communicating.
How does AI analyze these communication patterns?
In her book, Parker discusses the study of the researcher (Yossi Yovel), in which he observed nearly twenty species of Egyptian fruit bats for two and a half months and recorded their sounds, then his team used programs to analyze sounds based on artificial intelligence to analyze 15,000 audio clips, and the algorithm linked certain sounds to interactions specific social situations captured on video, such as when bats fight over food.
In the framework of this study, the research team was able to classify the majority of sounds made by bats, and concluded that bats use a more complex conversational language than we thought, as bats argue about food, distinguish between genders when communicating with each other, and even have their own names.
“Mother bats speak to their young in a motherly tone, and while human mothers raise their voices to instruct their offspring, mother bats use lower pitches to teach their offspring certain skills, eliciting an atypical response in their offspring who learn to speak specific words or words,” Parker says. specific signals during their development, which indicates that bats engage in vocal learning.”
And this is a great example of how deep learning can derive these patterns from the data collected from all these sensors and microphones, and reveal something we wouldn’t have accessed without them.
Since most bats communicate through ultrasound, and these waves are higher than our hearing range, and they speak much faster than we speak, which we have to slow them down to listen to them, and also reduce the frequency, we couldn’t do it without AI and machine learning techniques Reaching such results, while these techniques were able to produce specific patterns and use those patterns to communicate again with the bat colony or influence the behavior of the beehive, and this is what researchers are doing now.
How do researchers talk to bees?
In another chapter of the book, Parker deals with the study of a researcher named (Tim Landgraf) in which Faisal observed honey bees, and the kinetic methods that they adopt to communicate with each other.
She said that now artificial intelligence techniques have developed thanks to computer vision and natural language processing, so the team was able to develop algorithms capable of tracking specific bees, and they were able to determine the effect of the signals that these bees launch on the behaviors of the rest of the bees in the same hive.
The researchers found that the bees release signals that have semantics such as: stop, move, and watch out, in addition to other, more complex signals that express distress and direct group orders.
The researcher (Tim Landgraf) was also able to create a robot the size of a bee, which he called (RoboBee), and fed it with all the communication codes that could be extracted from the language of bees. After testing seven or eight prototypes of this robot, he made a robotic bee that can enter the hive and direct commands. Cell members respond to it.
The robotic bee was able to give orders to stop or move, and even implemented some complex communication methods between bees, such as: the circular dance that bees usually perform to guide the rest of the hive to the places of nectar.
Conclusion:
Parker believes that this scientific approach and modern technologies such as artificial intelligence raise many philosophical and ethical questions. You can imagine using these techniques to protect bees from dangers by guiding them to safe nectar spots and not those contaminated with high levels of pesticides.
You can also imagine using them to harm animals by trying to domesticate wild species or trying to control their behavior which affects the ecosystem of the planet.
Insights about the level of development and the degree of complex communication in non-humans also raise some very important philosophical questions. Are humans unique to language over other creatures, or not?
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