The chilling development of AI means that robots can now talk to animals, and we may be able to follow

HUMANS are one step closer to talking to animals as new technologies allow AI robots to talk to different species.

Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, recently revealed that this technology is used to communicate with bees, dolphins and elephants and offered a warning about the development.

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“Now, this raises a very serious ethical question, because the ability to talk to other species sounds intriguing and fascinating, but it could be used to create a deeper sense of kinship or a sense of mastery and manipulation ability to tame wild species. which we as humans have never previously been able to control,” Bakker said in an interview published with vox.

She noted the use of artificial intelligence to communicate with the bees Germany.

“A research team in Germany encoded the bees’ signals into a robot that they sent to a hive,” Bakker said.

“This robot is able to use the bees’ flutter dance communication to tell them to stop moving, and is able to tell them where to fly to get a specific source of nectar.”

“The next stage of this research is to implant them robots in bee hives, so the hives accept these robots as members of their community from birth.”

At the time, Bakker stressed that humans would have “an unprecedented degree of control” over these hives, essentially “domesticating” them.

“This creates the possibility of exploitative use of animals. And there’s a long history of military use of animals, so that’s a path that I think sets off a lot of alarm bells,” he said.

For Bakker, who discusses more recent technology in his book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, these concerns should not prevent scientists from pursuing animal communication.

“But the hope is that with these ethics in place, in the future, we, you and I, ordinary people, will have a much better ability to tune into the sounds of nature and to understand what we’re hearing,” he said. . said

“And I think what it does is create a real sense of awe and wonder and also a sense of deep kinship. That’s where I was hoping these technologies would go.”

In the Vox interview, Bakker noted that using AI to communicate with animals is very different from how humans have tried in the past.

For example, he pointed to teaching primates human language or sign language, calling this a “very human-centric view.”

Now, research and technology focus on the behaviors and patterns of different species.

Bakker explained that the process starts with recording the sounds animals and plants make to detect patterns and “associating those with behaviors also tries to determine if there is complex information that the sounds convey.”

“What [these researchers] What he’s doing is not trying to teach these species human language, but compiling, essentially, dictionaries of signals and then trying to understand what those signals mean within those species,” he told the outlet.

So far, Bakker said, research has determined that elephants have different signals for bees, which they consider a threat, and humans.

Even more, elephants it can also distinguish between non-threatening humans and threatening humans.

“It’s funny, humans as a species tend to believe that what we can’t observe doesn’t exist,” Bakker said.

“So many of these sounds were literally right in front of our ears. But because of a tendency, especially in Western science, to privilege sight over sound, we simply hadn’t heard them.”