Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) has announced that it's analyzed sperm whales' pattern of vocalizations and broken it down into a complex phoenetic alphabet, including consonants and vowels. They are now collecting data with unobtrusive underwater devices and using that alphabet framework to analyze their vocalizations in an attempt to decode their language.
I attended a talk with the founder and president of CETI, David Gruber, and César Rodríguez-Garavito, the founding director of New York University Law School's More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) program, at the Explorers Club in New York City.
Gruber said that the CETI team is using artificial intelligence to find patterns in the use of this alphabet to try to decode what the whales are saying to each other. "We believe this technology was given to humanity for this sole purpose; not to write better emails, or to cheat on your homework, but to be able to connect really deeply with other species."
Oliver Milman wrote in The Guardian about Gruber and CETI in April:
Project Ceti has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years.
Actually being able to fully grasp what the whales are saying, or being able to converse with them, is still a longer-term proposition, Gruber said, but not an outlandish one.
"It's totally within our grasp," he said. "We've already got a lot further than I thought we could. But it will take time, and funding. At the moment we are like a two-year-old, just saying a few words. In a few years' time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old."
It is a reflection of CETI's commitment to not only understand whales but to do so with the highest ethics and concern for their well-being that they have partnered with MOTH to explore the legal ramifications of decoding whale language.
At the event on Monday, Rodríguez-Garavito referred to an article he co-wrote in Ecology Law Quarterly: What if We Understood What Animals Are Saying?: The Legal Impact of AI-Assisted Studies of Animal Communication, which states, "On multiple occasions, scientific findings on nonhuman animal capacities have influenced societal attitudes and shaped laws and policies governing their treatment."
He gave two examples of how understanding whale language could change how society views them, which could in turn help advance legal arguments to protect them.
So, in the paper, we make two specific arguments. One is that we have enough evidence to advance the whales' right to be free from torture; torture meaning the type of noise that interferes within individual and social lives. We use human rights law by analogy, to say that blasting those loud noises in marine ecosystems [a byproduct of undersea commercial exploration and drilling] is equivalent to flashing a bright light straight into a human being's eyes. We're highly visual animals, so that is the equivalent. And the right to be free from torture is one of the classes of human rights established back in the 1940s.
But importantly, and provocatively, we will also say whales have a right to cultural life. They have culture, they have dialects, and they speak different dialects…. Whales have their cultural preferences for certain types of food. They speak in a certain way. And it turns out that we human beings have come to the conclusion that socialized cultural lives are as important as individual well-being. We can also confidently advance the argument that whales have a right to cultural life, to be able to continue to interact through those vocalizations.
Rodríguez-Garavito was asked if he thought whales would ever be able to testify in court. He answered:
In the broad scheme things, if in the future we understand some of the content, at least we will be able to take into account the expressions of their interest and preferences, right? Whether before a court, whether it's before a group of scientists, and those voices can be can bear on the decisions of courts and legislatures and other decision makers. You would be surprised at the number of researchers and philosophers and artists who entertain this possibility very seriously.
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PREVIOUSLY at The Explorers Club:
"Cave of Bones" scientist Lee Berger talks about extinct apes that buried their dead and created art
Saving the gorillas of Uganda by helping the people of Uganda
