Researchers train an algorithm to interpret pig grunts as emotions
cnet.com
cnet.com
> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse.
They cracked pig grunts, and are building a translator for the rest of us. Nice.
This would be groundbreaking, civilization changing even
What if an adult pig makes "positive emotion related to nursing" grunts? Does that mean they are thinking about nursing? Or has the meaning of the grunt has changed over time? Are they reliving a childhood pig-fantasy? Is the meaning of their adult-pig desire structured by their child-pig experiences in a vaguely Freudian way? Does the grunt mean "food enjoyment" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing + nostalgia for the Jungian archetypal teat"? These questions may seem ridiculous (and I suppose I am stretching them a bit for humour's sake), but I think ignoring them just leads to an impoverished behavioural science. Maybe that's the best we can do.
I just don't see how we can make the leap from correlating events with acoustics to saying that we understand the meaning of a pig grunt. The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. We would need to be able to ask a pig what such and such a grunt meant, which obviously presupposes a fairly complex shared language. In the absence of this, we are just making assumptions.
On the other hand, these assumptions certainly may be very plausible, and it seems reasonable to think that it would be very cosmically odd if such assumptions were dramatically off-base, due to our shared evolutionary history, physiology, and neural circuitry.
Decoding vocal communication and basic emotional states, however simple and unstructured both of these might be, could easily enable us to bootstrap training of pigs for other forms of communication, such as computer-assisted button boards. AIUI, this has been done wrt. other comparable mammals, with some measure of success.
Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator!
But I hope it’s successful, and they then develop beyond just positive vs. negative.
And then do cats. Please.
Pigs are supposed to be cheap and people aren’t supposed to care if we kill them, they become food, and maybe someday as carriers for human organs for transplant. Same with animals like chickens, just raise them and eat them. Seems pointless to focus on the emotions of these creatures. Better to start with animals like dogs and cats that are more meaningful to societies.
Because I don't think pigs are "supposed" to be slaughter fodder any more than <insert oppressed human class> is supposed to be enslaved/genocided/paid less/made into soap.
Not like they pointed a computer at a list of squeals and got some sort of actual 100% base truth emotion data out.
That's the point. The obvious emotional states are necessary in order to correctly label the data for training. The interesting part is to then use the trained model to identify emotional states in situations where it isn't so obvious.
I'm especially suspicious of fighting being negative. Humans can get pleasure from fighting. Why not pigs?
You are never getting a cat voice translator. They are only talking for our sake.
It would be great to use this animals emotional state to influence the succulence of its tender flesh.
Can't wait for the future. /s
Let's assume humans grow up in meat farms, disconnected from all former culture developements. They are born into it. Get fed and separated by machines, castrated and in the end slaughtered. Would they develope meaningful language under these circumstances?
I doubt it. So you still could then build a translator for human gutural noises. But not for human language. You would have to analyse a normal human culture for that.
Likewise, I would be much more interested in analyzing the grunts of free wild pigs.
I’ve linked prior posts on the same topic, including my own. Does time of day affect ranking that much, or perhaps there’s an algorithm at work? The person who posted this article has >30 submissions over the past week. Maybe people recognizing a username has a big influence too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30588423 - 4 days prior
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30594902 - 4 days prior
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30612740 - 2 days prior
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30639933 - 8 hours prior
There's something deeply sad about this. Speaking as someone that regularly eats meat (I had bacon this morning), the prospect of animals have emotional inner lives is the #1 thing that makes me consider vegetarianism.
I would love to have higher quality, better treated meat than what's normally available in the grocery store. In some cases it's possible to get it at a local farm. Pork is tough to find that way. Chicken can be tough to find at a good price. Beef is actually pretty common and a fairly decent price. Although as a side note, they still have to endure the trip to the slaughter house to be USDA inspected.
"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian."
I don't know if it is 100% true, but I am certain most people would turn into vegetarian. As time has passed due to ruthless industries, I think we should replace vegetarianism with veganism.
I think I can relate to this with war. If people see war with their eyes they would empathize it. But, if US media shows how they are doing some favor to humanity (like how media show how animal are important for human diet blah blah) many people are oblivious to war.
I still hold my opinion that if human see the egregious violation of animal industry in real time, or they have to kill animal themself for food, most would abstain meat for sake of emotions.
Just search for it. There are articles and videos about it on various networks like NBC, fox, etc.
"... or they have to kill animal themself for food, most would abstain meat for sake of emotions."
Well, there are about 15 million hunters in the US. It's also reasonable to expect that many more people would start/return to to hunting if that were the only way to get meat. And for areas like cities where it's impractical, I think many people would not be bothered by having to kill a domestic animal for meat if it was the only way.
84% of vegetarians and vegans return to eating meat. Seems like pretty strong evidence to support the idea that a majority of people would still eat meat, even if they had to witness or perform the killing. Would a significant majority stop eating meat? Probably, but current levels are 2% vegetarian or vegan in the US. I don't see that going beyond 49% even if you had to kill the animal yourself.
Any evidence to even tentatively support your side?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20141...
https://wanderlust.com/journal/new-study-illustrates-plants-...
FWIW I don't really bother trying to make ethical arguments for vegetarianism/veganism because of these tricky definition problems. I think it's a bit easier to argue for reduced meat consumption for ecological reasons, or to reduce the need for factory farming, etc.
Animals feel pain in part to learn in a dynamic environment, for example to run away from the source of pain. What evolutionary advantage would there be in a plant that feels pain or emotions?
So unless only some plant species have emotions, veganism is nevertheless the best one can do (short of synthesizing food from scratch at a molecular level)
From an evolutionary perspective, I don't see why plants would have emotions. In animals it makes sense as a mechanism to steer our actions in a more survival-prone direction.
But AFAIK plants have extremely limited agency, so I don't see why evolutionary pressures would favor the development of emotions in plants .
Why would you think, they have none in the first place? Because they cannot talk? Babies can't either. But they show their emotions. Just like any (higher) animal.
1. I've spent very little time around farm animals
2. I've always eaten meat, so assuming lack of inner life is an easy way to make sense of that behavior ethically
3. Given their inability to communicate and comparatively small intelligence, it isn't clear how much awareness they possess.
You mean veganism? Egg chickens and milk cows generally don't have a life much better than this (in industrial operations).
For reference, an estimated 99% of all farmed animals in the US live in factory conditions [2].
[0]:https://youtu.be/8gqwpfEcBjI
[1]:https://youtu.be/dvtVkNofcq8
[2]:https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
[0] Edited to add the book: "Peter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters", highly recommended. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?25965
But more seriously, the idea of using ML to adapt to building complex interfaces for animals driven by more subtle stimulus response is pretty fascinating.
Or just not exploit and slaughter sentient individuals for (taste) pleasure.
Specifically using the word "nope" to open a sentence in response to another comment that communicates empathy is inflammatory. This is because it is dismissive of the other individual's feelings/opinions.
I’m all for personal agency, so eat whatever you want, but it irks me when carnivores are admonished.
Nobody chooses the genes they are born with. Its a discrimination at its best. We stopped slavery probably 50 years ago. At past, I bet there were people like "Nope! I am not going to do menial job. Its my personal agent, so do whatever you want....".
If you believe all living things are conscience to an extent, like I do, then why do we draw the line at animals.
I’ve made peace with the idea that othering things have to suffer and die in order to provide for for me to survive.
That’s not to say we can’t try to reduce the suffering, but ultimately existence is suffering.
https://reductress.com/post/how-to-get-your-boyfriend-to-bru...
Reductress is perhaps the best comedy writing on the internet.
And gruntled when they're happy.
If only 130,000 years ago, evil pigs used humans for livestock, not only ate them, but ensured their cruel short lives, and humans revolted and turned the tables on the pigs, so they deserve cruel treatment, because they're adverse to human existence.
But that is scifi. In truth, a number of people have been killed by pigs, but as a species, pigs don't really threaten humans. We don't need to eat pigs, and even more cruelly, pigs are just business. But once you realize how much these interesting animals have in common with people, which is not apparent by their unflattering names nor our general familiarity with them having vague knowledge of various farm animals since childhood, the idea of consuming one or part of one becomes revolting in the same way that cannibalism is revolting. I used to eat pork steaks, and even though I could talk about taste, I don't care what it tastes like anymore. Taste is just not that important, and, most importantly, it can be and has been entirely simulated so that no one could tell the difference.
I'll just say it, I don't think humans should eat pigs anymore, period, let alone continue to treat them so horrifically. We should, through ethical programs (not killing) reduce their population over generations to a healthy representative of the species, and just let them go and not mess with them any more unless nuisance animals need to be moved. Because they're mentally absolutely no different than human children, and we should, as a species, have compassion for others like us, that experience the world in pretty much the same, mammalian way.
And all the other animals, too, we should stop killing everything immediately, and back out of encroaching on the remaining wild habitats. And we should, over generations, massively reduce the Earth's human population, but let the off-world human population grow as much as practical.
Because, otherwise, very soon, in two generations, maybe ten, Earth is totally going to suck, the whole stinking place, because of humans and terrible things done and caused by humans. If Earth succeeds in ridding itself of humankind, life will go on beautifully for a long time before another species becomes like humans and destroys all the environments.
I try to stay positive. I feel good knowing I lived at a time when the Amazon Rainforest still existed and there were still glaciers in some places. And maybe, just maybe, this research can generate compassion for living creatures that are mentally a lot like humans, and we know this for sure because their brains are just like human brains. Duh.