Unlocking the Language of Whales with AI | David Gruber

If aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, how would we talk with them? Well, we already have a kind of creature on this planet we could attempt to talk to first, and in the last few years a team of renowned scientists have been exploring the ocean studying sperm whales to get that conversation going.

David Gruber is a professor of biology and environmental science at CUNY and the founder of Project CETI (https://www.projectceti.org/) , an interdisciplinary scientific initiative that is using the latest developments in AI to understand, and possibly communicate with, sperm whales. The day when we break the cross-species communication barrier may be here sooner than you think. Just this year CETI managed to decode what could be called a sperm whale “alphabet”.

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00:00 The Alien Communication Conundrum
00:51 Introducing Project CETI
03:53 The Quest to Understand Whale Communication
14:52 The Intricacies of Sperm Whale Codas
19:02 Innovative Research Methods
19:23 Ethical Considerations in Marine Biology
23:34 The Future of Interspecies Communication
24:08 Final Thoughts and Reflections