Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".
No I meant Rob - Doug's fatter more drug addicted younger brother. He made some rather hateful comments to people who commute by bicycle back in the day. I didn't realize he died a decade ago (apologies for being a bit behind on local politics 2500 miles and one border away from home).
Toronto is embroiled in partisan politicking around bike lanes. The provincial premiere is overriding city council to have them removed, which is what I suspect is the motivation behind the parent comment.
You will never stop hearing about this until they are restored. Also enjoy your very slow commute with all the bikes now legally required to ride in the car lane and block you.
I'm saying it's a fallacy is you use sampling bias on one factor to discredit another unrelated factor.
If you pick a sample to test a new painkiller, you should include an equal amount of men and women, old and young people, people of different ethnic backgrounds, etc. to have a balanced sample.
On the other hand, you do not need to have equal shares of people whose favorite color is blue, red, green, etc. because that clearly has no relation with how people would react to medicine.
Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns all use a different currency. Finns and Sicilians do share a currency though, but all these countries have different immigration policies and regulations. I don't think you really know how the EU works.
Crows can remember a human face for 17 years, and pass this knowledge through their murder (group).
We know animals communicate with each other, and the trend is we generally discover more and have underestimated what many animal species practice and can do.
Everyone agrees that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis have talked together and lived (and bred) together; what makes inter-species communication (assuming a translator or device) impossible?
No, I don’t think “universal translators” are outside the domain of science fiction; but I think us building a device that enables two-way communication between one species and us, is probably more likely than not.
I pissed off a crow once, not a good idea. It got its revenge and it was crazy how its murder group would destroy my property. Luckily they have moved on but I make friends with them now and understand them much better.
There's a classic "This American Life" episode along those lines. Poor sap ended up wearing a fake beard and glasses on the back of his head just be be able to leave the house. Bonkers.-
I think you are very naïve about how complicated language is. I'm not saying animals lack any intelligence whatsoever, but I don't see how remembering faces means you'll be able to talk. The crows could just have acted hostile to the masked people in front of each other. Communicating is not the same thing as language which is vastly more expressive than any non-human animal is capable of.
Not everyone agrees that Neanderthals possessed language like us either, although evidently they are much, much closer evolutionarily to us than crows or whales, and it is vastly more plausible that they talked. Having Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean that we talked with them though, it needn't have been even consensual, unfortunately.
Lots of animals communicate with each other, I think we agree. If we can automatically translate their communicative utterances into English (or any other utterances that we understand), in general, that would be remarkable, and useful! Who cares whether those utterances qualify as "language".
My whole point is what we could communicate would be profoundly limited. It's like how we can communicate with dogs to a certain extent, but we're not telling them bedtime stories. The comment I responded to originally is fantasising an absurd degree of complexity in communication which is profoundly unrealistic.
> Younger signers had developed a richer vocabulary for mental states—concepts like believe, remember, forget, understand. They were much better than the original older signers at tasks requiring them to reason about what another person thinks or knows. Later, as the older signers picked up those mental-state terms from younger people, some of them improved on the same tests. Senghas describes it as language giving them new insight into other people’s thinking and motivations.
I see several likely stories:
* Much animal communication is practical, descriptive of the present (nothing abstract, or very few abstract concepts)
* If a species could expand its communication, it would give it more powerful tools and allow for more meaningful conversation with humans
* If such a thing is possible, it will be extremely disruptive to that species
I think if you could communicate about abstract ideas with your dog, you could exchange bedtime stories. However, I don't think such a thing is possible today, and it's not clear what species (if any, besides humans) will, in fact, be able to learn such things
Nicaraguan sign language is evidence for an innate language capacity, not that it is an invented technology and certainly not evidence for Sapir Whorf.
Communication is a two-way street, with both parties negotiating and evolving some "communication protocol" over time. We won't know how far we'll be able to go until we're able to try.
Except when we do, but it doesn't make for flashy press releases. Pet owners, vets, farmers throughout history - anyone who lives alongside animals, cares for them, and is open to developing an emotional relationship with them, knows animals are more than just small finite state machines made of meat. But it takes time to spot and learn the patterns of behavior, and as I said, it's a two-way street; the animal has to "open up" and learn you as much as you have to learn them.
It is a kind of thing that's difficult to cleanly verify and reproduce, and it's also kinda mundane. The cases that made headlines look like Clever Hans the other commenter mentioned.
I imagine that a better classifier, some general AI system that gets to learn and observe the animals, would be able to tease out the patterns and then translate them to English, and then that would be reproducable and make for flashy headlines.
Imagine trying to explain to animals the story behind those images. You'd have to explain human concepts like ego, greed, brutality (the ability to dehumanize others), technological development of weapons, up to nuclear weapons...
And the main comment thinks the whales will have the brains to understand something like space travel or why we desire it?
Then again, you give me an inkling what humans trying to talk to whales will be faced with.
>Then again, you give me an inkling what humans trying to talk to whales will be faced with.
Because I think your analogy is piss poor? Sorry to have contradicted you, Omniscient One! Get the fuck off your high horse, you're nothing special and that was downright offensive and absolutely uncalled for.
If a species has the cognitive capacity that would be required for a language akin to ours (or even more complex than it?) then why do you assume that they wouldn't have concepts like ego, greed, brutality? We already know that animals use tools; what is a weapon but a tool for the purpose of brutality?
Your example of teaching an alien all of humanity in 5 minutes, though: it's silly, and I don't think anyone in the debate here (except, you, apparently) expects that we are going to meld minds with whales in that short a time.
I don't speak whale, so it is hard to make a claim. I am sure linguists can estimate the complexity of an animal's utterances with the help of machine learning, using quantitative tools like Zipf's Law, Menzerath's Law, Conditional Shannon Enropy, and Repertoire Size.
Whale and Dolphin "languages" (or substitute "utterances" if the hypothesis is so antithetical to you) score remarkably complexly, close to Human "utterances" (again, if animal language is so offensive a notion) on some of these measures. Dog utterances do not:
Zipf's Law (Data Efficiency)
• Humans: -1.0 slope showing an optimal balance of information and physical effort.
• Whales & Dolphins: -1.0 slope matching the exact mathematical curve of human speech.
• Dogs: No -1.0 slope, heavily skewed toward isolated, repetitive alert spikes.
Menzerath's Law (Physical Pacing)
• Humans: Present; internal sounds get shorter as the total sequence grows longer.
• Whales & Dolphins: Present; highly efficient pacing across multiple species.
• Dogs: Absent; vocalizations lack the structured phrase sequences required for this law.
Shannon Entropy (Predictability)
• Humans: High; complex grammatical dependencies stretch across long sentences.
• Whales & Dolphins: Moderate-High; governed by structural rules and click patterns.
• Dogs: Very Low; individual sounds are isolated events with no grammatical rules.
Repertoire Size (Signal Diversity)
• Humans: Infinite vocabulary built from tens of thousands of words.
• Whales & Dolphins: High diversity with hundreds of whistles and thousands of clicks.
• Dogs: Very small vocal pool limited to roughly 10 distinct sounds.
I'd say, it's difficult to say, but calling the hypothesis of whale language "absurd" sounds like something someone might have said (and still might say, incorrectly) about the concept of evolution by natural selection. I think you are overselling your argument.
Maybe ? I know you're trying to make a distinction between communication and language which is fair but all signs we have point to there being a distinct possibility that one of our ocean friends, in the whale and/or cetacean class do have language. It's nowhere near as absurd as you're making out.
Where does this idea that people don't care about performance come from? They don't care _why_ or _how_ it is important, but people very much care whether an app is slow or fast.
Seeing you mentioning "apps" makes me think I have not explained it well...
I'm not talking specifically about performance here, more about ease of use and not having to learn to interact with a machine via UIs, keyboards, mouses and weird things like these.
They just care about getting the result they want without having to learn our cute UIs.
If they could ask the machine to "machine do this now!" and it would be done (quickly, of course) they would be really happy (and pay you well for it).
I think that correlation would actually go opposite than you're implying, given its billionaires who are by for the most gung-ho about AI. If anything, opposition to AI is much larger among people who have to work for a living over people who can live off capital.
It might end up as a U-shape, I think the parent's assessment of the world's bottom 10% may be accurate.
Billionaires will be (are, I suppose?) enthusiastic about a world in which labor has little leverage.
Labor that will have its leverage and standard of living threatened by AI (white-collar labor for now, plausibly blue-collar soon as robotics improve) will be much less happy. Current university students seem very concerned about the effects of AI on their job prospects, and I'd wager most current tech workers and other tuned-in white collar workers are similarly much less confident in their ability to maintain their standard of living indefinitely into the future than they were five years ago.
But white- and blue-collar labor and university students (at least in developed countries) are not anywhere near the world's bottom 10%. If you're in abject poverty with little hope of escaping it, "hand everything over to the AI" may sound like an appealing option, even if the chance of that being the outcome is small. Maybe the AI will be more magnanimous and decide to raise the floor for everyone.
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