Thanks for sharing, agree with all these concerns. Another one I’m worried about is that these kinds of efforts don’t accurately relay what animals are trying to communicate and instead just tell us what we want to hear (like we’re already seeing with misleading ‘dog translation collars’), which could be used as further justification for their exploitation and neglect.
As well as Earth Species Project and Project CETI, there’s lots of tech funding set to come into the field: Google is working on technology for communication with dolphins and the major Chinese tech firm Baidu has filed a patent for animal-human communication technology, and we’ll probably see lots of others following suit. Seeking to slow down these efforts makes sense as an end goal, but as an intermediate goal we could at least try to get as many players in the field to sign up to something like these principles drafted by the More Than Human Life program at New York University (who Project CETI has partnered with).
Thanks for sharing, agree with all these concerns. Another one I’m worried about is that these kinds of efforts don’t accurately relay what animals are trying to communicate and instead just tell us what we want to hear (like we’re already seeing with misleading ‘dog translation collars’), which could be used as further justification for their exploitation and neglect.
As well as Earth Species Project and Project CETI, there’s lots of tech funding set to come into the field: Google is working on technology for communication with dolphins and the major Chinese tech firm Baidu has filed a patent for animal-human communication technology, and we’ll probably see lots of others following suit. Seeking to slow down these efforts makes sense as an end goal, but as an intermediate goal we could at least try to get as many players in the field to sign up to something like these principles drafted by the More Than Human Life program at New York University (who Project CETI has partnered with).