https://time.com/6240144/aza-raskin-ai-animals-social-media/
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During the early years of the Cold War, an array of underwater microphones monitoring for sounds of Russian submarines captured something otherworldly in the depths of the North Atlantic.
The haunting sounds came not from enemy craft, nor aliens, but humpback whales, a species that, at the time, humans had hunted almost to the brink of extinction. Years later, when environmentalist Roger Payne obtained the recordings from U.S. Navy storage and listened to them, he was deeply moved. The whale songs seemed to reveal majestic creatures that could communicate with one another in complex ways. If only the world could hear these sounds, Payne reasoned, the humpback whale might just be saved from extinction.
When Payne released the recordings in 1970 as the album Songs of the Humpback Whale, he was proved right. The album went multi-platinum. It was played at the U.N. general assembly, and it inspired Congress to pass the 1973 endangered species act. By 1986, commercial whaling was banned under international law. Global humpback whale populations have risen from a low of around 5,000 individuals in the 1960s to 135,000 today.
For Aza Raskin, the story is a sign of just how much can change when humanity experiences a moment of connection with the natural world. “It’s this powerful moment that can wake us up and power a movement,” Raskin tells TIME.
Raskin’s focus on animals comes from a very human place. A former Silicon Valley wunderkind himself, in 2006 he was first to invent the infinite scroll, the feature that became a mainstay of so many social media apps. He founded a streaming startup called Songza that was eventually acquired by Google. But Raskin gradually soured on the industry after realizing that technology, which had such capacity to influence human behavior for the better, was mostly being leveraged to keep people addicted to their devices and spending money on unnecessary products. In 2018, he co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with his friend and former Google engineer Tristan Harris, as part of an effort to ensure tech companies were shaped to benefit humanity, rather than the other way around. He is perhaps best known for, alongside scholar Renée DiResta, coining the phrase “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.” The phrase became a helpful way for responsible technologists, lawmakers and political commentators to distinguish between the constitutional freedom for users to say whatever they like, and the privilege of having it amplified by social media megaphones.
Raskin is talking about whale song because he is also the co-founder and President of the Earth Species Project, an artificial intelligence (AI) nonprofit that is attempting to decode the speech of animals —from humpback whales, to great apes, to crows. The jury is out on whether it would ever truly be possible to accurately “translate” animal communication into anything resembling human language. Meaning is socially constructed, and animal societies are very different to ours. But Raskin is optimistic that the attempt is worthwhile, given that connection with animals can be a force strong enough to galvanize humans into protecting the natural world at such a critical juncture in the fight against climate change.
The Earth Species Project is applying natural language processing—the AI technique behind human translation software and chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT—to recordings of animals. While they haven’t succeeded in “decoding” any animal speech yet, computer scientists at the nonprofit recently designed an algorithm that is able to isolate the sounds from a single individual animal (the algorithm works well on bats and dolphins, and is not bad at elephants,) in a recording of multiple “speakers.” Raskin says solving this issue—known as the “cocktail party problem” since it is comparable with the difficulty of focusing on one person speaking in a crowded room—is a first step toward decoding the mysteries of the animal kingdom.
Read More: AI Chatbots Are Getting Better. But an Interview With ChatGPT Reveals Their Limits
Although fixing the ills of social media and decoding animal speech may seem worlds apart, Raskin sees them as part of a holistic mission. The Earth Species Project and the Center for Humane Technology are both “experiments into how you shift trillion dollar industries,” Raskin says. They share the same goal: changing society for the better, not through the traditional Silicon Valley route of building an app or cornering a business model, but by changing culture.
TIME spoke with Raskin this summer. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss not just animal translation, but the state of social media, applying those lessons to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, and how—amid everything—to secure a place for both humanity and nature in a fast-changing world.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Before we get onto talking about the Earth Species Project, I want to talk about your life up to now. Your father was Jef Raskin, the famous expert in human-computer interaction at Apple who left a huge mark on that company. You yourself were a Silicon Valley founder who worked on subtly changing people’s behaviors through technology. Then you gave that all up to sound the alarm on social media. Now you’re trying to talk to animals through AI. Talk me through your trajectory.
My mother worked in a palliative care hospice. From her, I learned what it is like to care for someone with dignity. My father created the Macintosh project at Apple. And he also came with a very humanistic sense of care, at a moment in Silicon Valley before it had been captured by engagement and the attention industrial machine. You could still ask these questions: what is technology even for?
One of the things that makes humanity unique is not that we use tools—lots of species use tools—but the extent to which our tools remake us. There is no such thing as to be human without using some form of technology. Whether that’s language, whether that’s fire, or anything that came after. One of the things that people miss is the extent to which our technology changes our social structures and our culture. Just look at the plough. It changed how we lived, it created surplus food that let us move into cities, which changed the nature of family and relationships. If you’re going to use animals to plough your field, it’s not compatible with animistic traditions anymore, so it changes religion. Growing up, especially with my father, I was given this lens of how fundamental technology is to what humans become. We have a choice about what we do with technology, and what’s at stake is our identity and how we interrelate with the rest of the world.
My father was really interested in the idea of ergonomics: how human beings bend and fold. If you don’t understand and study ergonomics, you end up designing things like chairs that really hurt us. There’s also an ergonomics of relationships, of communities, of societies—a way that we bend and fold. If we’re blind to ergonomics, we break ourselves. If capitalism isn’t ergonomic to our biosphere, we break the container that we live in. And this is the through-line. For almost all my work, I ask: how do we create things that understand the ergonomics of how we as human beings work, how our biosphere works, how our technosphere works, so that we can create things that help us thrive as a whole?