artificial intelligence – Pain In The Bud

Beloved Bodega Cat Killed By Autonomous Taxi In San Francisco

In disrupting another industry, AI has moved into a realm where its use has physical consequences.

I’d planned on taking a break and easing up on posts after the glut of cat-related news the past few days, but this story is disturbing, timely, and sadly we’ll almost certainly hear about more of these incidents in the near future.

KitKat, a nine-year-old tabby who called Randa’s Liquor Store in San Francisco’s Mission District home, was killed late Monday night by a vehicle owned by Waymo, an autonomous ride-hailing service.

Witnesses said they saw the Waymo hit the cat and pulled him out from under the self-driving car. They say KitKat was sitting on the sidewalk at the time. It’s not clear if the Waymo vehicle drove up onto the sidewalk or if its bumper was the impact point.

A witness who filed a report with 311 via smartphone said the Waymo vehicle “did not even try to stop.” The car continued on to its next pickup.

Several people rushed the injured tabby to a 24-hour emergency veterinary clinic, but his injuries were too severe and he died five minutes before his human arrived.

KitKat outside Randa’s Market. Credit: Randa’s Market Instagram

KitKat was extremely popular with people in the neighborhood, patrons of the neighboring bar and sandwich shop, and passersby. They described him as a feline who liked to patrol the sidewalk and pop into the bar and sandwich shop to “supervise,” making sure all was well in his little realm.

“Everyone’s heartbroken,” Jessica Chapdelaine, who tends bar next door and lives in an apartment above the liquor store, told Mission Local. “He’s the baby. He was everyone’s best friend and he was just the sweetest boy.”

Waymo didn’t respond to requests for comment by Mission Local, TheSFist and other media. The Google-owned company had not addressed the incident on its website’s press page, nor on its X account despite several users bringing it up, as of Thursday morning.

“You can’t even drive in the dark in normal weather without killing a cat,” one user wrote, while others weren’t nearly as diplomatic.

The San Francisco Standard provides a bit of context on the autonomous vehicle issue in California:

“The state had logged 884 autonomous vehicle collision reports as of Friday, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles (opens in new tab). A dog was struck and killed by a Waymo in Bernal Heights in 2023. A week later, a Labrador survived getting hit by a Cruise self-driving car; the company no longer tests its cars in San Francisco.”

On the other hand, there have been several dramatic incidents involving autonomous vehicles that have successfully avoided collisions with other cars, people and animals, even when given a fraction of a second to respond. In an incident in LA from earlier this year, a home security camera caught footage of a Waymo stopping instantly to avoid a dog that ran out into the street directly in the car’s path:

A human driver almost certainly could not make a safe decision in that time interval, but a machine can confirm there is no car immediately behind it and execute the stop within a few milliseconds.

Still, as more ride hailing services roll out autonomous fleets and expand into more cities — as the major players in the still-developing industry are already doing — this will become more of an issue. Waymo operates fleets in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin (TX) and Atlanta, and plans to roll out its service in Miami and Washington, D.C., in the near future.

The obvious question is whether AI-driven vehicles are safer than cars with people behind the wheel, for drivers and pedestrians. The answer seems to be yes, especially as the technology improves. Machines don’t text while driving, don’t get distracted fiddling with radios and don’t get behind the wheel after drinking. Sensors and software have improved dramatically in just a few years.

But that won’t be enough. There’s a psychological hurdle in giving up control. It’s the same reason why so many people are terrified of flying even though we’re statistically much more likely to die in car collisions. When you’re behind the wheel, you have control over your fate — or the illusion of control, anyway.

A close-up shot of hardware and some of the sensors on the Jaguar I-PACE Waymo autonomous vehicle. Credit: Waymo

Parallel to the questions about safety are concerns about whether any corporation should be permitted to put driverless cars on the road, especially when the companies with the resources to commit to a major venture like this are the familiar Big Tech conglomerates run by the same handful of tech oligarchs.

Should they be allowed to wipe out yet another industry, taking away work from people who drive taxis or for rideshare companies? Do we need the government to step in and place some guiderails on tech that has developed at an unprecedented pace and threatens to upend huge swaths of society? Should we demand a much more robust regulatory process and risk falling behind other countries in the AI race?

These are questions we’ll all have to grapple with, and there are no easy answers.

RIP KitKat.

All images of KitKat credit: Randa’s Market/Instagram

Another Tech Company Wants To Translate Meows And Barks Using AI: Can It Work?

Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.

A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.

Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.

More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.

Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.

In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.

It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.

No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.

“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”

Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.

Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.

This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.

Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.

Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.

Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.

“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon

An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.

In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.

The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”

The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)

We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”

If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.

Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.

The Latest Influencer Trend Puts Unfair Expectations On Felines

Cats aren’t equipped to use human language and there’s nothing wrong with that. Our feline friends already go to great lengths to communicate in ways we can comprehend. The least we can do is meet them halfway.

I would love it if my cat could talk to me.

Sure, he never shuts up, but if he could speak English I’d know why he meows at the same spot at the same time every morning, or what he wants on the occasions when he’s still meowing insistently at me despite the fact that his bowls are full, his box is clean, he’s had his play time, and every possible need and want of his — that I can fathom — has been met.

Most of all, I’d really like to know he understands I’ll be back soon when I go away for a few days, and my (mostly ignored) pleas for him not to attack his long-suffering, way-too-kind sitter.

Alas, Bud cannot speak. No non-human animal has ever demonstrated even basic proficiency in human language. People will point to examples like Koko the Gorilla and Nim Chimpsky, but there’s a reason why funding dried up for that kind of experiment.

It doesn’t work. It never did.

The scientists who end up taking on dual roles as researchers and parents to the animals invariably serve as interpreters, get too close to their subjects and swear that a gorilla pounding shiny buttons for “food tree food submarine” means the ape wants to have a picnic next to the ocean, or “car fly house car star” means she wants to ride a Tesla Roadster to Mars and start a colony with Elon Musk.

Koko, Nim, Chantek and the other apes who were the subjects of decades-long attempts to humanize them — and teach them language in the process — were ultimately not much different than Clever Hans the horse, who was reading subconscious nonverbal cues from his owner and convinced tens of thousands of people that he could do math and understand spoken language.

Hans had scores of experts fooled until the German psychologist Oskar Pfungst figured out how the horse was coming up with the correct answers.

Regardless of which famous example we’re talking about, no animal has ever mastered syntax, and the best that could be said of their proficiency with language, or lack of it, is that they learned they’d get attention and food when they pounded on a talking board or approximated a word in sign language.

Even if non-human primates were able to learn a handful of words by frequently reinforced association with an object, there has never been any evidence that they are actually using the words as language rather than simply understanding “Pushing the button that makes this sound means I get a treat!” (And yes, there is a profound difference. The former reveals the presence of cognitive processes while the latter is a conditioned response.)

Despite decades of intense effort, no animal has ever demonstrated the ability to use human language. At best an animal bangs on a few buttons and people are left to speculate on the intent. Maybe Fluffy likes the way a certain word sounds. Maybe it’s just fun to hammer on buttons the way it’s fun to pop bubble wrap. Most likely, these cats and dogs know that using a talking board is a guaranteed way to get attention, a treat and a head scratch from their caretakers.

Influencers and their talking boards

TikTok, which spawns inane trends with the reliability of an atomic clock, has provided a platform for people who insist their cats and dogs can talk. Using “talking boards” — elaborate set-ups in which words are assigned to their own buttons — they “teach” their cats how to express themselves in English and provide proof in the form of heavily edited, out-of-context clips that require the same sort of creative interpretation pioneered by Penny Patterson, Koko’s caretaker.

I just watched a video in which a woman claims her cat, named after Justin Bieber, was describing an encounter with a coyote by stomping on buttons for “stranger,” “Justin,” “Mike,” and “stranger.”

The woman says she thought Justin was asleep at the time, but now she believes the orange tabby saw the coyote outside and was still stressing about it well into the next day.

While she’s repeating Justin’s “words” back to him, two of her other cats come by and step all over the talking board. I guess whatever they had to say wasn’t important.

Justin’s talking board has 42 buttons, which stresses credulity well beyond the breaking point. More than half of the buttons are used for abstract concepts.

@speaking_of_cats
⚠️TRADE OFFER⚠️ Jackson recieves a brushing, Mom recieves 10 I Love You’s #fluentpet #talkingdog #talkingcat #cat #catsoftiktok #catlover #cattok
♬ original sound – Jackson the Cat

But forget all that for a moment and ask yourself how our own efforts to decode the meow have been going.

Despite our status as intelligent, sapient animals, despite the powerful AI algorithms at our disposal, despite the benefit of being able to digitally record and analyze every utterance, we haven’t come close to a reliable method for interpreting feline vocalizations.

Likewise with dolphins, whale song, corvid calls and the sounds made by other animals at the top of the cognition pyramid.

Mostly, we’re learning we’ve underestimated the complexity of our non-human companions’ inner lives, especially when it comes to the kind of multi-modal communication humans also engage in, but only subconsciously. We say what we want with our mouths, while our eyes, facial expressions and body language say what we’re actually thinking.

Likewise, the meow is an unnatural way for cats to communicate, and it contains only a fraction of the information cats are putting out there. It’s just that we can’t reliably read feline facial expressions, let alone tail, whisker and posture. (Studies have shown most of us, even when we live with cats, don’t get measurably better at this. In fact, we’re often no better than people with limited feline experience, but we think we’re better.)

Putting the burden on our furry friends

If we can’t crack a simple and limited system of vocalizations, aren’t we putting unrealistic expectations on cats? The average person has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, yet somehow we expect cats can latch on to an arbitrary number of them, approximate mastery of syntax that has eluded even our closest cousins, and bridge a cognition gap we haven’t been able to bridge ourselves.

It’s all too much.

I’ve had Buddy since he was eight or nine weeks old, and in more than nine years I still don’t know why he makes this praying motion. We may be best buds, but some things just don’t translate.

There’s a simple truth at the heart of this: Cats did not evolve to speak or parse human language, and that’s perfectly fine.

The little ones already meet us more than halfway because they understand we are hopelessly incompetent at reading tail, whisker or body language, and they understand we communicate with vocalizations.

By forgoing their natural methods of communication in favor of ours, cats are already taking on most of the burden in interspecies communication. Asking them to do more than that, to learn many dozens of words and the rudimentary rules of language, seems like laziness, wishful thinking or insanity on our part. Pretending that certain cats are successful is an exercise in the same kind of cynical opportunism that fuels every other desperate attempt by people trying to turn their pets into influencers. People do it because the reward is money and attention.

Worse, it contributes to the spread of misinformation. TikTok’s talking board videos routinely net millions of views, converting a credulous audience into an army of true believers who are convinced that, with just a little effort, their feline pal can shoot the shit with them.

If people want to construct elaborate talking boards in their homes and pretend their cats are expressing themselves in English, who am I to object? It’s not the smartest use of time, but have at it. What I won’t do is participate in the delusion that felines are a few buttons away from being able conversation partners, nor will I pretend these efforts have any relationship to science.

So to the journalists who keep writing credulous stories about these supposedly talking animals: please familiarize yourself with the example of Clever Hans, and please, I beg you to stop promoting these videos as if they’re anything more than wishful thinking. You are doing your readers a disservice for the sake of a few clicks.

Note: Jackson Galaxy isn’t a fan either, saying he’s “got some serious problems” with the talking board trend. Calling it “problematic,” he points out that cats are not only partially domesticated and the only animal species in history to take that step without human prompting, but humans have never selectively bred cats for specific behaviors or to bring out intelligence traits as we have with canines. (Think of sheep dogs or retrievers, who are the products of thousands of years of breeding for well-defined tasks.) There simply hasn’t been a need to breed cats for behavioral traits since the thing humans traditionally valued most about them — their ability to reliably eradicate rodents and protect human foodstuffs — is innate. No one had to teach cats how to hunt or breed them for the task. It’s only in the last two hundred years or so that certain human societies began breeding cats, and they did so for aesthetic attributes like coat patterns. Galaxy also notes that animals do not express emotions the same way humans do. Like monkeys, who “smile” when they’re terrified, felines express joy, anger and fear with their tails, whiskers, ears and body language. It’s not in their nature to tell us they’re happy or scared by padding up to a contraption and hammering on a button.

Top image of “Justin Bieber” the cat credit Sarah Baker.

Elephants Call Each Other By Name, Study Says

Elephants encode names and other information in low-frequency rumbles that can be heard miles away. For social animals who live in large herds, it’s crucial to be able to address individuals.

Elephants are famously social animals, moving in matriarchal herds that can consist of as many as 70 of their kind.

They also communicate over long distances, emitting rumbles that can be heard miles away.

Because of their social and nomadic existence, it makes sense that elephants would need a way to single out individuals and address each other, and for the first time researchers say they’ve found evidence of Earth’s largest land animals calling each other by name.

“If you’re looking after a large family, you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Hey, Virginia, get over here!’” Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm told the Associated Press.

The research involved field work and analysis using artificial intelligence. To record samples of elephants communicating, teams followed herds with recording equipment. Notably, elephant rumbles include sounds in frequencies lower than the human ear can detect.

large elephants near lake — Credit: Pixabay/Pexels

The team paid close attention when one elephant vocalized and another responded, and recorded who initiated each rumble and who it was meant for.

Although elephants are best known for making loud “trumpeting” sounds, experts say those are more like exclamations while rumbles contain encoded information that African savanna elephants would need to communicate to each other.

“The rumbles themselves are highly structurally variable,” said Mickey Pardo, a biologist from Cornell University and co-author of the study. “There’s quite a lot of variation in their acoustic structure.”

A machine learning algorithm was then used to sort and categorize the large number of audio samples, looking for patterns that are difficult for human minds to detect.

“Elephants are incredibly social, always talking and touching each other — this naming is probably one of the things that underpins their ability to communicate to individuals,” said George Wittemyer, an ecologist at Colorado State University and co-author of the study. “We just cracked open the door a bit to the elephant mind.”

A female elephant with her young offspring in Kenya. Credit: Pixabay/Pexels

Notably, the elephant “names” are identifiers that they created for themselves, and are not the kind of human-bestowed names that cats and dogs respond to. The list of animals who have names for themselves is short, although likely to expand with further study. Dolphins, for instance, identify themselves with unique whistling patterns, and parrots have a similar method, but both species address individuals by imitating their calls. Elephants use their name analogs the way humans do, to directly address each other.

The research has the potential to raise public awareness of elephant intelligence and their plight as they face threats to their continued existence. Like almost all of the Earth’s iconic megafauna, elephants will become extinct if we don’t do a better job protecting them and ending the ivory trade. Every year about 20,000 elephants are slaughtered for their tusks to feed the demand for ivory, especially in China where it’s considered a status symbol, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Yang Feng Glan, known as the”Queen of Ivory,” was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a Tanzanian court in 2019. Yang smuggled some 860 elephant tusks worth $6.5 million from Tanzania to China as the leader of one of the world’s most extensive poaching and ivory smuggling organizations.

During her years operating the smuggling ring, Yang presented herself as a successful businesswoman and ran in elite circles within China, authorities said. Two of her accomplices were also given 15-year sentences for their roles, but since then others have filled the vacuum left by Fang’s conviction, and elephant preserves are constantly under threat from heavily armed poachers.

Foundation Offers $10m For ‘Cracking The Code’ Of Animal Language

Think you can decipher the rhythmic clicks and whistles of dolphins or the grunts and alarm calls of monkeys? A foundation is offering big prizes for progress in communicating with animals.

Looking to prompt renewed efforts at decoding animal communication, a non-profit founded by an investor and a university are offering prizes — including a hefty $10 million — to teams that can figure out what animals are “saying.”

The Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. (Yes, it’s named after that Dr. Dolittle.)

Entrants aren’t asked to come up with a Star Trek-like “universal translator” for animals. Rather, the people behind the Coller Dolittle Challenge want to see methods that allow for two-way communication between humans and individual species.

“We are open to any organism and any modality from acoustic communication in whales to chemical communication in worms,” said Yossi Yovel, a professor at Tel Aviv University and co-chairman of the challenge.

The grand prize is a $10 million grant or $500,000 in cash, chosen by the winner, while the Foundation will offer $100,000 prizes each year for the best entries that make significant progress toward communicating with animals. The yearly prizes will be assessed “for significant contributions to decipher, interface or mimic non-human organism communication.”

While it may seem far-fetched — and there are those who believe humans will never be able to fully understand animal communication in proper context — there have been efforts to communicate with and decode the communications of bats, dolphins, whales and some primate species. Scientists have also pushed the boundaries on understanding group communication, such as the coordination involved in avian murmurations.

orangutan on tree — Orangutans have demonstrated the ability to understand abstract concepts, like using money, rudimentary sign language, and have even deceived humans. One orangutan in the 1960s repeatedly escaped his zoo enclosure by hiding a small strip of metal in his mouth and using it to pick a lock. Credit: Klub Boks/Pexels

The organizers believe artificial intelligence will be the tool that ultimately helps crack the communication barrier, but entrants aren’t required to use AI. The technology is incredibly useful for tasks involving pattern recognition and sorting large amounts of data, both of which are important in this kind of work when researchers are tasked with analyzing thousands of audio samples or hundreds of hours of footage.

Alas, we don’t think the foundation will be interested in the Buddinese language, which boasts 327 different ways of demanding food and features a timekeeping and calendar system based on meals and naps. A short trill followed by a series of staccato meows, for example, means “I expect prompt service at salmon o’clock,” while a truncated meow ending with a scoff is used to indicate displeasure when a human napping substrate tosses too much during sleep.

Still, maybe we’ll dress it up to make it look properly academic and give the challenge a try. Those prizes could buy a lot of Roombas!