“Articulate a stronger defense of why they’re good?”
I’m no expert on animal-welfare stuff, but just thinking out loud, here are some benefits that I could imagine coming from this technology (not trying to weigh them up versus potential harms or prioritize which seem largest or anything like that):
You imagine negative PR consequences once we realize that animals might mostly be thinking about basic stuff like food and sex, but I picture that being only a small second-order consequence—the primary effect, I suspect, is that people’s empathy for animals might be greatly increased by realizing they think about stuff and communicate at all. The idea that animals (especially, like, whales) have sophisticated thoughts and communicate, and the intuition that they probably have valuable internal subjective experience, might both seem “obvious” to animal-welfare activists, but I think for most normal people globally, they either sorta believe that animals have feelings (but don’t think about this very much) or else explicitly believe that animals lack consciousness / can’t think like humans because they don’t have language / don’t have full human souls (if the person is religious) / etc. Hearing animals talk would, I expect, wake people up a little bit more to the idea that intelligence & consciousness exist on a spectrum and animals have some valuable experience (even if less so than humans).
In particular, I’m definitely picturing that the journalists covering such experiments are likely to be some combination of 1. environmentalists who like animals, 2. animal rights activists who like animals, 3. just think animals are cute and figure that a feel-good story portraying animals as sweet and cute will obviously do better numbers than a boring story complaining about how dumb animals are. So, with friendly media coverage, I expect the biggest news stories will be about the cutest / sweetest / most striking / saddest things that animals say, not the boring fact that they spend most of their time complaining about bodily needs just like humans do.
Compare for instance “news coverage” (and other cultural perceptions of) human children. To the extent that toddlers can talk, they are mostly just demanding things, crying, failing to understand stuff, etc. Yet, we find this really cute and endearing (eg, i am a father of a toddler myself, and it’s often very fun). I bet animal communication would similarly be perceived positively, even if (like babies) they’re really dumb compared to adult humans.
Talk-to-animals tech also seems potentially philosophically important in some longtermist, “sentient-futures” style ways:
What’s good versus bad for an animal? Right now we literally just have to guess, based on eyeballing whether the creature seems happy. And if you are less of a total-hedonic-utilitarian, more of a preference utilitarian, the situation gets even worse. It would be nice if we could just ask animals what their problems are, what kind of things they want, etc! Even a very small amount of communication would really increase what we are able to learn about animals’ preferences, and thus how well we are able to treat them in a best-case scenario.
Maybe we could use this tech to do scientific studies and learn valuable things about consciousness, language, subjective experience, etc, in a way that clarifies humanity’s thinking about these slippery issues and helps us better avoid moral catastrophes (perhaps becoming more sympathetic to animals as a result, or getting a better understanding of when AI systems might or might not be capable of suffering).
Perhaps humanity has some sort of moral obligation to (someday, after we solve more pressing problems like not destroying the world or creating misaligned AI) eventually uplift creatures like whales, monkeys, octopi, etc, so they too can explore and comprehend the universe together with us. Talk-to-animals tech might be an early first step toward such future goals, might set early precedents, might help us learn about some of the philosophical / moral choices we would need to make if we embarked on a path of uplifting other species, idk.
“Articulate a stronger defense of why they’re good?”
I’m no expert on animal-welfare stuff, but just thinking out loud, here are some benefits that I could imagine coming from this technology (not trying to weigh them up versus potential harms or prioritize which seem largest or anything like that):
You imagine negative PR consequences once we realize that animals might mostly be thinking about basic stuff like food and sex, but I picture that being only a small second-order consequence—the primary effect, I suspect, is that people’s empathy for animals might be greatly increased by realizing they think about stuff and communicate at all. The idea that animals (especially, like, whales) have sophisticated thoughts and communicate, and the intuition that they probably have valuable internal subjective experience, might both seem “obvious” to animal-welfare activists, but I think for most normal people globally, they either sorta believe that animals have feelings (but don’t think about this very much) or else explicitly believe that animals lack consciousness / can’t think like humans because they don’t have language / don’t have full human souls (if the person is religious) / etc. Hearing animals talk would, I expect, wake people up a little bit more to the idea that intelligence & consciousness exist on a spectrum and animals have some valuable experience (even if less so than humans).
In particular, I’m definitely picturing that the journalists covering such experiments are likely to be some combination of 1. environmentalists who like animals, 2. animal rights activists who like animals, 3. just think animals are cute and figure that a feel-good story portraying animals as sweet and cute will obviously do better numbers than a boring story complaining about how dumb animals are. So, with friendly media coverage, I expect the biggest news stories will be about the cutest / sweetest / most striking / saddest things that animals say, not the boring fact that they spend most of their time complaining about bodily needs just like humans do.
Compare for instance “news coverage” (and other cultural perceptions of) human children. To the extent that toddlers can talk, they are mostly just demanding things, crying, failing to understand stuff, etc. Yet, we find this really cute and endearing (eg, i am a father of a toddler myself, and it’s often very fun). I bet animal communication would similarly be perceived positively, even if (like babies) they’re really dumb compared to adult humans.
Talk-to-animals tech also seems potentially philosophically important in some longtermist, “sentient-futures” style ways:
What’s good versus bad for an animal? Right now we literally just have to guess, based on eyeballing whether the creature seems happy. And if you are less of a total-hedonic-utilitarian, more of a preference utilitarian, the situation gets even worse. It would be nice if we could just ask animals what their problems are, what kind of things they want, etc! Even a very small amount of communication would really increase what we are able to learn about animals’ preferences, and thus how well we are able to treat them in a best-case scenario.
Maybe we could use this tech to do scientific studies and learn valuable things about consciousness, language, subjective experience, etc, in a way that clarifies humanity’s thinking about these slippery issues and helps us better avoid moral catastrophes (perhaps becoming more sympathetic to animals as a result, or getting a better understanding of when AI systems might or might not be capable of suffering).
Perhaps humanity has some sort of moral obligation to (someday, after we solve more pressing problems like not destroying the world or creating misaligned AI) eventually uplift creatures like whales, monkeys, octopi, etc, so they too can explore and comprehend the universe together with us. Talk-to-animals tech might be an early first step toward such future goals, might set early precedents, might help us learn about some of the philosophical / moral choices we would need to make if we embarked on a path of uplifting other species, idk.