Comment by Mystery-Machine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mystery-Machine | Hacker News Reader

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Mystery-Machine

The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible. You also probably don't have kids. For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins can also see (divers with) some objects and name them. We can also guess what they are saying from the sounds plus the actions they do. That's probably how we got "seagrass" in the first place.

For all the word that they don't have in their language, we/they can invent them. Just like we do all the time: artificial intelligence, social network, skyscraper, surfboard, tuxedo, black hole, whatever...

It might also be possible that dolphins' language uses the same patterns as our language(s) and that an LLM that knows both can manage to translate between the two.

I suggest a bit more optimistic look on the world, especially on something that's pretty-much impossible to have any negative consequences for humanity.

Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults.

If you had read this part --

"But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.

To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree."

it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds.

I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.

That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_. You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement. AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it. Let's give it a shot.

There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.

> You do not think this is possible.

Not at all.

I believe just throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.

I quote myself again -- 'But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means".

Note the emphasis on the word alone.

What needs to happen is to build shared experiences, perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML training process. If this succeeds this exercise of building shared experience will do heavier lifting than the LLM.

Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not hold high hopes.

> shared experiences and emotions

I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.

Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.

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