AI Decodes Sperm Whale Language, Revealing a Complex System of Communication

if the heptapods already knew everything that they would ever say or hear, what was the point of their using language at all? A reasonable question. But language wasn’t only for communication: it was also a form of action. According to speech act theory, statements like ‘You’re under arrest,’ ‘I christen this vessel,’ or ‘I promise’ were all perfor

1 Decoding the Jargon

Brown, Mercer, and their fellow mathematicians and scientists, including the group’s hard-driving leader, Fred Jelinek, viewed language very differently from the traditionalists. To them, language could be modeled like a game of chance. At any point in a sentence, there exists a certain probability of what might come next, which can be estimated ba

Strides have been made, and the gap between human and machine communication narrows with each advancement, but perfect understanding remains on the horizon.

It’s frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way obliviously through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo that’s a little twitchier than its contemporaries till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all b