Technology & Ecology
Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies
The MOTH Program has sought to answer questions that arise at the technology-ecology interface in the context of nonhuman animal communication technologies (NACTs).
At the forefront of the development of NACTs is Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), the leading scientific organization dedicated to applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to understand and translate sperm whale communications. Through its ongoing research, Project CETI has produced evidence for the presence of vowels and diphthongs in sperm whale codas (groups of clicks), which suggests that these communications are “highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought.” Other research by Project CETI demonstrates that sperm whale codas “exhibit contextual and combinational structure with key similarities to aspects of human language and other primate communication systems.”
Advances in the study and comprehension of animal communications like those achieved by Project CETI are accelerating. Increasingly, additional scientific organizations as well as technology-oriented startups are moving into the nonhuman animal communication space, looking to further develop technologies to listen to nonhuman animals for research but also for commercial purposes.
Beyond translation, some observers in the field predict that the technology and capacity to talk back to animals will exist by the end of the decade, if not earlier, collapsing the wall between direct human and nonhuman animal communications but also raising enormous potential risks for the well-being of nonhumans.
In short, advances in animal communications will not only transform our understanding of the cognition and complexity of the more-than-human world, but also will present unparalleled opportunities and risks for restructuring our relationships with the nonhuman animal world. Despite this urgent state of affairs, however, law and ethics is far behind and has not yet seriously tackled the legal and ethical implications of advances in animal communications, nor has it taken advantage of the field of new opportunities to advance protections and legal claims for nonhumans.
This is where the MOTH Program has stepped in. With respect to the newfound opportunities raised by these new technologies and capacities, MOTH and CETI are jointly publishing a law review article in Ecology Law Quarterly that maps how newfound understandings of animal communications, like those produced by Project CETI, can be used to strengthen the application and implementation of existing legal and policy protections for nonhuman animals and generate support for new forms of protection.
To guard against the risks these technologies pose, MOTH and CETI have launched an interdisciplinary design process with experts in law, AI ethics, Indigenous systems of knowledge, and other relevant areas of expertise and experience to develop legal and ethical principles (i.e., “guardrails”) for nonhuman animal communication technologies. MOTH and CETI ran an initial workshop on November 22, 2024 at NYU Law, where an early draft of these guardrails was discussed and refined. The draft guardrails draw on relevant and analogous bodies of law, ethics, and standards of practice, including children’s rights, Indigenous rights, wildlife research, AI regulatory frameworks, and more.
The draft guardrails will soon be made publicly available through a perspectives article in a peer-reviewed journal, with the complete framework available for viewing on the MOTH website.
The ultimate mission of this effort is to ensure the widespread, field-level adoption of these guardrails in order to mitigate risks to the nonhuman world.
Project CETI north_eastThese communications are “highly compositional, more informative, and more complex than previously thought.”