AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans
science.org
science.org
My dog can understand my voice tone and emotions way better than I can understand hers, also animals can understand the difference sounds we make (words) that affect them, way better than our understanding of animals sounds.
Don't get me wrong we can make tools and we can experiment and be able to suppress all other animals. But a solo, "naked" human is like an office worker in world of manual labor.
We rational humans overthink our first instinct and even learn to ignore it. And it helps us function in traditional society.
Nah most of it is nurture. Raise a human in the wild and he'll be more in tune with nature. We have become alienated from the environment we evolved in and that's why you feel like a "naked office worker" on your own planet despite being the result of billions of years of adaptation.
Most humans simply ignore animals when they communicate. Both because they're ignorant and because they won't bother to listen. You can't expect an animal to talk with human words, but they talk all the time. Pets actively have conversations with us.
Plus there's this hardwired notion in our culture that humans are inherently superior to all animals but that's a very self-centered and short-sighted understanding of the world. We are more intelligent, yeah, but that's about it.
Before we start painting with all the colors of the wind too much in this thread, this is not entirely a bad thing. We are removed from stressors such as 'being eaten by large predators' and 'dying of infections from wounds'. There is a lot of 'nature' that out ancestors would be quite happy to be 'alienated' from.
Ah yes, that old chestnut. “Anyone who disagrees with me is a dum dum”
How persuasive your arguments are.
Best they can do is point at our current existence -- something that individual forks may not have ever had the ability to change the outcome of.
I agree that 'moron' is a bad choice - this type of bad actor we're describing isn't as innocent as a moron.
We always lose something when evolving, that's okay. You can keep living in whatever way you want to, as long as it doesn't disrupt the liberty of another person. If you're mad that the world embraced secularity over spiritualism, or that men aren't fist-fighting for resources, blame yourself for not modernizing. Without any serious examples, your comment basically just reads like a trad dogwhistle.
If you are actually looking for an answer and not simply to comfort yourself, I heartily recommend Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson.
no, it's not necessarily okay. Nothing to do about it, and we can't change a thing , but we're not guaranteed more success in the future, and plenty of genetic mishaps occur that aren't okay -- so not every change is guaranteed to be 'okay'.
>Which parts are you referring to? The part where you kill a guy with a rock if he looks at your wife funny?
you can frame it both ways.
You say we lost the ability to bludgeon each other with rocks. (we haven't..)
I say we lost the freedom to live without social caveats like "...as long as it doesn't disrupt the liberty of another person.".
I am happy with our trajectory, but it takes a supreme blind eye to ignore that we've taken forks in the road that we can't walk back on; and i'd contend that most of what we're talking about here has nothing to do with biological evolution and everything to do with social evolution and progress.
Many of us still have the drive towards violence upon sleights, this hasn't been somehow removed by evolution -- social evolution and culture however came about and had some strong words to say about murder and what shall happen to murderers.
Social evolution used the traits of self-preservation and bent the blade backwards to provide compensation towards society for an actors bad motives. Murder didn't somehow get bred out, it became a penalized act -- those with self-interest then began to avoid penalized acts. We still have plenty of murder.
Furthermore, parent that you are replying to explicitly says that we'll be blind to what we've missed. They're absolutely right. You can oversimplify that statement into meaning cave-men headbashing each other, but there is a lot more in that statement than you seem to be willing to unpack.
We had a field where any form of philosophy, governance, or religion could have taken hold and we chose a single trajectory for our future. Of course we had to do that, that's how things work -- but the field of choices initially was so immense that it seems in poor taste to presume what parent must have meant was just barbarian violence.
Why not be altruistic in interpretation here and presume the parent wanted to speak on the difference between sedentary and nomadic life-styles?
Time and time again the issues our society faces prove to us that we have yet to find an optimal way to do things. No one can really say whether or not we're getting there faster or slower than another path would have taken us..
From a moral perspective, is it the right thing to dismantle de-humanising systems?
- physical health (microplastics, pollution etc)
- loneliness and mental health epidemic
- unknown unknowns of currently tech
4 off the top of my head. I'm sure I can think of more.
Our language for example, requires to be "forced on us" from early stages or you will never be able to "get it" [1]
> Most humans simply ignore animals when they communicate. Both because they're ignorant and because they won't bother to listen. You can't expect an animal to talk with human words, but they talk all the time. Pets actively have conversations with us.
With my dog I can understand angry/playful/sad/afraid/(give me food) barking/sounds and especially body language. But hearing "dog words" in random barking? Impossible.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experimen...
No what I meant is that animals use body language, smells and all kinds of non-auditory cues in order to communicate. And they rely a lot on behavioral reinforcement in order to communicate efficiently with us.
They don't really use verbal language like we do and therefore they also lack the tools that are required for abstract conversation.
They don't talk about complex topics like astrophysics. They usually just talk about their immediate needs but they can also convey more complex emotions like trust and guilt -- displaying a rudimentary theory of mind.
Regardless, there are many interactions you can have with your pets that entail a string of questions and answers.
Example:
1. My cat comes up to me and sits there staring. She means: "I need something of you, but I can wait"
1a. If I don't get up in a while, she will come closer and bump my leg. She means: "come on, please"
2. I ask her what's up and get up from my chair to signal that I am ready
3. She recognizes this signal, having seen it many times before, and heads for the bowl/the door/the balcony/the cat tree depending on what she needs
4. I understand her need and give her what she wants
5. She trills or purrs to tell me that I'm on the right track/my assessment is correct/to thank me
That is clearly a conversation, albeit a simple one.
Lately she's become addicted to bird and mice videos on Youtube so she comes up to me and stares intently at my laptop and/or desktop until I put those on for her.
Funny.
In a way, it is possible to have a more meaningful conversation with an animal than a human - at least the animal is clear about what it wants!
You say that like it's not the defining characteristic of our power over the natural world
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dogs-have-special-...
humans developed extraordinary nuanced expression that most other animals cannot get near matching the depth and breadth of primarily because of the role that those expressions play in society itself.
an aardvark never has to put on a front so that their children aren't taken away by CPS. A donkey's livelihood is never reliant on them selling a poorly maintained used car to a sucker. Rhinos don't run for mayor.
BUT when you start considering animals that do seem to have a culture and society -- take for instance bonobos -- you start to see increased depth and breadth of expression and emotional response.
That signals to me that (most) emotions and expression come after the point of them playing a larger role than just familial maintenance. They seem to be largely reinforced by the needs of a growing social network that uses them to determine individual roles and the prioritization of 'maintenance of the group' rather than the individual.
that said, I am sure your example individual would be good at reading the expressive state of the 5 meter tall dog; I just contend that the emotional states of that dog are more simple and straight-forward than his human pet -- although maybe not since these dogs drive cars...
further research is needed on 5m car-driving dogs.
Yes, we are working on that but I see writing on the wall and it is not soon enough.
Here is one of many:
https://media.gallaudet.edu/channel/Videolibrary+Archive/158...
Assuming that a significant portion of our ability to understand animal behavior comes from evolutionary instinct or ancestral folklore, then it seems reasonable that the result might be highly pragmatic. For example, our ancestors may have only cared about identifying whether a dog was communicating sufficient submissiveness to indicate that it would follow orders. Whether that submissiveness came from love or fear of punishment may not have been important.
Sheep I can understand -- most people online are urban and the people who upload the most are urban -- but it also was difficult to find relevant pictures of housepets?
What creeps me out is that so many people have zero self-awareness that there is a difference between what has been communicated and their interpenetration of it.
They will be in a bad mood and conclude the text they just received must have been written in a very rude "tone".
They see your face and conclude you must be angry at them.
They take their subjective interpretation as the same as the objective truth and absolute hate to be challenged. The believe themselves to be "empaths" and "good communicators".
If you think you are very accurate at understanding other people's emotions, you are not. That is not possible. The inside state of people can not be measured by looking at their outside expression, you can only make predictions. You have to ask people how they feel.
But I think what you're talking about is someone's ability to simulate the internal state of someone else. Or its little brother: simulating it correctly and then getting mad at the result due to ego.
The problem is that people are not equipped to fix those bugs, its very hard to fix a bug with a buggy software after all. Which is why, a second opinion, in this case, an AI (or a therapist, a friend, etc) will help significantly.
I _should_ have commented on it, but I kept quite. If he really wanted to know what went wrong, I should have told him what happened, but I don't know that. If he had some ML chatbot analyzing the images and such, he would have had a second opinion.