Show Notes
We’ve spent decades beaming radio waves into space listening for an answer. But it might be enough to start here on Earth, or more accurately, under the seas. Sperm whales live in complex clans and communicate in rapid-fire clicks. Even if we could decode their messages, is it safe to assume they want to talk to us? What, exactly, would we have to say to them?
The Cetacean Translation Initiative – CETI for whales not SETI for E.T. – is considering the implications of AI translation tools for the ocean’s depths. In this episode of Futurology, CETI Founder David Gruber joins Claire Webb – the director of the Berggruen Institute's Future Humans program – to explore what it means to approach another intelligence with humility rather than conquest. In the end, creating a direct linguistic connection with another species may be yet another white whale that humanity should abandon as folly. For Gruber, the point isn’t fluency. It’s learning to speak more softly on a planet filled with minds we’ve barely begun to meet.
Resources
Aglow in the Dark: The Revolutionary Science of Biofluorescence — David Gruber & Vincent Pieribone (Book, 2005)
The Art of Translation — Vladimir Nabokov (Essay, 1941)
Songs of the Humpback Whale — Roger Payne & Scott McVay (Scientific Article, 1970)
Songs of the Humpback Whale — Roger Payne & Frank Watlington (Audio Recording, 1970)
Follow David Gruber
@davidfgruber
Follow Project CETI
Instagram: @ProjectCETI
LinkedIn: Project CETI
Twitter/X: @ProjectCETI
YouTube: Project CETI
TikTok: @ProjectCETI
Want to share suggestions or feedback?
Email [email protected]
Keep up to Date with the Berggruen Institute at:
Instagram: / berggrueninst
Twitter/X: / berggrueninst
Facebook: / berggrueninst
LinkedIn: / berggrueninst
Bluesky /futurologypod
Credits
Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.
Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.
Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney
Theme Music: Marcus Bagala.
Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli
Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland and distributed by Realm.
More from Futurology
Hypocrisy, the old line goes, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. For eighty years, the powerful at least bothered to pay it, citing human rights, national security, and democracy as reasons for starting wars and undercutting liberties. Now the veneers have been stripped, and the next generation is not accepting business as usual.
Machines are starting to act like humans. Does that mean they’re conscious? The problem is we haven’t been able to prove how or why humans are conscious yet either. So why would we be able to offer any answers about AI?
Democracy counts people, not plants. Humans are only a sliver of life on this planet, but today, we're the only ones who get a vote. What if we gave rights to rivers and standing to trees?
Somewhere around the Enlightenment we decided that thinking was what made us human. We built our schools, careers, and sense of worth at the altar of intelligence. Now machines are passing us on that rubric, which leaves two possibilities: we were replaceable all along, or we picked the wrong standard to live by.
Relying on machines to coordinate our lives was just one step toward decentering humanity’s role in the world. Flights, banking, trade, food production... But as we start merging our actual decision-making with digital entities, exactly which pieces of humanity are we leaving behind? And how might we bring those pieces back?