Karen Bakker, 1971-2023

Her book The Sounds of Life , in many ways about AI -- how AI might help us communicate better with animals -- had just come out the previous fall, and was immediately wildly successful. She was on sabbatical at Harvard, gave a fantastic TED talk on the prospects of using AI to decipher animal communication, and was constantly doing podcasts and in... See more

In her TED talk, Karen imagined a world in which AI and machine learning helped to bring us humans deeper into the world of animals. She closed by asking us to imagine an orca giving a TED talk:

And maybe one day in a speculative future, instead of a human here on stage, maybe bioacoustics would enable an orca to give a TED talk.