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shevy-java

I misread this as AI initially ...

The only art-centric monkey I knew was Koko, the female gorilla.

Here she draws some things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iixL0CMOAM

Smartest monkey I ever saw was Kanzi though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENKinbfgrkU

I think it is only a question and matter of time before the prison systems for monkeys may have to be reconsidered completely. Of course even smarter monkeys than Kanzi won't reach human brain functions, but they are also very convincingly extremely clever and can adapt. Numerous videos where monkeys handle (!) smartphones show this already and this is just the beginning. Like, in the movie Planet of the Apes. Just long-term in smaller steps.

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Fun fact! Koko’s abilities to sign and communicate were a total fraud!

https://bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/

To dismiss it as total fraud is disingenuous, but I do agree that the personification of some of those videos is quite egregious. I don't think anyone expected a chimp to make coherent, grammatically correct sentences. But the relationship between sign/vocalization and emotion/desire is strong and seen in many animals, such as parrots. It depends on your definition of communication I suppose.

Is it?

Afaik they didn’t actually sign anything other than random words, an “food” every second word or so..

There’s no evidence that KoKo ever communicated a word and had understanding of what the word meant outside of basic Pavlovian associations.

The main issue wasn't grammatical correctness, it was being grammatical at all. It's not surprising that an animal can learn individual pieces of vocabulary: anybody whose dog loses its mind when the word "walk" is mentioned, or watched meerkats for significant periods of time can observe vocabulary in animals.

Koko was intended to be taught grammar, specifically the ability to express new thoughts by combining her vocabulary in an ordered way. Despite Francine Patterson's best efforts to convince the world otherwise, Koko never achieved this.

There's some research that some birds understand grammar [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmys2abx4co

Don't call him a monk- aaaaarghhh...

https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/The_Librarian

> I misread this as AI initially ...

The japanese have it harder because "ai" means love. But perhaps "love" will be written in kanji while "AI" in katakana, so writing form is not confusing.

From what I've seen, "AI" is typically written with the "Roman" (latin) letters, or translated as 人工知能 (AI) or as 生成AI (generative AI like LLMs).

"I think this was a powerful lesson on the dangers of AI. Which by the way means 'love' in Chinese."

Elon Tusk, Rick and Morty, S4E4: https://youtu.be/xQHCz9ZZorA?t=129

It also means love in Japanese!

it's weird to see that 6 years ago the public consensus on Musk was just that he was a well-intentioned soft-spoken nerd who liked computers and found himself with inadvertent money to allocate altruistically

Here's Rambo, an orangutan, driving a golf cart in Dubai: https://youtu.be/ERTrOwEb5M8

is there any further information on how she was trained and whether it used a reward for reaching objectives like teaching Kanzi (a bonobo) to play Minecraft? did a human demonstrate the controls or was there a simulation before the actual vehicle? or a hardcoded speed limit that was slowly raised?

I think about this way, would you stick a five year old in a prison?

What about an intellectually disabled adult?

And before someone comes in to correct: yes, we're monkeys. No, the taxonomists don't know any better! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey

That article seems to say that the standard definition of "monkey" does not include apes, and thus humans.

It doesn't just seem to say it, it says it explicitly: "monkeys are, in terms of currently recognized taxa, non-hominoid simians". Perhaps the accepted terminology may change at some point, but currently apes are not monkeys.

I remember reading or hearing that if we follow taxonomnic rules from the ground up, humans would be classified as hagfish (don't quote me on that, I have a terrible memory)

We've not made much progress on this front since Plato's featherless biped.

An anthropologist writes about communication and language in The Language Puzzle, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steven-mithen/the... , TLDR, a little speculative but no primate exhibits evidence beyond a very primitive form of communication - only the extreme outliers are used in demonstrations, which are not much upon closer examination, there’s probably an evolutionary step needed for any other primate than man to use language as far as we can tell. There are key differences in brain and vocalization physiology between humans and other primates .

Koko, that chimp’s alright.

Koko's communication skills turned out to be a scam.

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