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00:02There aren't many cities in the world with wilderness on their doorstep.
00:07But this is the African savannah.
00:10So, five rhino, big train bridge in the distance.
00:15And just in that direction there, we've got the city heights of Nairobi.
00:22As the human population has grown, wild animals have been forced to share their spaces.
00:28But while the physical distance might have married, there remains a gap between their world and ours.
00:34It's a hippo!
00:35Or at least, we think there is.
00:37Oh, there's another one there.
00:39We haven't exactly been able to ask what they think.
00:43Unbelievable. And then the birds here, talking to each other.
00:53Today, artificial intelligence is helping scientists to explore the croaks, the chirps, and the howls that pass between and across
01:02different species.
01:05Revealing communications of staggering complexity.
01:11I'm Professor Hannah Fry, mathematician and writer.
01:15I want to know whether we can decode the language of other species.
01:20And perhaps even speak to them with the power of AI.
01:41Oh, I can see a waggy tail.
01:43Any story about animal communication should surely start with our closest furry friends.
01:49What are you doing?
01:51I'm like, come on!
01:52Look, we're matching!
01:54They might make the best companions, but our conversations with them have always been a bit one-sided.
01:59Thank you!
02:00You want to show her the house?
02:03This is the thing that most people are interested in.
02:07This is his fucking board.
02:12Cash.
02:14Cash has quite the social media following as he is able to communicate via buttons.
02:20Grandma.
02:21Friend.
02:21Blonde.
02:24Blonde.
02:25Blonde.
02:25How many do you think that he knows?
02:27There's maybe 130, but basically everything over here, if I press any of these, we're going to see quite a
02:33large response.
02:34The W-A-L-K button is on this side.
02:37Okay, sure.
02:37And if there was any...
02:39Cash hasn't learned how to spell yet.
02:40No, he has not.
02:41It's visitor.
02:42The board is designed with social words like hello and goodbye at one end, and verbs, nouns, and places at
02:49the other.
02:49Pray.
02:50I'm sick.
02:52And, according to Christina, she and Cash can use it to converse.
02:57Hey, Bubba, can I ask you a question?
02:59Do you want a bone?
03:03Bone.
03:04Yes.
03:05Yes.
03:07Okay.
03:08You want a bone?
03:09Oh, you clever doggy.
03:12There you go.
03:13Yeah.
03:14But every dog understands the word bone, right?
03:18What would be more impressive is if Cash communicated not just what he wants, but how he feels.
03:24Okay, so I asked him, you want to be brushed right now, because he was just hovering over this brush.
03:32He said, no, I'm sad.
03:37That didn't make sense to me, so I asked, why are you sad?
03:40And he said, I'm sick.
03:45And he didn't seem sick, but we went over to the couch, we cuddled, and you're going to see him
03:50bark right next to me.
03:54Oh, wow.
03:55Yeah, sorry, there is more.
03:56No, no, that's fine.
04:00Okay, maybe we're doing a human interpretation of this, but that is like understanding your own internal emotional state.
04:07Do you think that actually dogs have a much more intelligent inner life than we give them credit for?
04:13He absolutely seems to care about things I never had any idea about.
04:17The frequency with which my parents visit, very meaningful to him.
04:21If they've gone a couple of days and they have not visited him, I start to get grandparent requests.
04:26While many of us want to believe that we can have a meaningful conversation with our pets,
04:30some researchers have doubts about what the use of button boards really shows.
04:35It is not an exact science by any means, and we actually get a lot of pushback on that because
04:43people want it to be very clear and very linear.
04:46What I will say without a doubt is that what's happening here is communication, and that to me is very,
04:51very valuable.
04:56So far, little research has been published, but there is some evidence that dogs can combine buttons together to create
05:04new meanings.
05:05Cash! Cash!
05:08Oh yeah! You gorgeous boy!
05:11And regardless of the science, Christina's motivation is to build a better relationship with her dog.
05:18I think Cash and his relationship with Christina, super cute.
05:22But I also think that the jury is out on this, about whether this is just sophisticated begging or a
05:29real form of communication.
05:31What's interesting is the language, because this is Cash learning English.
05:36I think if you're going to claim to have really cracked animal communication, I think we also have to learn
05:40how to speak dog.
05:42And that is where artificial intelligence comes in.
05:47The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, that was the key that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs and the language of an ancient
05:53civilization.
05:55Unfortunately, when it comes to communicating with animals, it's unlikely that we're going to find another one.
05:59But there is some hope that lies in an incredibly powerful piece of AI architecture known as a Transformer.
06:07Now, Transformers are now ubiquitous. They are the engine that drives chatbots like GPT-4, and they work by taking
06:14reams of data, text for instance, and mapping it into a multidimensional space, a bit like a galaxy of stars.
06:22In this galaxy, each star represents a word, but crucially, the distance and direction between the stars encodes relational meaning.
06:32For example, the geometric space between queen and woman will be the same as princess and girl.
06:40This ability to track relationships between words gives Transformers their superpower.
06:45It's what helps them to make sense of things like context and structure.
06:50And incredibly, if you map different languages from around the world, even ones as different as English versus Urdu, they
06:58all form very similar geometric shapes.
07:01Meaning, if you transpose one map over the other, you can seamlessly translate from one language to another, just like
07:11a Rosetta Stone.
07:12With the discovery of this hidden mathematical structure, scientists can begin to venture into an alien world to decode animal
07:21communication and perhaps even to speak back.
07:30From birds to bats, frogs to humpback whales, the complexity of animal sounds is astonishing.
07:40Research shows prairie dogs can describe what their predators look like.
07:46Budgies use sounds akin to consonants and vowels.
07:50And with decades of data collected by scientists just waiting for AI to decode it, these kinds of discoveries could
07:58be just the beginning.
08:08I mean, this is an extraordinary building.
08:12This is Azza Raskin.
08:15A brain.
08:15This is a real human brain.
08:17A real, real one.
08:18Yeah, a real, real one.
08:19He co-founded the Earth Species Project, a non-profit that tries to decode communication in non-human species.
08:29We work with like 40 plus institutions and like 80, 100 biologists.
08:35And they record, as you see here, like video.
08:37They record audio.
08:39Yeah.
08:40They record motion, how the animals move.
08:42And so what that lets us start to do is to translate to and from all the different modalities.
08:49What does one whale say that causes another whale to dive?
08:53In terms of the first step of that then, like trying to uncover existing patterns in the data that you're
08:58collecting.
08:59Like, do you see that there's a particular noise that whales make when another whale dives?
09:05Yeah.
09:05Yeah, yeah, yeah.
09:06Wow.
09:07This, these are a couple beluga communicating while hunting.
09:11Go on.
09:15Sounds like radio static.
09:16Right?
09:17Or an alien modem.
09:20Yeah.
09:21An alien modem.
09:23I like that a lot.
09:24Yeah.
09:24I mean, I could listen to that for 100 years and never make sense of it.
09:28Correct.
09:28Yeah.
09:29And mind you, scientists haven't been able to make sense of it.
09:32But we're at the cusp of having the tools to learn how to like disambiguate to like solve what's called
09:39the cocktail party problem.
09:44The cocktail party problem is the task of picking out a single voice from a background of business.
09:51Help me, please.
09:52Could you tell me where the nearest tube station is?
09:54I'm just not sure of directions.
09:58AI has nearly solved it for human voices.
10:01But the progress for animals has been a little slower.
10:06Even before you've started trying to understand what an individual animal is talking about in an individual situation, even collecting
10:13the data of a single animal speaking is really hard.
10:17Yeah.
10:18And so you have to teach an AI what does an individual animal sound like?
10:21What is the syntax?
10:22And once it learns that, then it tries to do lots of separations and it's like, oh, is this a
10:26good separation?
10:27So to be able to translate all of that data into meaning is what enables us to start doing this
10:33kind of work.
10:35It's a little bit like ChatGPT, but instead of for humans, for animals.
10:40So this first bit is the prompt.
10:43So this is what the bird sang and then the AI continues it.
10:47It's sort of like autocomplete for animal communication.
10:51Predictive text for birds.
10:52Exactly right.
10:53But for birds.
10:54So here we go.
10:58Okay.
10:59To my ear, I wasn't looking.
11:01I didn't notice the point at which it became fake.
11:03And yet, does the bird notice?
11:05You don't know yet.
11:06Like we are right at that cusp of trying for the very first time to have like AI animal direct
11:14like communication.
11:16The capability to converse with animals would be an almost magical superpower.
11:21But even if we could, what words from our human world would we even say?
11:28I think we should expect some birds of our experience to be very similar.
11:32You know, we all have mothers, we all need to eat, and we should expect a whole bunch to not
11:37be.
11:38So if you're using this full AI, right?
11:40And it's like doing autocomplete.
11:42Yeah.
11:42And you have no idea what it's saying.
11:45Is there concern that you might, I don't know, like distress the animal or sort of put them in a
11:51situation they don't need to be in?
11:52Yeah.
11:53One of the really scary things about working on this technology is if we're not careful and we just create
12:01a synthetic whale and put it on the ocean that starts to sing, like we might mess up a 34
12:07million year old wisdom tradition.
12:10Humpback whales have the ability to adopt other populations' songs and can broadcast them thousands of miles across the ocean.
12:19An AI whale could interfere with that communication, perhaps affecting behaviour or navigation.
12:30Eventually I think we're going to need a kind of Geneva Convention for cross-species communication.
12:35Like this technology is coming whether we build it or somebody else.
12:39In some sense it's inevitable.
12:42There is an assumption here that the technology that works for humans could be transported to work for animals too.
12:50But just because AI can switch from Urdu to Spanish, translating from English to whale seems like a different kind
12:58of problem altogether.
12:59It feels like there's something missing here, right?
13:02You know, when ChatGPT was trained with humans using it and assessing how much sense it made, how good it
13:11was at replicating human language.
13:14We're kind of missing the key translator who can go from one language to the other.
13:19And I know that that's the point. I know that they're saying that AI can be the Rosetta Stone.
13:23But I'm just...
13:25I'm not sure that I'm convinced that our world view
13:30and the things that we care enough about to have language for
13:34are going to map onto the things that are important to animals enough.
13:50These are elephant seals.
13:53For three months a year they lie around on beaches while the females wait for their newborn pups to be
13:59old enough to swim.
14:01So what does a colony of elephant seals have to talk about in all of that time?
14:06Oh my gosh, the light for the morning is so beautiful.
14:09When it comes down over all of these hillsides, it's absolutely beautiful.
14:13Biologist Caroline Casey has spent over a decade studying these creatures.
14:18It's got a little bit of mountain goat. We knew.
14:21Mountain goat genes.
14:22And has begun to discover what they have to say.
14:25Really, it's just about sitting here and waiting, you know.
14:28I'll just like post up and kind of watch to see what's happening on the colony.
14:34Right now, it's mating season.
14:37And the seals approach to romance is seemingly, well, one-sided.
14:43These are mostly adult females.
14:45And then each female for the most part has a little pup with them.
14:49And so typically there's one alpha and his job is to mate with as many females as possible before they
14:54depart back to sea.
14:55And that's when things get really dynamic because there's males waiting in the wings for these females.
15:00Is that a male over there?
15:01Yeah.
15:03Rather than heading straight into an energy-draining and sometimes deadly battle,
15:09the competing males call out, each with a unique rhythm and timbre.
15:16This is a real simple call.
15:21Oh, it sounds like someone with a drum.
15:23Yeah.
15:24And then I love this one.
15:26This one is more complex.
15:27So there's like little substructural components that hopefully you can hear.
15:36Oh, it sounds like a bongo.
15:38Yeah.
15:40Through a series of playback experiments, Caroline discovered they were essentially just saying their own names.
15:48They've got names?
15:49Exactly.
15:50What, that they give each other or that they give themselves?
15:52They give themselves, essentially.
15:53We don't know how.
15:54We don't know if they learn them or if they're born with them.
15:56What, so they come in and they're like, Jim's here!
16:00That's the only thing they say.
16:01But you need to be able to have experience with Jim to know how to respond to them.
16:05But if Bob had beat you up a couple of times and you hear the word Bob, all of a
16:10sudden you have this association with this negative thing that happened.
16:15In the world of male elephant seals who only ever say their own name, it's not looking great for an
16:22AI Rosetta Stone to communicate with them.
16:25But that doesn't mean that AI can't bring other benefits.
16:30I would love to work with somebody who specializes in AI to see what they would find.
16:35But I'm really driven by a specific scientific question.
16:38You know, I'm taking maybe a two minute recording of this male.
16:40I know exactly who he is.
16:41I know the context of the call that he's producing.
16:43So it's not just a case of like, get the data, now we've got AI, press the big AI button
16:49and there you go, talk to animals.
16:51I mean, you're the main, sorry, I'm just so sidetracked by how gigantically enormous that animal seal is.
16:57And now he's living.
16:58He's unreal.
16:59Because his seal is coming up and he's like, you better come into my hair.
17:04Is it possible, though, that maybe there are things other than food and space and mating that these seals are
17:12talking about?
17:13Sure.
17:13Yeah, absolutely.
17:15Yeah.
17:15Yeah.
17:15I mean, I would be surprised just because we've been studying them for so long.
17:21But of course, maybe they love surfing.
17:23Yeah, of course, we're looking at it through our own human lens.
17:27And of course, there may be some subtle patterns that we're missing.
17:30So I think that that's where AI can really complement.
17:33But it's no substitute for sitting on a gym.
17:35I don't think so.
17:36I think that the most elegant and profound discoveries of animal behavior have come from knowing individual animals and watching
17:45them and tracking them and just being present.
17:55I think the big thing about this project is that it's all about listening rather than communicating necessarily.
18:00It's all about what these creatures are saying to each other.
18:04And they're only intervening to be sure that they've understood it.
18:08And it does make me wonder about this idea of communication.
18:11I mean, here it's one way.
18:15But is there ever going to be a situation where talking to wild animals is a good thing?
18:21The potential risks from human to animal communication are far reaching, whether it's causing animals distress or unknowingly impacting entire
18:31ecosystems.
18:33The stakes are high if the goal of two way communication is to actually improve our relationship with the natural
18:41world.
18:49In Kenya, a group of researchers are trying to do just this.
18:54This is our headquarters in Nairobi, in this incredible building actually. It's very, very old. It's about 70 years old.
19:01They have harnessed the power of communication to address the growing problem of human-elephant conflict in the hope that
19:09they can prevent both sides from harm.
19:15It all began after hearing indigenous folklore that elephants are terrified of bees.
19:22So here we are. So this is one of the...
19:25Inspired, Dr Lucy King hid a loudspeaker near to a herd of resting elephants and played the sound of a
19:32disturbed hive of African bees.
19:35The bee sound is coming from this side. Can you see her face? She's lifting her head up, the trunk's
19:41curling round, ears are out.
19:43And then you start to see one female starts the retreat with her head up, tail out.
19:48She's clearly alert and she follows and then suddenly because she starts running, they all start running away.
19:56Oh my goodness.
19:56And you can see them literally galloping away from what they think is bees coming to get them.
20:03But not only did they run away, but the elephants listening to bees head shook as if there were bees
20:09in the air.
20:10And then they would also dust themselves as if they were thinking there are bees, I need to knock them
20:15out of the air.
20:15Because before this moment, all you knew was that they didn't like chilling out under trees that had beehives in
20:22it.
20:22But this is like the moment when it's like, no, they really do not want to be near the bees.
20:29To better understand what was going on, Lucy used microphones to record low frequency elephant rumbles inaudible to humans.
20:39Potentially, there's like a ripple of panic that goes through them.
20:42Potentially there's some communication going on there as well.
20:45And what she found was rather incredible.
20:49You get back to the lab and there on the screen are just ripples of rumbles coming through that have
20:56been captured.
20:56There's a very specific shape to the bee rumble.
21:00And if you played that shape of sound through a very large speaker back to unknowing elephants,
21:07they would run away, head shake and dust.
21:09No!
21:10Yeah.
21:11So you basically get the elephant word bee, play it to an elephant and they react as though they are
21:17bees.
21:17Yes.
21:18And that was the absolute eureka moment.
21:25Decoding this hidden communication inspired a way to keep elephants and humans away from conflict.
21:33Enter the beehive fence.
21:35Hives or identical dummy hives are hung along a wire to create a border around farmer's crops.
21:43If an elephant disturbs the wire, the fence releases a swarm of angry bees sending the elephants on their way.
21:51It's a deceptively simple solution.
21:54And just the beginning of scientific research that could provide conservation at a wider level.
22:03Our interpretation of this, we are passionately interested in the animal itself, but in the reality, it's to help us
22:09save them.
22:09Because they're all under such threat.
22:11And I guess understanding that comes through language, perhaps.
22:14Perhaps.
22:15You know, perhaps language might give us an insight into how they are reacting to each other.
22:21We played bee sounds to certain elephants and then we played the sound of samburu warriors to another group of
22:27elephants.
22:28They don't head shake.
22:29They don't dust.
22:30They actually run.
22:31So they rumble, but they don't make a huge load of noise because they want to be quiet.
22:34So, like a word for scary human?
22:37Yes.
22:37And the question is, is it scary human or is it scary samburu?
22:40So the threat level is different and the elephants respond differently to the threat levels.
22:44Oh, Jesus.
22:44Yeah.
22:45This is the level of complexity that we're teasing apart now with the science that we can do.
22:53As AI develops, it will provide researchers with new ways to tune into the animal kingdom.
23:00Goals that once seemed fantastical could be closer than ever.
23:05And while a meaningful conversation with an elephant might never come to pass,
23:10none of it will matter unless we are willing to properly engage and appreciate the other species on this planet.
23:19Honestly, I'm a little bit skeptical about how far it's going to take us.
23:23Because if we do manage to get to this future where we can fully communicate with animals,
23:30I'm not sure that humans are going to be that good at listening.