Infinite scroll was one of many things that I was working on and that's the one that everyone knows me for. The things that I put into the world, I can't necessarily control how they're going to be used.
I should have spent more time thinking about the philosophy and the responsibility that comes along with the invention. Your other big project is the the Earth Species Project, which is attempting to understand animal communication. The Center for Humane Technology is looking at the interdependence between humans and human society.
The Earth Species project broadens the lens, looking at the interdependence of all species. Tim Wu, who's a scholar on First Amendment rights, points out that the First Amendment was created in an environment when speaking was expensive. It took a lot of work to get your word out, but listening was cheap, because there wasn't that much information. Now, speaking is really cheap.
You hit one button and your message can go to hundreds of millions of people. But listening is expensive. We live in an information overload. The thing that the First Amendment was created to protect, it no longer protects, because the environment is shifting.
And we are really bad at listening. We just can't hear each other. We're disconnected from nature, and we're disconnected from ourselves. It was motivated by a breakthrough in what's known as the field of unsupervised machinery.
Computers had been pretty good in machine learning and AI; you gave them a set of examples and it could start to learn how to make more or predict those kinds of examples. But it couldn't take a language that was unknown and translate it. In , some research came out of University of Basque Country that let the computer turn an entire language into a shape and match the shape of one language to the shape of another language. You could translate between any two languages without examples.
We were like, "Okay, now is the time. If it does, can you start to build yourself a Rosetta Stone? If it doesn't, isn't that even more fascinating? If you can really hear someone else, understand someone else, you can take their perspective. Perspective changes can change almost anything. That's motivated a lot of our work.
We just started talking to anyone that would talk to us. We went to as many biologists and ethologists and animal researchers and machine learning researchers as possible.
The more we talked, the more we realized one of the major things that was missing was a repository. A library of all the different animal communication data sets that were machine learning ready. Everyone was working in their own silos, and we saw an opportunity to create a kind of perspective-changing machine: to look at the difference between humpback communication and elephant communication and sperm whale communication and bat communication.
It makes sense: the more human beings you put into a party, the more vocabulary they use and the more they speak. But biologists often have to throw all that data away, because there's more than one animal speaking and they don't know what to do with it. We know there are going to be parts of animal language that fit into the universal human meaning shape, directly translatable experiences. They have grief, they have love, and they need to eat, and they have family structures, and they have dialect.
Please update your billing details here. Please update your billing information. The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. Please update your billing details here to continue enjoying your subscription. Your subscription will end shortly. ES Money. The Escapist. The Reveller. The Optimist. ES Best. ES Mag. Follow us:. Password Please enter a valid password.
0コメント