Can a powerful model become a fantastic autocomplete for dolphins ? Sure. Someday soon that's very likely to happen. But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.
To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree.
It would help if the dolphins are also interested in teaching us. Dolphins or we could say to the other '... that is how we pronounce sea-cucumber'. Shared nouns would be the easiest.
The next level, a far harder level, would be to reach the stage where we can say 'the emotion that you are feeling now, that we call "anger"'.
We will no quite have the right word for "anxiety that I feel when my baby's blood flow doesn't sound right in Doppler".
Teaching or learning 'ennui' and 'schadenfreude' would be a whole lot harder.
This begs a question can one fully feel and understand an emotion we do not have a word for ? Perhaps Wittgenstein has an answer.
Postscript: I seem to have triggered quite a few of you and that has me surprised. I thought this would be neither controversial nor unpopular. It's ironic in a way. If we can't understand each other, understanding dolphin "speech" would be a tough hill to climb.
The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible. You also probably don't have kids. For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins can also see (divers with) some objects and name them. We can also guess what they are saying from the sounds plus the actions they do. That's probably how we got "seagrass" in the first place.
For all the word that they don't have in their language, we/they can invent them. Just like we do all the time: artificial intelligence, social network, skyscraper, surfboard, tuxedo, black hole, whatever...
It might also be possible that dolphins' language uses the same patterns as our language(s) and that an LLM that knows both can manage to translate between the two.
I suggest a bit more optimistic look on the world, especially on something that's pretty-much impossible to have any negative consequences for humanity.
Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults.
If you had read this part --
"But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.
To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree."
it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds.
I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.
That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_. You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement. AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it. Let's give it a shot.
There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.
> You do not think this is possible.
Not at all.
I believe just throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.
I quote myself again -- 'But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means".
Note the emphasis on the word alone.
What needs to happen is to build shared experiences, perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML training process. If this succeeds this exercise of building shared experience will do heavier lifting than the LLM.
Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not hold high hopes.
> shared experiences and emotions
I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.
Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.
Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)
Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.
Sorry, it's not really, just a personal nickname for him. Although I think I recall that Austin would call him Witters (very much to this annoyance).
I think you are describing more of an edge case than you might think for a vertebrate, mammal, social, warm blooded, air breathing, earth living, pack hunter.
Yes there is a lot we have common, especially the social part. But our worlds and primary senses are really very different.
Even a limited success would gladden my heart.
>To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds
Why? With modern AI there exists unsupervised learning for translation where you don't have to explicitly make translation pairs between the 2 languages. It seems possible to eventually create a way to translate without having to have a teaching process for individual words like you describe.
Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.
This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.
The word is just a 'pointer' to the underlying shared experience, so I don't think you could; the kid would come away thinking red is the same thing as the feeling of splinters or the warmth of a sunset, which isn't what red is, those are just feelings maybe associated with red. That said - I'm actually pretty confident we'll be able to have basic "conversations" made of basic snippets of information with dolphins and whales in my lifetime. Maybe not complex grammatical structure we identify with, but small stuff like: "I'm hungry". I'm not sure if dolphins could understand "fish or octopus for dinner?", because they might not have any idea of a logical 'OR', and perhaps they might don't even differentiate between fish/octopus.
We do share (presumably) experiences of hunger, pain, happiness, the perception of gradations of light and shape/form within them, some kind of dimensionally bound spatial medium they exist in as an individual and are moving through - though of course they might not conceive of these as "dimensions" or "space", they would surely have analogs for directional words - although given they aren't constrained to live on top of a 2D surface, these might not be "up", "down", "left", "right", but something in the vein of "lightward" or "darkward" as the two main directions, and then some complicated 3D rotational coordinate system for modeling direction. Who knows, maybe they even use quaternions!
Very poetically put and absolutely agree.
For the subset of shared experiences and emotions this should be possible, not only that, I feel that we must try (as in, it's a moral/ ethical obligation).
Training an ML on dialogues alone will not be enough. One would need to spend a lot of time to build up a wealth of shared experiences, so that one can learn the mapping/correspondence.
That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.
Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.
It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.
It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.
Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.
There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. That it's impossible to translate between blind and sighted people because they don't "truley" experience color? That's clearly not the case. Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.
I elaborated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684124
> Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.
Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human languages have come up with names for experiences they share.
The hard part is learning the correspondence between say two nouns in different languages that mean the same thing.
Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come from some shared grounded experience/emotion.
The French word x word relationship graph has to get connected to the English word x word relationship graph.
BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous challenge just to get to the point where the person understand that things have names. For example for Hellen Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus will not suffice.
imagine thinking qualia can be described and understood... with words! lol lmao