AI is poised to revolutionize our understanding of animal communication
Underneath the thick forest canopy on a remote island in the South Pacific, a New Caledonian Crow peers from its perch, dark eyes glittering. The bird carefully removes a branch, strips off unwanted leaves with its bill and fashions a hook from the wood. The crow is a perfectionist: if it makes an error, it will scrap the whole thing and start over. When it's satisfied, the bird pokes the finished utensil into a crevice in the tree and fishes out a wriggling grub.
Decoding animal vocalizations could aid conservation and welfare efforts. It could also have a startling impact on us. Raskin compares the coming revolution to the invention of the telescope. “We looked out at the universe and discovered that Earth was not the center,” he says. The power of AI to reshape our understanding of animals, he thinks, will have a similar effect. “These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything.
As sensors have gotten cheaper and technologies such as hydrophones, biologgers and drones have improved, the amount of animal data has exploded. There's suddenly far too much for biologists to sift through efficiently by hand. AI thrives on vast quantities of information, though.
You can already use one kind of AI-powered analysis with Merlin, a free app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that identifies bird species. To identify a bird by sound, Merlin takes a user's recording and converts it into a spectrogram—a visualization of the volume, pitch and length of the bird's call. The model is trained on Cornell's audio library, against which it compares the user's recording to predict the species identification.
Now Slobodchikoff is developing an AI model aimed at translating a dog's facial expressions and barks for its owner. He has no doubt that as researchers expand their studies to domestic animals, machine-learning advances will reveal surprising capabilities in pets. “Animals have thoughts, hopes, maybe dreams of their own,” he says.
Daniela Rus, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, leans back in an armchair in her office, surrounded by books and stacks of papers. She is eager to explore the new possibilities for studying animal communication that machine learning has opened up.
The prospect of this achievement raises ethical concerns. Karen Bakker, a digital innovations researcher and author of The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, explains that there may be unintended ramifications.
Raskin shrugs off these concerns. He doubts animals are saying “pass me the banana,” but he suspects we will discover some basis for communication in common experiences. “It wouldn't surprise me if we discovered [expressions for] ‘grief’ or ‘mother’ or ‘hungry’ across species,” he says. After all, the fossil record shows that creatures such as whales have been vocalizing for tens of millions of years. “For something to survive a long time, it has to encode something very deep and very true.
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