Alien Communication starts with the animals

We can imagine the marvel of first contact, whether alien or AI, and it starts with communication.

We can practice with the isolated animal intelligences all around us. We hosted a gathering for the leadership of the Earth Species Project, with an ambitious plan to do just that, using multimodal AI models.

“Everything that can be translated will be, by 2030.”— Aza Raskin of ESP, and:

“It’s impossible without scale and inevitable with scale.” (of data and compute)

“We will face the unusual situation where our AI will communicate with animals before we understand what they are saying.”

“Human languages have evolved over a couple hundred thousand years. Whale and dolphin language has evolved over 34 million years. And some are multilingual, using a third language when hunting together off the coast of Norway.”

“Beluga whales announce themselves with their unique name and clan ID. Parrots teach each of their chicks their name in the nest—a lifelong signature that connects them to their family and community.”

“And there are different cultures. The is a fascinating community of crows in Spain that operate unlike other crows. They raise their young as a group, like a kibbutz. They have a unique dialect for collaborative parenting. When an outside crow joins the group, it learns the dialect and participates in the unique culture. The crows have different personalities and there is a lot of drama. There is one adult that none of the other mothers like. She has to zip in and out quickly to feed the young before being chased off by the others.”

“Humpback whale songs go viral. There is group of whales off Australia that are like the K-pop singers. Their songs propagate globally over a couple years."

"An orca once wore a salmon hat, and it became a fashion trend among orcas.”

“80% of animal communication is relatively quiet one-to-one communication, and we need to capture that. It’s a perception problem. Of the animal recordings made, only 3% of the data have been analyzed. There has been little progress in orca communications in the past 20 years.”

“Many indigenous myths start with communication with the animals and nature. And then we forget how. We became disconnected.”