Ask HN: Would you stop eating meat after AI unlocks communication with animals?
Or maybe you might still eat animals that have nothing interesting to say?
I think cows are affectionate, that doesn’t stop me from eating beef. For that matter, my wife and I were driving into work and saw a huge buck in the side of the road that somebody has just hit with a car, she came back with some friends and found somebody else had cut off the antlers, they hauled the deer back to a friend’s workshop and cut it up, see here
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111259362923381643
what is immoral about that?
Nothing, like all the other under terrible conditions mass produced meat that makes up 99.99% of the rest of the consumed meat.. ehrm no wait what? Who asked about that anyway? A bit off-topic ;)
This question can only spring from magical mystical nonsense thinking.
You may as well daydream about ai unlocking communication with toasters, or the earth.
There's a lot of media depiction of scenarios where someone can talk to animals, either via magic or by technology (a different magic). So it does not surprise me that a lot of people just believe animals can talk to each other if only we could understand.
This isn't to say there aren't some unknown communications going on - we regularly find new ones. But we're never going to find what we would consider a language.
"Comprehension, at levels far above chance, was shown for all of the sentence forms and sentence meanings that could be generated by the lexicon and the set of syntactic rules, and included the understanding of: (a) lexically novel sentences; (b) structurally novel sentences; (c) semantically reversible sentences that expressed relationships between objects; (d) sentences in which changes in modifier position changed sentence meaning; and (e) conjoined sentences (Phoenix). Additional abilities demonstrated included a broad and immediate generalization of the lexical items to different exemplars of objects; an ability to modulate the form of response to given action words, in order to apply the action appropriately to new objects, to different object attributes, or to different object locations; an ability to carry out instructions correctly despite changes in the context or location in which a sentence was given, or in the trainer providing the instructions; an ability to distinguish between different relational concepts; an ability to respond correctly to sentences given with no objects present in the tank until 30 seconds after the instruction was given (displacement tests); and an ability to report correctly that the particular object designated in a sentence was in fact not present in the tank, although all other objects were (Akeakamai).
......
The comprehension approach used was a radical departure from the emphasis on language production in studies of the linguistic abilities of apes; the result obtained offer the first convincing evidence of the ability of animals to process both semantic and syntactic features of sentences. "
I just figured the extent of it was "Well we can't prove they aren't just communicating unlike we can for say dogs"
By the way, if you'd like an overview of the tests performed, you can read them here.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342706263_Language_...
Yes I know it's not proof they use language naturally but this is where that "not being able to prove" thing come into play.
As far we can see, it does look like they use language.
1. We can tell they give each other unique names https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dolphins-whistle-...
2. similar use of "baby talk" in mothers. https://www.science.org/content/article/dolphin-moms-use-bab...
3. Their clicks and whistles three key linguistic laws of efficient communication, namely, Zipf’s rank-frequency law (humpback whales also shown to follow this), the law of brevity and Menzerath-Altmann law...but only till babies reach a certain age!
That humpback whales will communicate with fewer vocalizations in the presence of noise but still seem to understand each other
https://theworld.org/stories/2019-06-13/baby-dolphins-babble...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.11.523588v1....
All these things paint a pretty clear picture imo. I'm near certain that most? cetaceans use language.
We're not wolves, of course, but meat can reasonably be some percentage of our diet. I prefer a few meals a month that include meat.
I've read and thoroughly enjoyed Charlotte's Web. I love watching animals of all shapes and sizes and abilities. I sat in a stand for hours, days, and ultimately shot a deer for food. I also accept that I will eat meat and enjoy it as a delicious luxury, even if they have something interesting to say. We've killed so many wolves that it is now on us to either give more land back to wolves, removing our fences and livestock, or kill the deer ourselves.
There are already animals I will not eat unless it's necessary for survival. Whales. Wolves. Bears. Raptors. Chimpanzees. The list is fairly long.
Consider reading The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich[0], about Omakayas and her family (Anishinaabe, 1847) living through the seasons of a year.
Wolf pack to elk: Hey, you ok with we eating you?
Elk: WTF definitely not, go away please.
Wolf: But we have no other option and want also to survive!
Elk: (argument less meh)
For us it is a bit different though now.
Obviously I could not know (unless such a thing were happening and I were there to observe it, which I am not), so I would try to guess. Maybe temporarily, if you actually have something to discuss (rather than wanting to eat). Even then it would probably be rare even if it is somehow possible.
> but meat can reasonably be some percentage of our diet. I prefer a few meals a month that include meat.
Yes, I think so too. Of course it need not be all the time (humans is omnivores and should eat both plants and meats), but a few meals in a month, it can be OK.
> We've killed so many wolves that it is now on us to either give more land back to wolves, removing our fences and livestock, or kill the deer ourselves.
I do think that, you should give more land back to the wolves if they have run out of land (but it is not necessary if that is not the case). Kill the deer yourself is not completely the solution, though, but may be worth if you like to eat a deer. Otherwise, I think that it is generally better not to do and to do something else instead.
> There are already animals I will not eat unless it's necessary for survival. Whales. Wolves. Bears. Raptors. Chimpanzees. The list is fairly long.
I also, but unless it is because they are endangered, it will not be because of a moral reason; rather, just what I eat is something else instead.
Is this actually true? Or is it true to you because:
> I prefer a few meals a month that include meat.
There’s tons of things some people like that the majority of people choose not to do because we’re “civilized.” But then there’s tons of stuff that we convince ourselves is logical and reasonable because it fits with the worldview and lifestyle that we personally like.
But, I do think that people treat animals badly (and treat other people badly too, who are also animals, of course), and should be avoided. (Also should be avoided attacking them as much as they do (sometimes indirectly due to policies relating to other stuff, such as structure of lands, pollution, etc), which is, I think, too much compared with how much they should be; but also the how badly is treated even by one instance is also too much badly, too.) I don't know if such AI communcation would help; maybe, but I guess probably it won't help very much. Because you will eat, is not the excuse to treat everyone even more badly and even more often.
Or maybe you might be still poor, because AI is not trained to be working for the poor people.
AI will not unlock communication with animals, because 99.9% species of animals doesn't create sanitize data for training a LLAMA (not YAMA).
When the animals will learn to speak and develop a symbolic language, maybe AI could develop communication with them. In the meanwhile, keep using LATIN ALPHABET DERIVATIVES IN HIGH ORDER LANGUAGES to develop machines and algorithms and transform them to the Gregorian Calendar to count ticks in a processor an create Human Readable Datetime types to keep record of your *nixonian alchemy finances.
We all love the 70s. Hippies, Yuppies and SuperCows commands.
Electric Jimi.
PD: Take LSD and convert to Buddhism if you want to speak with animals, it is cheaper and pollutes less this communal IDE people use to create coins and stocks.
Conclusion: most people really don';t give a shit if animals are snetient or not.
They want their make believe family member and eat it too...
> Most people just aren’t philosophical about their dining habits or their pets
That is to say, people typically pursue these behaviours without considering the reasons or consequences.
This is what I would call "not giving a shit"
> mostly cultural things
I also agree with this. Other things that are "mostly cultural things":
war, all other forms of murder torture and rape, slavery, colonialism and other forms of physical domination of one group by another, destructive assault on the natural environment for profit with no consideration for the long term consequences.
We eat animals that eat stuff we don't value.
Cows eat grass, chickens eat grains we don't want, etc.
This is for efficiency, if we wanted to raise lions for food we would first have to raise another animal for the lions to eat. Same thing with dogs, cats, etc.
I guess the main exception is fishing,for example Tuna or Salmon. But in this case those fish eat other smaller fish that we don't value. You also don't (normally) see people have a pet tuna.
It's not cruel to kill an animal, chop it up, and eat it's burnt dead body, as long as it eats something you don't want to, or can't eat?
I'm pretty sure to the animal, there's no difference in being killed for one reason versus another.
I will agree with you, on something I think you're trying to say: it's less cruel to kill a wild animal that has lived in it's own environment, birthed and raised it's own young, and been predated by a human.
It's more cruel to artificially enseminate and raise animals in pens to be fed through an industrial scale meat grinder without ever having lived it's own life.
In general all of the arguments for eating other animals rest on "other animals do it". Which is not a completely vacuous argument, but it also has to be taken with the agreement that we haven't really progressed beyond the behavour of other mammals. It's a tacit agreement that we're still an unevolved violent primate species. Which is undoubetly the case.
I also eat some dead animals, I also drive a petro fueled car. I consider both of these things primitive and unevolved. I continue to try to correct both of these at every opportunity.
Acknoledging the problem is the first step to correcting it. Otherwise, we're just offering excuses for our bad behaviour.
Of course that can be difficult and opens other conversations.
My point is, the reason humanity generally prefers to eat cows over dogs, is not necessarily because we are hypocrites who want one animal to be a family member and another to die.
It's because (moral issues aside) it's a lot more efficient to eat cows than dogs.
Following my previous example, imagine we wanted to raise lions for food. Lions can eat (among other things) sheep.
So to raise lions you first need to raise many sheep, take care of them, graze them, breed them, etc.
A lion can eat hundreds of sheep for many years before it's big enough to slaughter and eat.
This is inefficient. So we logically decided to just eat the sheep. Sheep eat grass that we don't want so it costs us nothing to feed them.
As an atheist that believes in evolution I believe we are just another animal. If its moral for a wolf to hunt and eat a deer it should also be moral for us. To say otherwise is to get into religious territory where we are somehow divine and not just a slightly smarter ape.
I 10000% agree we have gone past the point of just hunting. There is no moral justification for caging 100 chickens in a small space, pumping them full of hormones, killing them as soon as they are viable to eat.
That is torture and no other animal (AFAIK) engages in that behavior.
With that said, if it did happen, it would 100% depend on what they had to say.
Yet… we will still hunt them, we will still eat them.
Maybe not everyone in the world, but in my part of the world people butcher animals for their household during December. You have to bring home the animal, feed them for some days or weeks then do it. Yet, despite all that… we still eat animals.
Or, ahhhh go away. Run for the hills.
Or, what's with the lack of fur, what a freak.
Thinking AI translation between humans and other animals would be anything real is preposterous and dangerous until there is training data for that. Data provided by human scientists. Who would have to learn to communicate with other animals first.
Knowing that other animals feel pain should be enough to not eat meat, as long as you can get equivalent nutrition.