AI looks poised to disrupt how humans act and behave, but it could also end up changing our relationship with other living beings around us.
In a recent interview, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a leading AI safety and research company, made a startling prediction: artificial intelligence may soon enable us to communicate with animals. His comments, rooted in observations about the adaptability of AI language models, offer a glimpse into a future where the lines of interspecies communication blur. Amodei’s perspective stems from the realization that AI systems, despite their generic architecture, effectively master human language. This proficiency hints at a potential to decipher and perhaps even reciprocate the complex communication patterns of other species.
“When I train AI systems to predict the next word,” Amodei explained, “they have almost no priors. Their architecture is very generic; it’s not structured to understand language. You can argue—linguists argue over it—whether the human brain is structured or adapted in some way to language in particular. Transformer architecture is so generic, I think we can confidently say they pretty much aren’t.”
He continued, “And yet they’re able to learn human languages very well. And so, if we look at the patterns of communication that animals have when they talk to each other, there’s a lot we don’t know. But I think there’s enough, at least with some animals—you mention whales, whales or dolphins—there’s some significant complexity to their communications with each other.”
Amodei’s prediction hinges on the versatility of these AI systems: “So it would be my pretty strong prediction that if we can train AI systems on the patterns in these communications, they’ll be able to make sense of them. AI systems, they’re general pattern learners and pattern recognizers. If they can learn human languages, my guess is they can probably decode something about these animals.”
This decoding, he suggests, could lead to a groundbreaking shift in interspecies interaction: “And perhaps this would allow us to generate synthetic signals that could let us talk to the animals.”
It’s a pretty interesting prediction. Thus far, most people have been looking to predict how AI could disrupt white collar jobs, human relationships and governance and politics, but Amodei’s assertion about AI enabling humans to talk to animals shows how wide-ranging AI’s impact might be. AI is just getting started, and it could end up changing our lives in ways we haven’t yet considered.