TALKING TO ANIMALS — REALLY?

AI could help build translation system

LONDON • The fantasy of man talking to the animals has been a staple of Hollywood since Doctor Dolittle made his debut 50 years ago.

Two of the original architects of social media believe they may be on the brink of turning it into reality by using artificial intelligence to create a translation system that will understand what animals are saying and what they think of us.

They have analyzed 70 human languages to establish that all have a universal “shape,” such that a computer can translate one into the other without any prior understanding or knowledge.

Aza Raskin, a designer of tech features and software used worldwide, and Britt Selvitelle, founding engineer of Twitter, are creating a similar database for animal communications including whales, monkeys and elephants.

In December, they will add to their 50,000 hours of humpback whale recordings by setting up a huge array of microphones in the Congo to log elephants’ communications at one of the animals’ most populous meeting points in Africa.

It will enable them to compare the architecture of animals’ communications with human language, from which they aim to create a modern-day AI Rosetta Stone to decode and translate what animals are saying.

“Imagine if we could translate an elephant or an orca to say anything like: ‘Stop’ or ‘You are hurting us,’ ” said Raskin, a computer-human interface expert who invented the endless scroll, a model for geolocation and a language-based software used across the tech industry.

“It would have profound implications for our judiciary system and the way we pursue our role as stewards of this tiny, pale blue marble that we call home.”

Raskin hoped the system would be a “cultural awakening moment” for humankind.

“We need empathy incredibly quickly (with animals); otherwise, we are going to live in a world post-nature,” said Raskin, a co-founder of the Centre for Humane Technology, a group of leading tech insiders campaigning for a more responsible industry to protect people from online harms.

“Every time there’s a major advance in rights, whether civil rights, human rights or LGBT rights, it comes from a group that didn’t have a voice being given voice.”

Raskin, who led design at Mozilla Firefox and multiple startups, said the breakthrough came last October with the discovery of a method for translating one language into another without the need to “know either language or have any examples of how to translate between the two.”