Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
The interspecies internet: Diana
Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf at TED2013
Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
February 28, 2013 at 8:13 pm EST
Photos: James Duncan Davidson
The internet connects people all over the world. But
could the internet also connect us with dolphins, apes, elephants and other
highly intelligent species?
In a bold talk in Session 10 of TED2013, four
incredible thinkers come together to launch the idea of the interspecies
internet. Each takes four minutes to talk, then passes the metaphorical baton,
building the narrative in parts.
The talk begins with Diana Reiss, a cognitive
psychologist who studies intelligence in animals. She shows us a video of an
adorable dolphin twirling in the water. But the dolphin isn’t spinning
playfully for the camera — the dolphin is watching itself in a two-way mirror.
“A dolphin has self-awareness,” says Reiss. “We used
to think this was a uniquely human quality, but dolphins aren’t the only
non-human animals to show self-recognition in a mirror. Great apes, our closest
relatives, also show this ability.” Ditto for elephants and even magpies.
Reiss shares her work with dolphins — she’s been
teaching them to communicate through an underwater keyboard of symbols that
correspond to whistles and playful activities. Through this keyboard, the
dolphins learned to perform activities on demand, and also to express their
desire for them. (For more on how a similar dolphin keyboard works, read up on Denise Herzing’s talk from earlier today.)
“You can’t get more alien than the dolphin. We’re
separated by 95 million years of divergent evolution. These are true
non-terrestrials,” says Reiss. “This self-organized learning, the same thing we
heard from TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra. I’m suggesting this is our Hole in
the Water.”
Reiss was conducting this work on her own. And then
she got a call from iconic musician Peter Gabriel.
“I make noises for a living, and on a good day it’s
music,” says Gabriel. He has always looked into the eyes of animals and
wondered what is going on inside their heads, he says, so excitedly read about
research, like Reiss’, examining communication with animals.
“What was amazing to me was that [the animals] seemed
a lot more adept at getting a handle on our language than we were at getting a
handle on theirs,” says Gabriel. “I work with a lot of musicians from around
the world. Often we don’t have any common language at all. We sit behind our
instruments and it’s a way to connect.”
So Gabriel started cold-calling scientists to see if
he could be a part of this work. His goal: To try writing music with an animal.
And he got his chance.
In a video clip that raises oohs and ahhs from
audience, Gabriel shares a video of a bonobo with a keyboard. While bonobos had
been introduced to percussion instruments before, and bashed them with their
fists, this was the first time this bonobo had ever seen a keyboard. And with
accompaniment, she played truly amazing music.
“She discovers a note she likes. She finds the
octave,” says Gabriel, narrating the beautiful melody in the video. “We began
to dream … What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces – visual,
audio — to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the
planet with.”
Gabriel brought the video of this unusual jam session
to Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Center for Bits and Atoms.
s unusual jam session to Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.
“I lost it when I saw that clip,” says Gershenfeld,
stepping up to the stage. “I was struck by the history of the internet, because
it started as the internet of middle-aged white men … I realized that we humans
had missed something — the rest of the planet.”
At this point, Gershenfeld video-conferenced in
animals live — including orangutans in Waco, Texas, dolphins at the National
Aquarium in Baltimore, and elephants in Thailand.
Gershenfeld is known for his work in the internet of
things. And he thinks animals can be a part of it, too. ”We’re starting to
think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the
internet,” he says.
Which brings us to Vint Cerf, who helped lay the
foundations for the internet as we know it and is now vice president and Chief
Internet Evangelist for Google.
o helped lay the foundations for the internet as we know it and is now vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google.
“Forty years ago we wrote the script of the internet.
Thirty years ago we turned it on,” says Cerf. “We thought we were building a
system to connect computers together. But we quickly learned that it’s a system
for connecting people.”
“You know where this is going,” Cerf continues, to a
laugh, bringing it back to research in communicating with animals. ”What’s
important about what these people are doing: They’re beginning to learn how to
communicate with species that are not us, but share a sensory environment.
[They're figuring out] what it means to communicate with something that’s not a
person. I can’t wait to see these experiments unfold.”
So what’s next? The internet of things, yes, and the
ability for us to communicate with computers without keyboards and mice. And in
addition to the internet of species, he even imagines an interplanetary
internet.
“These interactions with other animals will teach us,
ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world,” says Cerf.
“I can hardly wait.”
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