The author included, near the end, a paragraph about me and my best friend the sonar operator who taught me a lot of what I know about cetacean communication in the 1970s. He was hunting soviet subs in 1962 and he saved us from a nuclear war during the October Missile Crisis because he had detected a sub that the Russians were thinking was not detectable. My friend had also conducted experimental acoustic interactions with cetaceans at sea.
I am finishing the latest version of Dolphin Whispers Chat application, an Android app for trying to chat with dolphins at sea. And the new version will probably be adapted to work with some wearable display glasses so that we can see the spectrogram and the chat text from the app and see the dolphins reactions near the boat without moving our head and refocussing, which makes us losing important and fleeting information about the exchanges. Such exchanges are usually very short and we need to focus on it and not be distracted by changing focus. Once we are better at these exchanges, then they should become longer. www.dolphinwhispers.com
Design whistle sequences to get dolphins to respond in ways that will help you figure out their meaning. A few multi-million $ projects could use that, such as Google, Baidu, and SDRP.
www.dolphinwhispers.com
I working on the Android app to chat with dolphins using underwater whistles.
The current version works well and is about to be used with free dolphins near Spain. We do not support captivity and we don't want our work to promote captivity or to increase revenues from captivity.
I saw the preview and I find it believable. Many people still think that this is not true and maybe the reason is something related to ontological shock https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ontological_shock
we at https://www.dolphinwhispers.com are building an Android app to let you add your own AI models to it and compete with DolphinGemma. The app can currently be used without AI models and chat ethically with dolphins by using your own intelligence.
Nice view. I see it that way too, for the most part. Yes consciousness is a spectrum, so is intelligence and on top of that, intelligence has multiple types, with different qualities. What is happening these days is that our machines that simulate some form of intelligence are forcing us to refine our crude everyday concepts such as consciousness and intelligence. And also machine, AI, etc. In a few generations, people will use much more accurate concepts for these things. Our vocabulary will expand much. Unfortunately many of us will use inaccurate concepts and make life dangerous for us all, just as the current inaccurate concepts of superior ethnicity or superior group or political power or disregard for clean environment, are making us in danger and ruining many lives.
The new book Agency explores a fictitious AI that has agency and can affect its environment, which is anything, and gets people to work for it and do things it cannot yet do. Intelligence has many types and levels within each type, consciousness seems to be a spectrum that our everyday mind-body theorizes but cannot strictly define, except by some mystics. Recent scientific discoveries are also making some of us suspect that there may be an underlying field of mind, a universe mind that generates our reality and life as we know it. Like Gaia but for the entire universe and including physical phenomena, not just life on Earth. Our machines that mimic intelligence are only intelligent in appearance and our own intelligence is somewhat limited. Our own intelligence is easily skewed and rendered defective, eg conspiracy theories, brainwashing. Thinking that we are the most intelligent species is also a sign that we have serious weaknesses. Not seeing that we are completely integrated with nature and that we must be much more careful with nature is a sign of low intelligence. One good test of the level of intelligence could be comparing how the entity is taking care of its environment. Comparing that with an appropriate level of care. We would rate quite poorly.
Very humbling and fascinating to read all the amazing achievements in this list. Here are mine:
1. The first and only app (I believe) to chat with dolphins using underwater whistles.
2. The structure of the knowledge component of an app that ensures the safe use of extremely poisonous pesticides produced by a large chemical manufacturer.
3. An expert system used to generate the complete source code, including the UI, of 13 operational expert systems for the configuration of telecom equipment.
4. The complete software for the safe transport of extra dimensional loads on a very large train network, the first of its kind in 1973.
5. Flight testing the first commercial autopilot RNAV flight management system, originally for the 747, back in 1974.
In the 1990's, an AI Corp developer (a woman friend of mine) completely automated the management of a large IBM mainframe using old fashioned AI. The computer worked in complete darkness. She called it "lights out computing".
I have an SWTP 6800 computer from around 1978, with keyboard, monitor, mag tape drive. Condition TBD. I could sell it at a reasonable price to a collector.
I wrote commercial Prolog applications circa 1990 and it is the nicest programming language that I know (I used over 30 in my 50 year career); I recommend the book The Art of Prolog, by Ehud Shapiro. Also the idea that with Prolog, you can easily write programs that write programs (I wrote a few of those) and that it may be feasible to scale up a program to fill in the code to match input and output descriptions, and build possibly unlimited complex logic on top of simpler components, as I think Shapiro was working on this approach in the 1990's for the Israeli gov., before the project went under the covers, it seems.