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Artificial intelligence promises a new dawn of innovation and liberation. Or oblivion. Or simply another profitable hype cycle. It depends on who you ask.
For many, AI helps fuel a faith that technology will deliver us from ecological disaster, even as that disaster takes hold. This techno-optimism is often framed as the foe of the “ecological turn”—a constellation of beliefs that instead see salvation in living more ecologically, as a part of nature.
As usual, this is a false dichotomy: if AI enables interspecies communication, it could actually help facilitate an ecological turn. As an environmental journalist, I’m fascinated by the social and cultural impacts of this possibility.
From King Solomon’s supposed ability to speak with animals to indigenous peoples’ widespread cooperation with other species, the pieces below show communicating with animals to be an ancient human concern. But now, converging scientific and technological advances present remarkable new possibilities. From the mycelial “wood wide web” to smart slime molds and political honeybees, science is demonstrating that humans don’t monopolize language or intelligence. And cutting-edge AI, drone, and sensor technologies are allowing us to interpret non-human communication like never before.
These possibilities contain profound implications for conservation, law, politics, and culture. Non-human communication is already being integrated into environmental management and governance—as Karen Bakker’s pieces below explore. The Rights of Nature movement is securing ambitious legal rights for non-human organisms, like Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest. Scientists, technologists, conservationists, and philosophers are exploring interspecies democracy with renewed vigor. And discussions about what this all means ethically and culturally are gathering pace.
The effects of interspecies communication will depend on how we interpret, translate, and “speak” with other organisms—processes that raise enormous questions. Can technology translate multisensory languages? What is language? Is true interspecies understanding even possible? What are the potential applications, good and bad, of even partial success? Why are we doing this? The pieces below offer a cross-section of the emerging perspectives on these questions.
How AI Is Decoding the Animal Kingdom (Persis Love, Irene de la Torre Arenas, Sam Learner, and Sam Joiner, Financial Times, January 2024)
This New Yorker essay by Elizabeth Kolbert offers another good introduction, in the form of a deep dive into Project CETI: “the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.”
This interactive report provides an excellent introduction to the topic, from key technologies and ethical questions to headline projects and possible applications. The Financial Times produces some of the best visual storytelling in journalism, and here audio and graphics bring infrasonic elephant rumbles and synthetic chiffchaff calls to life, conveying technical concepts like spectrograms and embedding spaces. Fascinating details—like lemurs and dolphins getting high—also surface throughout.
The piece clarifies the multi-sensory nature of non-human communication and the resulting challenges. Even if AI can interpret these forms of communication, how might it translate into something human-perceptible? The authors quote Aza Raskin, founder of the Earth Species Project, a non-profit using AI to decode non-human communication:
Maybe the translation ends up not looking like a Dr Dolittle or Google translator where you get specific words, but maybe it ends up as flashes of colour and some sound, and you get a sort of a felt sense of what maybe they mean.
The writing also powerfully demonstrates the potentially seismic consequences of using AI to speak to animals. Cetaceans have transmitted oral culture for around 34 million years, over 10 times longer than humans. Given humpback whales can disseminate a song across the planet within a couple of seasons, attempting to speak to a whale, says Raskin, “may create . . . a viral meme that infects a 34mn-year-old culture, which we probably shouldn’t do.” Shane Gero, the lead biologist at Project CETI, which is working to translate sperm whale communication, agrees:
The last thing any of us want to do is be in a scenario where we look back and say, like Einstein did, ‘If I had known better I would have never helped with the bomb.’
The Challenges of Animal Translation (Philip Ball, The New Yorker, April 2021)
One of the most fraught philosophical and ethical questions involved in interspecies communication is whether humans can ever be sure of correctly understanding another species. This fine piece by Philip Ball explores the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to certain translations, but also the profound value in trying and failing.
Language is an enabler of, and a constraint on, what we can say and even think. Diverse biologies and environments equip organisms with radically different sensory worlds (the scientific term is “umwelten”). Bees see in ultraviolet, for example, and bats hear in ultrasonic. Can unfamiliar umwelten ever be comprehensible to humans? Though AI may help interpret non-human language in meaningful ways, there seems an almost unavoidable risk of projecting anthropocentric ideas and prejudices during translation—of “overinterpreting what we see,” in Ball’s words. He cites the Swadesh list, which contains 215 supposedly universal concepts across languages. Many of its words, he notes, would have no “dolphish” equivalent.
Nevertheless, the most stirring part of Ball’s essay is his eloquent articulation of why it’s still worth trying. Mystery, he writes, is a possible antidote to human hubris:
It may be that the most interesting, revealing part of dolphish is precisely the part that lies outside our own lexicon—which is to say, outside our own minds. If, in fact, we find ourselves unable to fully reconstruct another creature’s mental world, it may be enough just to acknowledge the reality of what we can’t articulate.
In other ways, even basic communication may be of value. Some of our mistreatment of other species is obviously callous and selfish, as in factory farming, but some of it arises from a communications breakdown.
Moreover, Ball writes, “Even the attempt at translation suggests a deepening of respect for [non-humans]—and a willingness to free ourselves from our human preconceptions and prejudices.” Failure could well bring a different form of success: deepening interspecies respect.
How to Speak Honeybee (Karen Bakker, Noema, November 2022)
This other Noema piece by Bakker makes an excellent companion. It charts the confluence of technologies, including AI-powered whale interpretation, being incorporated into shipping logistics and other marine-governance initiatives.
The late Karen Bakker was one of the world’s leading thinkers on interspecies communication. This essay, on the dazzling linguistic capabilities of honeybees, is one of the essential Noema pieces she wrote on the larger topic.
Bakker opens with an important reminder that interspecies communication long predates AI. She tells the story of pioneering ethologist and zoologist Karl von Frisch, whose work illuminating non-human language won him a 1973 Nobel Prize (and ample opprobrium). Bakker also acknowledges the many indigenous peoples that, long before von Frisch, developed vibroacoustic devices like bullhorns to communicate with bees.
Bakker then traces a string of remarkable discoveries around honeybee communication. Honeybees’ waggle dance, “still considered by many scientists to be the most complex symbolic system that humans have decoded to date in the animal world,” can relay nectar sources miles away. Vibroacoustic research has determined that honeybees can distinguish and recall complex information, and learn and teach skills through cultural transmission. Dr. Thomas Seeley’s research has combined computer vision and machine learning to make other striking discoveries:
Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society.
This research lineage culminated in RoboBee: a robotic bee able to communicate with bees through programmed waggle dancing. “A statistically significant number of bees would follow the RoboBee’s dance and then fly to the specific location that [researcher Tim] Landgraf had coded into his honeybee robots,” reports Bakker. “He had created, in essence, a bio-digital equivalent to Google Translate for bees.”
Bakker’s work engages thoughtfully with potential applications of even rudimentary interspecies communication. Here, she considers how RoboBee might enable smart hives that help bees avoid threats and locate food sources. She also outlines the wider bio-sensing possibilities in decoding waggle dances:
When gathering nectar, bees continuously sample from the environment, so who better to act as a sentinel for environmental risk? Bees and other insects have been successfully trained to detect a range of chemicals and pollutants. Decoding a large number of dances from a specific area could help evaluate landscapes for sustainability and conservation. It could also make pollination more efficient and provide insights into how to ward off the widespread, alarming phenomenon of colony collapse disorder. Bees could also be recruited as live bioindicators: surveying, monitoring and reporting the landscape in a fine-grained, inexpensive way that would be impossible for humans to achieve alone.
But there is a violent shadow to this possible light. The United States military has already started testing bee bio-detectors—what military scientists dub “six-legged soldiers”—for security objectives. This requires “genetic and mechanical manipulation of the bees’ nervous systems, migration patterns, and social relationships,” Bakker writes. She goes on:
To witness biohybrid bees engaging in reciprocal (if rudimentary) interspecies communication gives me a numinous sense of awe. To witness bees being converted into disposable, militarized sensing devices gives me a sense of dread. These two choices are emblematic of humanity’s relationship with nature. Will we choose dominion or kinship?
Ethologies of Animal Politics (Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Public Seminar, January 2024)
The notion of idly chatting with a sperm whale elicits sci-fi awe. But what if interspecies communication facilitated joint governance?
Notwithstanding the oppressed worldviews of many animistic indigenous cultures, a steadfast belief in human exceptionalism has long hindered any meaningful consideration of interspecies democracy. But Donaldson and Kymlicka, two thinkers at the forefront of the field, say this is changing:
A century of orthodoxy that viewed animals—from horses to hyenas, from crows to cuckoos—as tightly scripted and instinctive creatures is being overturned. It turns out that many animals are genuinely social and cultural beings—reasoning, norm-complying, and behaviorally flexible individuals who come to be who they are within a particular social and cultural group whose practices are passed down through social learning, not (or not just) instinct.
Science has now shown many animals can learn how “we do things around here,” reinterpret songs and skills, and form political systems that involve voting, deliberating, splitting, and regrouping. Instinct and hierarchy play only a partial role—much like with humans, who are not, it turns out, Earth’s only “zoon politikon.”
Melanie Challenger is a writer and ethicist at the vanguard of interspecies democracy. This poetic Emergence Magazine essay (also a podcast) interweaves personal experience and emergent frameworks.
Donaldson and Kymlicka sketch two dominant strands of thought within interspecies political theory: a conception of non-human organisms as political agents to be represented by humans; and the view that “wild animals should be viewed as self-determining political communities or ‘nations,’ with rights of self-government, territorial sovereignty, or grounded jurisdiction, and that relations between humans and wild animals should be seen on the model of international diplomacy.”
The missing piece, which technologically enabled governance models are starting to explore, is collaboration:
Neither offers a vision of politics as something humans and animals do together. The first insists humans should take animals’ interests into account while continuing to exercise sovereignty over their lives; the second insists animals have the right to exercise their own forms of collective political agency. But neither offers an account of how humans and animals can exercise political agency together as part of shared political communities, how they can be mutually responsive and accountable and coauthor social norms and ideas of the public good.
An Ecological Technology (James Bridle, Emergence Magazine, December 2022)
This last piece zooms out, lest we lose the forest for the trees. James Bridle is an insightful thinker on AI and intelligence. This conversation with Emergence Magazine (also available as a podcast) exhibits his irreverent, thought-provoking perspective on political and philosophical questions around interspecies communication.
For Bridle’s similarly critical assessment of generative AI beyond the context of interspecies communication, this Guardian essay is also excellent.
Bridle begins with a critique of humans’ anthropocentric understanding of intelligence as simply “what humans do.” He argues that although AI should alert us to the possibility of diverse intelligence, we persist in programming and assessing AI along human-centric lines. He instead calls for a multiplicity of embodied, relational, and analog forms of intelligence:
When you try and put everything into ones and zeros, something is lost. What happens in between those ones and zeros is lost, and the result of that is a deep violence, because what is lost is either erased or violently suppressed; because then you’ve started to act in the world according to the model that the computer provides. And you try to make the world more like the model.
Bridle champions listening over knowing and curiosity over control as prerequisites for interspecies kinship:
Once you are prepared to pay attention to [non-human organisms]—and that’s really, really key—once you are prepared to admit the possibility of their intelligence, it becomes almost instantly undeniable. And so the project, really, then is to integrate that awareness into our lives.
Building on the hope he sees in the unfolding ecological turn, Bridle finishes with a powerful vision of a more just technological culture, guided by decentralization, non-binary thinking, and unknowing:
Inter-species solidarity is fundamental to new politics. And it doesn’t require knowing. And by ‘politics,’ more broadly, I mean the ability to think and make decisions together, hopefully for our common benefit. And the politics that best fits that, for me, is this idea of solidarity, which simply starts from the position that you—unknowable you; unknowably, incredibly different you, who I cannot imagine—I still care for you and value you and think you are as important, and I will stand with you. That, for me, is the heart of solidarity. It’s a simple acknowledgment of the value of all forms of life and of our common, shared goals that have to lie at the heart of any movement towards a more just and equal world.
Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin
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