A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones!
>Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms.
>This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded that other primates could not produce as many vowels as humans because of the position of their larynxes [which] cemented the idea that a descended larynx is a prerequisite for speech.
>Towards the end of the 20th century, evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch realized a crucial fact – all the existing evidence was based on the anatomy of dead primates. Surprised that this had not been done before, Fitch used x-ray imaging to study the vocal tracts of live animals while they were voicing sounds. He was amazed to observe that their larynxes at rest remained high and then descended during vocalization to a position very similar to the human larynx.
>All these studies indicate that apes have all the anatomical characteristics necessary for speech. The reason they don’t is purely neural. Humans have much better control of the larynx, not because of its position, but because of the neural connections that connect it to the brain. Parrots don’t even have a larynx, but they have wonderful control of their speech organ, which enables them to articulate intelligible words and phrases.
I'm pretty sure descended larynx is not prequisite for producing vowels.
Vowels are merely overtones which occurs because the waves generated in the vocal folds(with a charachtrized fundamental frequency) travel the vocal tract in 3d, which causes destructive interference for most frequencies except those with constructive interference (overtones / formants)
When humans move that tongue and lips we basically change the vocal tract shape which changes the overtones, the larynx is behind the lips and behind/in the back of the tongue anyway.
"require" is a fuzzy term. If you force your lips and tongue to stay in place, you can get partial intelligible vowel sounds from your larynx, and feel your larynx changing as vowels change.
Human exceptionalism has poisoned so many studies.
My pet-theory why primates do not vocalize is that the neural difference is not even that cemented, it has to be some difference at the language acquiring stage as babys and children, were one human pattern matching center for sound fires constantly, acquiring the language "keys" and theirs dont.
20th century hubris poisoned so many studies I would rather say.
I have this example but there are literally hundreds:
You know about the 5 μm particle size limit for it to become airborne? Washing hands for protecting against aerosols? It’s parroted bad research; and wrong.
The main infection path of upper respiratory diseases is through aerosols. The medical literature says it’s through hands that are touching the mouth and the nose but this is wrong. It was shown in the 1940s that viruses can spread through aerosols and that aerosols are particles under 100 μm. Research was done on tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that must infect the deep inside parts of the lung. For that it needs an aerosol size of 5 μm. Other diseases can do with aerosols of 5-100 μm.
Now, a meme was born that only 5 μm particles can get airborne.
And this was just accepted by the Western medical canon and the WHO.
One sort of R, sure. But native English speakers often have trouble with the "voiced alveolar trill" R which is present in many other European languages, unless they speak one of the less common English dialects where it is used.
Monkeys have a much easier time learning sign language than spoken, so there's probably something about vocal chords too. I suspect it's because humans and parrots independently developed music as a bonding mechanism and apes did not.
You're biased because you already know what it's supposed to be saying. The brain really likes to make us hear the sound it knows it's supposed to hear.
My chihuahua-pit mix has such a range I often describe it as “singing the songs of her people”.
Anyway, what qualifies as speech is very subjective and generally anthropomorphic. I understand what my pup is saying almost all of the time, which wouldn’t qualify it as talking by most standards but it’s plain as day to me.
Ya, humans are really good at pattern recognition. I can understand what my parrot (who can’t speak) is communicating.
But did I learn my parrot’s patterns or is he intending to communicate with me? Hard to say.
If he is intending to communicate, did he just learn what works through operant conditioning? Hard to say.
If it is just operant conditioning (for both of us) and a pinch of antropomorphizing from me, does that even matter when the end result is that we are successfully communicating? Hard to say.
Whatever it is, it works. We can’t have a philosophical discussion, but he can usually get what he needs from me and I can usually understand what he wants and get him to change course of action when needed or get him to perform tricks on command.
Haha, meanwhile my chihuahua-pit mix only communicates by trembling, booping, performative sneezing, huffing (as opposed to a woof), sometimes grumbling, and yelling at the mailman. Mostly trembles.
My first beloved Chihuahua was similarly very expressive, but almost never barked. Lots of trembling, sneezing, some cute vocalizations while sneezing, growling, grumbling, stamping her feet, pointing with her eyes, but no barking... unless other dogs she affiliated with were barking.
I was so amused, I always used to praise her for it. I'd say
> That's right, baby! Good job!! That was a good, family bark!!!
My gorl doesn’t get the chihuahua shivers, but she definitely does some big sneezes and huffs. She also does a big performative snorty sigh when she settles into a snuggle. And she has the loudest sing-songy yawns I have ever imagined, sometimes while dismounting the couch with her front paws and letting them slide across the floor before she can bother with even moving her hind paws.
Cats don't even meow or purr at each other much. They just stare each other down and, as my parents told me when I was a lil kid, they speak through mind reading. I still believe that.
They do communicate, usually in the form of yelling to indicate they want food, pettig, to be let outside or let back in. That's err... all the communication they need, the rest of the time they sleep.
They did develop fine control in their eyebrows to appeal / communicate to humans. And cats developed mewling similar to human babies to draw their attention.
That’s not the conclusion at all. The article says monkeys can understand and produce words (via signs). They can’t talk because they don’t have control of their larynx. They’re mute essentially.
Yes, we just put some AI via electrodes into the monkeys. If we can also add some blockchain, I think we'll have a winner. Let's circle back Monday on this idea, I'd like to pick your brain some more.
In any case, you bring up an important issue: can monkeys bitcoin?
Could we backport a blockchain experiment in the same way that demoscene Hungarians have backported math hacks to fuel unexpectedly sophisticated realtime graphics to the C64?
Yes, but Brain-Computer Interfaces are not currently an especially advanced field of study. We don't have the precision needed to do any of that as currently stands.
Chimpanzees are intelligent and willing to do something like communicating, and can maybe produce words/signs, but they don't produce sentences/syntax and they never ask questions. Supposedly parrots can do that one.
Related question: which animals understand humans pointing at things?
There are a number of interesting videos on social media sites ostensibly demonstrating dogs and birds using buttons and tablets to generate reasonably coherent communication like might be expected out of a two year old. Some of these have some backing scientific literature that provide some validation of the claims. If true it would indicate they have quite advanced mental faculties and are basically entirely limited by the lack of a appropriate vocal system for generating human speech.
Two year olds learn a lot more language in a year than chimps can. Can't have a sentence like "dog bites man" without word order even if it's made of logograms.
There's no reason to believe that LLMs are necessarily similar to humans. Just think of flight; both birds and planes can fly despite being very different. It's understandable that because humans are our main reference for intelligence that we see LLMs speaking language as a proof of similarity but there's no concrete reason to assume that.
There's something about watching other primates interact with screens that just feels so uncanny. It's an almost humbling experience, seeing how much they look like us tapping and scrolling. The only difference seems to be that we think we understand more of what we're looking at on the screen... but do we really?
Yes. We do. Significantly more. It’s our only power. We aren’t stronger or faster or more vicious, we cannot fly or breed dozens of humans at a time or puke honey. We can’t swim the ocean depths or swing through the trees.
But we sure can think, understand and create. For better or worse.
I’m all for not underestimating animals. They are sentient like us.
But not at the cost of dismissing the human animal.
We have very good color eyesight, are unusually flexible when it comes to weather, are pretty omnivorous and disease resistant, and we're absolutely unbeatable endurance runners.
IIRC we actually smell as well as dogs too, if we get down to floor level.
Planes and birds do operate on the same principles though, but instead of power through propellers birds are powered via wings.
There's no reason to think an LLM would not work for a monkey. Even if it is a different structure than how things work in humans a parallel structure could offer more or less the same benefits.
Anyway I buy the whole LLM thing, consider a baby, they can't talk at all and only become coherent when you talk to eachother just about non stop for 2 or 3 years.
You are right, there’s no concrete reason why an Internet comment should be taken to heart, yet somehow we still do react emotionally to online content all day long.
I get excited, happy, sad, jealous, proud and a bunch of other stuff just seeing stuff on a screen.
Anyway, what is life’s concrete reason to be? Does everything need one to be considered valid?
I've also been wondering this. Can we train an LLM on dolphin noises?
I suspect the problem is the training data. If we don't know what the dolphin squeaks mean, we can't really filter the training data to include only meaningful "language." But I do wonder how far we could get by just dumping a bunch of dolphin recordings into an LLM and getting it to make the same noises...
The other side of that same problem is that we would have no way of knowing whether it's working. Even if it could "communicate" perfectly, we would have no way of understanding it, aside from watching real dolphins interact with it. But maybe we could build an artificial dolphin, load an LLM into it, and drop it in a pool with real dolphins... just to see what happens...
One issue with this is that dolphins don't have a consistent "language". There are at the very least different dialects in different parts of the ocean. So one issue is ensuring your model is using sounds from a group of dolphins speaking the same "language" - otherwise you're at risk of trying to "translate human" by feeding a mix of English and Chinese.
They key issue with lack of training data is that we do have intelligent dolphins for communication experiments - for example, we can replay certain sounds that we have recorded, and we can "ground" that language with "nonverbal" communication - e.g. showing various things or pictures.
Yes that's the point of project CETI https://www.projectceti.org/ but for sperm whales instead of dolphins. I saw a video of it, it was so amazing but I forget which one of the videos it was.
This is an old tradition in popular science, replacing the humans are animals with souls analogy with the current fad. (Analogies to clockworks, printed circuits, et cetera.) They’re wrong because they’re oversimplifying for pithiness. Not explanatory value.
Hmmm. As I type this reply on my device powered by a semi conductor that wouldn’t exist without our knowledge of quantum physics I’m gonna say science.
As I type this from a free country that allows me unrestricted access to worldwide media, and affords me the right to express my opinion freely publicly, I would say politics.
We all have our own points of view. Yours is certainly an astute observation. But it is not the only one.
False dichotomy. This isn’t science versus religion, philosophy, the humanities or politics.
You repeated a meme: humans are animals plus some nebulous X. I’m calling that out as meaningless; it’s unfalsifiable. You switched to asking about the meaning of words, and are now trying to draw equivalence between your statements and the merits of politics as a category. This is an exercise in false equivalences, red herrings and wronger than wrongs [1].
Could you care to explain why you expected the comment to be about the conclusion of the article instead of an opinion about the comment it was replying to?
We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.
A few things we observed:
1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations
2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations
3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of slightly differentiated and mostly to get people's attention
This isn't true for other animals (based on our reading of academic papers) and a commonality we've seen in the papers: as animals have more individuals they interact with across their life especially not directly related, their vocalizations are more structured. Within family units they tend to rely more on touch, body language, and some intermittent vocalizations. Though marine mammals are very vocal given they operate within acoustic environments in the ocean and it gets dark around 100m - 200m.
Basically, as number of sustained individuals in a group goes up and the number of non-related individuals increases, vocalizations get more diverse. We see cows, pigs, goats, and other herd animals are also very vocal which is how scientists have been decoding their speech recently similar to prairie dogs.
Much of what I've written here is a super simplification but happy to get deeper into the weeds.
We had an old dog move in with us and it’s been interesting because it has developed a new dog culture based on my existing dog. It now barks when someone comes home, barks to go outside etc. It didn’t do any of that before but it has started doing it by watching the existing dog communicate and having people who are more attentive to its needs.
Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.
If you ever deliberately raise a puppy, you'll watch the formation of many communication patterns that you create both deliberately (like barking or ringing a bell to go outside) and by accident.
The more I learn about domesticated animals, the more impressed I am by their intelligence and attunement to humans, natural and learned.
> Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.
If you haven't check out whataboutbunny [1] on Instagram to get an indication of how far dogs can go when given an opportunity. Bunny is trained to use buttons to "speak". A lot of it is very simple and functional ("outside", "play") that could easily be handled by body language and the odd bark, but occasionally you get fairly complex conversations which seems to indicate introspection and fairly complex reasoning that as you say they "just don't seem to need" to be able to express in language in normal conditions.
I do chuckle at one of mine, who definitely has a range of meanings to her barks. One solitary "WOOF", repeated at an interval means, "I'm stuck in the paddock, please let me out." She has another for "I've got a raccoon up a tree," and a gruff huffing noise for, "get off your ass and take us for a walk!"
I'm pretty sure I'm at least as much the trainee as the trainer here though.
> We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.
Can most dog owners not already understand or differentiate their dogs' barks? I can tell from the quality and context of my dog's barks, whether he
- wants something (food, water, attention)
- is angry
- is scared
- wants to play
- is excited
- is voicing a territorial dispute
and I think most dog people can also be confident in interpreting a fair range of basic emotions and also perhaps unique behaviors they've accidentally trained or organically developed with their dogs.
What additional things can your tech detect or identify beyond stuff like that? Are you using AI with human coders on training data, and if so, do they need special training or is the wisdom of naive dog-adjacent crowds good enough here?
I thought the other info you shared about canine and other animal vocalizations was very cool and interesting. I'd love to learn more about that any time, from anyone!
While maybe not very useful, it would be fun to have a real translation of dogs (and other animals). I have a lot of questions that I'd like them to answer.
In order to translate language, the animal has to be speaking language. That is, they have to be putting some sort of emotion or indicator into their vocalizations that would be able to be decoded in the first place.
There's a channel on YouTube called BilliSpeaks where someone trained their cat to be able to press buttons to speak. The cat can answer questions, communicate feelings and even have conversations with the help of their translator, but only because they were trained on how to use it.
My cats heavily use body language and physical activity to communicate with each other, rather than explicit vocalization. Their body language is passive, and their physical activity is indicative (and usually, so are their vocalizations); they don't exactly directly communicate concepts like human language does.
I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.
One use case I could see is storytelling, specifically to share events that one of the animals was not present for.
In my house, my dogs usually seem to 'communicate' by calling the other's attention, and then observing the same thing together. Maybe they'd like to tell stories for some of the things that one of them misses.
> I wonder if pets in households with those talking buttons ever use them to communicate with each other, or if they never choose to because it's so much less efficient than natural conspecific communication for most of the things they would want to 'talk' about.
I haven't yet seen an example of it. I think pets learn to use the buttons to make requests or answer them, but they never do that with each other because they never really have any requests or answers for each other, if that makes any sense.
Correct. Dogs will vocalize and use touch with one another but the buttons are exclusively (at least from what I've observed) used for communicating with people. Though dogs & cats have specific vocalizations for speaking with people. Though we're now seeing vocalizations in new species that we didn't expect such as plants[1] & turtles[2].
That's exactly right so you can expand the vocabulary of animals especially dogs with training similar to how they train dogs to press buttons. This research is much more extensive with captive dolphins and now we're seeing the same with domesticated animals.
Speaking of Dogs and Human interaction: I remember a study stating that wolfs lack a certain muscle, which dogs have. A muscle above the eye; believed to be directly linked to dogs’ long time interaction with humans.
Strange that this article doesn't mention any of the current research into what the cause is. [Erich Jarvis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Jarvis) has done research into the neurological mechanisms and seems to have discovered that animals capable of complex speech patterns have some mutations that permit a neural connection to grow from the motor cortex to the larynx (or syrinx in birds) by way of the brain stem. In other words, we can make complex vocalizations in part because we have fine motor control over our voice box, whereas most other animals do not.
This is only part of the story — there's still the question of how auditory information makes it in as an input so that we can replicate sounds we've heard — but it's a pretty big part for TFA to omit.
Yet people can make perfectly intelligible speech without using the larynx at all - whispering. People can also speak using a vibrator pressed against the throat.
more importantly, people can make perfectly intelligible speech using a completely different set of symbols, for example writing, whistling^1, hand gestures (sign language), pictures, etc.
It's interesting to compare this "sound-talk" that parrots can easily accomplish with the obviously greater intelligence of apes, who can't reproduce human sounds, with the debate over whether chatGPT is intelligent or not. Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was.
Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence?
Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of language.
Koko primarily communicated via repeating individual words that she'd been able to correlate with getting immediate effects. "Food", "Water", etc. When she did use multi-word phrases, they had no semblance of grammar: human babies will quickly work out the difference between "Me bite him" and "him bite me", whereas Koko never did. Frankly, despite being billed as a decisive blow against the Chomsky school of linguistics, Koko probably stands as strong evidence for it.
IMO, the massive complexity gap between human-level language compared to the relatively tight pack of merely possessing vocabulary animals, pretty directly correlated with levels of problem solving skills and tool use, should signal that there's something to the idea that our cognitive and language abilities are pretty closely linked. Mimicking human behavior may not be necessary for intelligence, but some kind of language likely is.
Different people tend to have differing levels of internal monologue. Mine is so constant that nearly all conscious thought filters through it, to the point that it would be very easy to mistake the monologue for the totality of consciousness.
It's a theory that rings true with people who think like I do, but still assume that everyone else thinks the same way too.
Worse than that. Manners of speaking, narration, works of fiction, etc. will - both for convenience and from actual bias - focus strongly on people quite unlike you. So strongly that many people will start to doubt that your kind even exist.
Welcome to the short and dirty end of yet another dimension of human cognitive bias.
> And some people, like myself, have no monologue or internal dialogue. What then? I have no consciousness or intelligence?
I don't have this either, but I would still say I think in language. It might be concepts that link together in hierarchies or graphs, but those concepts are described in words.
The concepts are described in words, but you're not describing your thoughts to yourself. You have your own thoughts directly. The words are a side effect, to be called upon when you want to talk to someone else.
Saying that you think in words is saying that the computer from GalaxyQuest thinks in words because every time it does something, it reports what it has just done over the loudspeakers. You're confusing the effect with the cause.
> Saying that you think in words is saying that the computer from GalaxyQuest thinks in words because every time it does something, it reports what it has just done over the loudspeakers. You're confusing the effect with the cause.
This seems a bit silly. I'm not saying that speaking words is what constitutes thought. I'm saying concepts generally need names before we can reason about them.
You're saying that mental instances of words are what constitutes thought. That is incorrect. Mental words are an output of a mental process downstream of thought.
> I'm saying concepts generally need names before we can reason about them.
This is also false. People adapt to patterns constantly; they rarely bother to name those patterns.
> This is also false. People adapt to patterns constantly; they rarely bother to name those patterns.
I'm trying to maintain an open tone in the face of this, but I might stop soon. To address this particular point: "adapt to patterns" - such as? From context you seem to be saying this is identical to reasoning, but I don't see why that would be.
This is difficult to answer in terms other than "everything in the world".
People do not have trouble recognizing different types of pain that they experience and seeking different treatment based on the difference in the pain. They do not use words to represent the differences, and if you ask them to describe those differences, they will become frustrated.
People don't have trouble recognizing smells. They are generally not able to describe smells. This is why you see frustration among chemical engineers over papers describing the smell of various substances as "characteristic".
People routinely recognize behavior without having any name for it. If you choose a strategy for making a presentation to your boss, you are doing this based on a mental model of his behavior. In some cases, people do give names to behavior that they worry about, but in almost all cases, they don't.
I recently described the behavior of dancers in a dance video in these terms: "they're being like him". You may notice that there is zero descriptive content in that sentence. But the meaning was clear to both me and my interlocutors.
Consider a hypothetical conversation planning out a strategy. (For anything.) Person A describes a plan. Person B responds "What if he does that thing he does?". A and B both understand what is being referred to, but, obviously, B has no name for it.
All of these are just examples of a phenomenon that applies to everything. If you've ever observed anyone struggling to put their thoughts into words -- and I know that you have -- you should be able to realize that their thoughts cannot have been embodied in words to begin with.
You already received a fantastic response with many examples, but I want to pile on another thing. Talk to an accomplished autodidact. That is, somebody who learned a skill on their own using only trial and error. Examples I'm familiar with are music (playing an instrument) and computer programming. Autodidacts regularly recognize and apply patterns, methods, systems, procedures or strategies, long before they find out whether people have a word for them. For instance, a basic bit of music theory is that you can resolve a C-major melody by returning from a G chord back to C. Autodidacts regularly discover that, and that it translates analogously to other modes, without knowing the terms “dominant” and “tonica” (or even “major” and “chord” and “resolve”).
The short story "The Great Silence" by Ted Chaing feels very relevant here.
> The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?
I think the dark forest theory rings very true here. The risk/reward equation for communication is skewed so far towards the risk end that, as the joke goes, maybe the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has contacted us.
Or Peter Watts’ much more succinct take: if they do exist, they’ll be mean.
TL;DW - Data was VERY cherry-picked to make it look like she could communicate via sign language. At best, she was responding via rote memorization and had no idea what she was actually communicating.
The part that starts at 32:00 to around 38:00 is quite interesting, they programmed a PDP-8 to function as an icon-based chat mechanism. I always remembered the "grooming" part.
I think Koko's trainer really did believe her more extravagant claims. So did Clever Hans's. But there was a lot of wishful thinking along the lines of "Koko's making a weird gorilla joke that doesn't make sense to human minds" when a more likely explanation would be "Koko really doesn't know what she is saying".
I also personally asked GPT-4 to solve an easy CodeForces problem dated March 2023 and its solution worked perfectly the first time. (I haven’t yet tested it on a harder Codeforces problem.) Although the problem is relatively easy, it’s still much harder than the Fizz buzz test.
Thanks, the explanation of jokes was very interesting, although both GPTs made the wrong interpretation of the goat/toga party joke. The joke is that the speaker thought it was a "goat party", not a "toga party" (rather than that they dressed as a goat in a toga party).
Similarly for the intelligence joke; the joke there is that the speaker can only get an unintelligent girl, rather than that he seeks an unintelligent girl.
I was more impressed by the glove and ball interpretation, to be honest.
Apes are not more intelligent than parrots, despite not having hands like apes parrots use tools with the same sophistication as chimps, and Crows surpass all great apes except humans in tool use and complexity. Parrots have been able to solve complex puzzles of equal or greater complexity to what a Chimp could solve. And when it comes to social behavior parrots/corvids are far more sophisticated and complex.
Honestly if I had to bet which animal would outsmart which in a real world game of wits I would bet on the parrot or crow over a chimp every time. I apes have hands which are perfect for tool use and making, but crows make more complex tools using their beak.
I recall that the origin of the word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greeks, who interpreted foreign languages as simply "bar bar bar". So, other animals may be communicating vocally, it's just that all we hear is "woof woof woof".
Or it might be that because we aren’t teaching them the way we teach babies. With a baby you are constantly reinforcing the language and encouraging them to match you. They obviously don’t have a human voice in there but they may be capable of a richer dog language than they currently use if they were taught it from early life.
> There was also a communications problem. Though they had an equivalent IQ of sixty, and could understand several hundred words of English, they were unable to talk. It had proved impossible to give useful vocal chords either to apes or monkeys, and they therefore had to express themselves in sign language
It would be impossible to give them useful vocal cords. Just not because of the vocal cords.
There should be a category specifically for invalidated science fiction. Things found to be unpossible in any timeline, assuming consistent laws of nature.
I believe this category is referred to as "uplifting" [0]. And while it certainly hasn't been proved to be viable so far, are you really sure it's time to rule it out as a possibility?
Eeh, just 'poorly aged'? I dont think how likely the principle of the thing was is all that important for science fiction which tends to concern itself with the consequences of a given technology.
Mind you, I tried to think up a fun word for this and failed which is why you're getting this answer instead of a word.
Just change the emphasis - "...give useful vocal chords...".
Important note on context - IIR, the "they" in that story were a spare-no-expense domesticated hybrid "working breed" of apes. Designed to replace expensive human astronauts doing repetitive, menial "housekeeping" jobs on space ships. One can read this as creative and edgy in context (1973, Civil Rights, "race riots", etc.) - but having the story's housekeeping apes able to talk might have gotten a "too big a risk" veto from the author's editor.
On the other side: Parrots cannot recognize themselves in a mirror https://talkieparrot.com/behavior/can-parrots-recognize-them..., while monkeys can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test . I consider the mirror test a better test for a higher form of intelligence than simply being able to simulate talking. So the real question nowadays would be: Can GPT-4 pass the mirror test? Can it detect it‘s own output, if you echo it back to it?
The problem is also that intelligence isn't on some kind of a line where a specific test tells you that you're closer to a base amount of intelligence needed for sentience. It's a whole bunch of things combined in some yet to be defined way that ends up allowing for the development of intelligence.
As for GPT-4 - it can't even recognize for itself whether data is good or bad, and it can't even recognize that it doesn't know something; IMO right now it's still basically just a black box that takes an input and produces a statistically matching output. A very good one, but still.
We should write that on the sky. A terrifying amount of things can be explained with evolution and natural selection. It can even be applied to social groups and systems of thought, i.e. religion, politics and economics.
The article is also an illustration of how dangerous is to attempt mechanistic explanations in biology. It's almost never one factor that bolsters or prevent an outcome, but a lot of factors working together in ways the human mind can only very poorly model without mathematical and computational tools.
I've heard as well that some animals, like Gorillas, have a hard time understanding human speech. However, they can communicate in other ways (using simple signs) that make it clear they have some understanding of language (in the sense of concepts like position, individuals, etc.) and context.
To me this suggests either their sound processing is also insufficient to understand human speech, or not their vocal anatomy, I wonder, but their auditory anatomy could be not ideal for understanding human speech.
Infrasound aside, it seems that it's neural after all. Apes scream and grunt, so vocalisation follows gross mood. (I don't know if anyone has tested apes for ultra low frequency communications)
I don't follow why screams and grunts can only encode gross mood. Presuming I can differentiate them enough to have some amount of vocabulary, why can't I make a well reasoned and abstract grunt?
Honestly, when you speedup or slow down the playback to be in proportion to their size, all animals sort of sound the same. This goes for whales all the way up to birds. Whale sounds sped up are hilarious btw.
You can, and arguably Apes do. I do not reject the possibility the range of grunts encode information beyond "stop behaving like the 9 month old ape you are before I rage quit and beat my chest"
Huh, according to the article it's not larynx position. It's that chimps seemingly lack the neural wiring to exercise fine motor control over their larynges. It's like humans comparative lack of control in wagging our ears compared to what dogs can do.
I have a parrot. He can talk, both contextually and randomly (the former much less often, but does still happen).
Not sure what your criteria for "talking" are but, by all of my own measures, my parrot sounds pretty much exactly like me in most cases, and like a child in most others. The words are clearly distinguishable, understandable, and in multiple languages (he lives in a multi-language household).
So, yes. Parrots can talk. Can they converse? Sometimes loosely, usually not at all. But they can very much talk.
If you mean that parrots do not understand the words and construction they are speaking, sure. But at that point you're splitting hairs. My parrot says "do you want it?" when he wants a treat. He says "good night" when he wants to go to bed. He says "c'mon!" when he wants me to come to him. He absolutely talks.
My parrot will on every occasion that it stumbles, let out a surprised "Oh!" followed by a "Good boy!" when he gets back up again. I didn't sit around all day teaching him to say "Oh!" whenever I pushed him off the branch and praise him when he got back up again. I also don't tell myself I'm a "Good boy!" whenever I get back up from a stumble (which thankfully doesn't happen often at home to begin with).
I'm sure my parrot doesn't know what "Oh!" or "Good boy" means, that is what the words mean in a human context. I'm also sure that he doesn't know what snapping finger noise followed by a stern "Ah-ah!" means, but he has used that on one occasion when he was mad at me and wanted to tell me to back off if I treasured the skin on my hands. (A learned behaviour from his first and previous owner).
...but at the end of the day, speech is in many ways "just" a series of correct sounds at correct times in correct situations, right? Does my parrot have a conversation with me? Well yes, sometimes, but not with words. Does my parrot mimic human words and phrases? Also yes, and sometimes in the most perfect situations possible.
From your description, it does sound like your Parrot has some understanding of meaning, much like dogs do. Not that they understand the grammar or can make out the individual words, but it seems like it can correlate <real world event> with <sounds>. <get back up> -> "Good boy"; <caught you right where I wanted you> -> "<snap> + Ah-ha!". Similarly, a dog may not understand that "sit" is an English word, but it can clearly understand "sit" -> <get that ass on the floor> (or whatever language you used to train them, they couldn't care less). That association is meaning, even if they are not fully acquainted with the works of Shakespeare.
My parrot will take a little nibble of you and then chuckle to himself cause he knows it strikes fear into you. And he’ll say “whatchya doin?” when he wants your attention.
> It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans.
I owned a parrot for a few years. The speech she had was like a tape recorder, she could mostly only play back what she heard in an identical manner. But she was able to play back pieces of appropriate snippets in the right context to express herself to a level that I'd call it talking. It's not normal "speech", but if you gave an otherwise normal human with damaged speech centers in their brain a tape recorder it's very much like that.
You don’t need a language to communicate (ask my cat — or any cat/dog). You also don’t need words, but colloquially, “talking” means using words, not using language. Someone talking to you with random noises you can reproduce would still be called “talking” whether or not it was a language.
In other words a baby saying “milk” because it wants milk doesn’t mean you should ignore it because it isn’t using a “language.”
Obviously we are the smart ones with our wonderfully clear, expressive, and concise language. /s --kind of.
We really need to be aware of our own biases and biological limitations if we actually want to study and understand the ability of other animals to have complex communications. Birds experience reality differently than we do - they see more of visible spectrum, they can make multiple sounds at once, etc. I wouldn't be surprised that what they can hear and how they perceive things like time is very different then us. Anyone observing parrots, crows, and other highly social avians can see they have complex relationships.
Parrots can't use sign language, but some great apes can(koko)[0]!
Even thought monkeys don't have the vocal complexity to generate all the vowels(a,e,i,o,u) I think "great ape language" communication is more complex and nuanced than a fricking parrot repeating some phonemes after some form of stimulation.
I think you are underestimating avian intelligence. Despite the term "parroting," if I recall correctly, they're estimated to grow to about the intelligence of a 3 year old human child:
> ...parrots demonstrate sophisticated problem solving abilities, they can communicate their desires, they can count, add and subtract, and remarkably, they even understand the concept of zero
It's not uncommon for people to underestimate avian intelligence, for some reason I never quite understood.
At times I wonder if it's some sort of tiny vendetta from humans themselves. You know, like how (Eurasian) magpies are considered pests, even bad omens, despite being intelligent and crafty...only because they are able to get past human-made traps. I guess a lot of humans are sore losers, heh.
But corvidae are legitimately intelligent, specially crows and magpies. The behaviors of crows in Japan are well-known, and magpies were proven to not only being able to recognize themselves in a mirror, they also used the view from the mirror as a tool (in the controlled experiment, to try to remove a sticker put on them by researchers). They can also remember humans visually (and therefore being able to hold grudges, or consider individuals "safe"), use and/or make rudimentary tools to achieve goals.
Not to mention that a bunch of birds can go literally (and visibly) insane in captivity. You can't have insanity without sanity.
Sorry but I was going to sleep, the article title was intriguing to me but was 12+ paragraphs long, so I ask ChatGPT the same question and I got 3 short paragraphs. Hope I'm not missing too much.
> If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
> Parrots are able to mimic human speech because they have a specialized vocal organ, called a syrinx, that allows them to control the sounds they produce. This ability is not shared by all birds, but it is particularly well developed in parrots.
Monkeys, on the other hand, do not have the same type of vocal organ as birds, and so they are not able to produce the same range of sounds. While monkeys do communicate with each other using a variety of vocalizations, these sounds are not as complex or as adaptable as human speech.
Additionally, language is not just about making sounds, it is also about understanding and using complex grammatical rules and abstract concepts. While some primates have demonstrated a degree of language comprehension and production in scientific studies, their abilities are still far from the complexity and flexibility of human language.
That is not a very good answer. What ChatGPT basically said was: “Monkeys can’t speak because they don’t have a bird-only organ and because syntax is hard”
I think you would have had a much better result if you had asked it to summarize this (fun and interesting) article.
> Parrots are social animals that live in complex environments such as rainforests, where communication with other members of the group is essential. The ability to produce a wide range of vocalizations, including mimicry of other animals and human speech, could provide an advantage in communicating with other parrots and navigating the complex social dynamics of their environment.
> In contrast, monkeys and other primates evolved in a different ecological context, where visual communication and social cues may have played a more important role than vocalization. Additionally, the physical constraints of the primate vocal tract may have limited the evolution of more complex vocalizations, including mimicry of human speech.
Although it doesn't make sense to me now - monkeys also evolved in rainforests right? Maybe they stayed closer. After all birds can fly.
>Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms.
>This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded that other primates could not produce as many vowels as humans because of the position of their larynxes [which] cemented the idea that a descended larynx is a prerequisite for speech.
>Towards the end of the 20th century, evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch realized a crucial fact – all the existing evidence was based on the anatomy of dead primates. Surprised that this had not been done before, Fitch used x-ray imaging to study the vocal tracts of live animals while they were voicing sounds. He was amazed to observe that their larynxes at rest remained high and then descended during vocalization to a position very similar to the human larynx.
>All these studies indicate that apes have all the anatomical characteristics necessary for speech. The reason they don’t is purely neural. Humans have much better control of the larynx, not because of its position, but because of the neural connections that connect it to the brain. Parrots don’t even have a larynx, but they have wonderful control of their speech organ, which enables them to articulate intelligible words and phrases.
Fascinating