That said, it does seem they all tried to understand whale language instead of teaching whales human language like your idea. There is an honest chance you’ll succeed when they haven’t.
If sperm whales actually are “superintelligent” after getting enough education, the benefits would be a million-fold greater than the costs.
They would be far easier to control/align than ASI because they might have human-like values to begin with, get smarter gradually, be as bribe-able as humans, and work in human-like timescales.
In conclusion, it feels very worthwhile :)
Edit:
Reasons orcas might be smarter:
Their brains are bigger, as you said.
They evolved a very long time with a large brain, and have algorithms better adapted to a larger brain. e.g. if you genetically engineered a chimp to have a human sized brain, it probably won’t be as smart as humans because it didn’t evolve long enough with a large brain.
Reasons orcas might be dumber:
They evolved a very long time with a large brain. Paradoxically, this reason can make them dumber too. Their brains may “overfit their environment,” relying more on a ton of small heuristics fine tuned for their ancestral environment, and relying less on general intelligence.
The parts of intelligence required for tool use, engineering, and inventing, are more useful for prehistoric humans than orcas.
Attempts to communicate haven’t succeeded. This doesn’t prove much because the simplest explanation is that communication is very hard, in fact many human languages can’t be decoded. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence they do have language (as you mentioned in your posts).
I know of Earth Species Project (ESP) and CETI (though I only read 2 publications of ESP and none of CETI).
I don’t expect them to succeed in something equivalent to decoding orca language to an extent that we could communicate with them almost as richly as they communicate among each other. (Though like, if long-range sperm whales signals are a lot simpler they might be easier to decode.)
From what I’ve seen, they are mostly trying to throw AI at stuff and hoping somehow they will understand stuff, without having a clear plan how to actually decode it. The AI stuff might look advanced but it’s sorta obvious things to try and I think it’s unlikely to work very well, though still glad they are trying this.
If you look at orca vocalizations, it looks complex and alien. The patterns we can currently recognize there look very different from what we’d be able to see in an unknown human language. The embedding mapping might be useful if we had to decode a human language, and maybe we still learn some useful stuff from it, but for orca language we don’t even know what their analog of words and sentences are and maybe their language works even somewhat differently (though I’d guess if they are smarter than humans there’s probably going to be something like words and sentences—but they might be encoded differently in the signals than in human languages).
Though definitely plausible that AI can help significantly with decoding animal languages, but I think it also needs forming deep understanding of some things and I think it’s likely too hard for ESP to succeed anytime soon, though like possible a supergenius could do it in a few years, but it would be really impressive.
My approach may fail, especially if orcas aren’t at least roughly human-level smart, but it has the advantage that we can show orcas precise context of what some words and sentences mean, whereas we basically have almost no context data on recordings of orca vocalizations, so it’s easier for them to see what some signals mean than for humans to infer what orca vocalizations mean. (Even if we had a lot of video datasets with vocalizations (which we don’t), it’s still a lot less context information about what they are talking about, than if they could show us images to indicate what they would talk about.) Of course humans have more research experience and better tools for decoding signals, but it doesn’t look to me like anyone is currently remotely close, and my approach is much quicker to try and might have at least a decent chance. (I mean it nonzero worked with bottlenose dolphins (in terms of grammar better than with great apes), though I’d be a lot more ambitious.)
Of course, the language I create will also be alien for orcas, but I think if they are good enough at abstract pattern recognition they might still be able to learn it.
though I’d guess if they are smarter than humans there’s probably going to be something like words and sentences
the highest form of language might be “neuralese”, directly sharing your latent pre-verbal cognition. (idk how much intelligence that requires though. actually, i’d guess it more requires a particular structure which is ready to receive it, and not intelligence per se. e.g. the brain already receives neuralese from other parts of the brain. so the real question is how hard it is to evolve neuralese-emitting/-receiving structures.) also, in this framing, human language is a discrete-ized form of neuralese (standardized into words before emitting); maybe orca language would be ‘less discrete’ (less ‘word’-based) or discrete-ized at smaller intervals (more specific ‘words’).
Aza Raskin from the Earth Species Project is trying to translate whale language to English, by modelling whale language using an LLM, and rotating the whale LLM’s embedding space to fit an English LLM’s embedding space. It sounds very advanced but, as far as I know, they haven’t translated anything yet. I’m not sure if they tried orcas in particular. Project CETI has also been working on sperm whales for a while but made no headlines.
That said, it does seem they all tried to understand whale language instead of teaching whales human language like your idea. There is an honest chance you’ll succeed when they haven’t.
If sperm whales actually are “superintelligent” after getting enough education, the benefits would be a million-fold greater than the costs.
They would be far easier to control/align than ASI because they might have human-like values to begin with, get smarter gradually, be as bribe-able as humans, and work in human-like timescales.
In conclusion, it feels very worthwhile :)
Edit:
Reasons orcas might be smarter:
Their brains are bigger, as you said.
They evolved a very long time with a large brain, and have algorithms better adapted to a larger brain. e.g. if you genetically engineered a chimp to have a human sized brain, it probably won’t be as smart as humans because it didn’t evolve long enough with a large brain.
Reasons orcas might be dumber:
They evolved a very long time with a large brain. Paradoxically, this reason can make them dumber too. Their brains may “overfit their environment,” relying more on a ton of small heuristics fine tuned for their ancestral environment, and relying less on general intelligence.
The parts of intelligence required for tool use, engineering, and inventing, are more useful for prehistoric humans than orcas.
Attempts to communicate haven’t succeeded. This doesn’t prove much because the simplest explanation is that communication is very hard, in fact many human languages can’t be decoded. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence they do have language (as you mentioned in your posts).
Thanks. Yep I agree with you, some elaboration:
(This comment assumes you at least read the basic summary of my project (or watched the intro video).)
I know of Earth Species Project (ESP) and CETI (though I only read 2 publications of ESP and none of CETI).
I don’t expect them to succeed in something equivalent to decoding orca language to an extent that we could communicate with them almost as richly as they communicate among each other. (Though like, if long-range sperm whales signals are a lot simpler they might be easier to decode.)
From what I’ve seen, they are mostly trying to throw AI at stuff and hoping somehow they will understand stuff, without having a clear plan how to actually decode it. The AI stuff might look advanced but it’s sorta obvious things to try and I think it’s unlikely to work very well, though still glad they are trying this.
If you look at orca vocalizations, it looks complex and alien. The patterns we can currently recognize there look very different from what we’d be able to see in an unknown human language. The embedding mapping might be useful if we had to decode a human language, and maybe we still learn some useful stuff from it, but for orca language we don’t even know what their analog of words and sentences are and maybe their language works even somewhat differently (though I’d guess if they are smarter than humans there’s probably going to be something like words and sentences—but they might be encoded differently in the signals than in human languages).
Though definitely plausible that AI can help significantly with decoding animal languages, but I think it also needs forming deep understanding of some things and I think it’s likely too hard for ESP to succeed anytime soon, though like possible a supergenius could do it in a few years, but it would be really impressive.
My approach may fail, especially if orcas aren’t at least roughly human-level smart, but it has the advantage that we can show orcas precise context of what some words and sentences mean, whereas we basically have almost no context data on recordings of orca vocalizations, so it’s easier for them to see what some signals mean than for humans to infer what orca vocalizations mean. (Even if we had a lot of video datasets with vocalizations (which we don’t), it’s still a lot less context information about what they are talking about, than if they could show us images to indicate what they would talk about.) Of course humans have more research experience and better tools for decoding signals, but it doesn’t look to me like anyone is currently remotely close, and my approach is much quicker to try and might have at least a decent chance. (I mean it nonzero worked with bottlenose dolphins (in terms of grammar better than with great apes), though I’d be a lot more ambitious.)
Of course, the language I create will also be alien for orcas, but I think if they are good enough at abstract pattern recognition they might still be able to learn it.
the highest form of language might be “neuralese”, directly sharing your latent pre-verbal cognition. (idk how much intelligence that requires though. actually, i’d guess it more requires a particular structure which is ready to receive it, and not intelligence per se. e.g. the brain already receives neuralese from other parts of the brain. so the real question is how hard it is to evolve neuralese-emitting/-receiving structures.) also, in this framing, human language is a discrete-ized form of neuralese (standardized into words before emitting); maybe orca language would be ‘less discrete’ (less ‘word’-based) or discrete-ized at smaller intervals (more specific ‘words’).