13. The Sounds of Life: Bioacoustics, A.I. and Ethics – with Karen Bakker

Written By alexa firmenich

“The bigger implication is that it may be that every single organism alive is sensitive to sound. And they may be more sensitive than us, because in the case of coral larva, they are listening with their entire bodies.”

- Karen Bakker

 

SYNOPSIS:

The world around us is constantly vibrating with sounds we cannot hear. But our ability to listen in, and make sense of the noise, is rapidly changing.

Over the last decades, scientists have begun installing digital listening devices in nearly every ecosystem on the planet. This process of deciphering what nature is saying is called “bioacoustics” and “ecoacoustics”. Massive advances in both hardware and artificial intelligence are permitting us to go where no artificial ear has ever gone before… And the discoveries are astounding.

Recent breakthroughs are revealing that many more species are speaking in ways we didn’t even know were possible, with far richer behaviors than was previously known. Our is guest Karen Bakker (a Canadian scientist, author, Professor at UBC and Rhodes Scholar) and she shares how bioacoustics is poised to alter humanity’s relationship with our planet, by expanding our sense of sound to new perceptual and conceptual horizons.

We can develop mobile protected areas for animal climate refugees. Simply by singing, a whale can turn aside a container ship. Acoustic enrichment can help corals regenerate. And so much more.

Acknowledging these forms of communication requires us to confront our entrenched ideas of sentience and intelligence. This seeks to understand non-human communication on its own terms, and brings up a whole new terrain of ethical and moral dilemmas… Who grants us consent to listen in to the conversation of bats in their cave? Who owns their data? And as we inhabit such different lifeworlds, might we have enough shared concepts that would enable any kind of translation?

 

GUEST BIO:

Karen Bakker is a Canadian scientist, author, and entrepreneur known for her work on digital transformation, environmental governance, and sustainability. A Rhodes Scholar with a PhD from Oxford University, she is a Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is currently the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stanford University’s Annenberg Fellowship in Communication, Canada’s “Top 40 Under 40″, and a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship.

Bakker’s Smart Earth project focuses on digital transformation and environmental governance, advancing regenerative sustainability and environmental justice through mobilizing the tools of the Digital Age to address the most pressing challenges of the Anthropocene.

Bakker is the author of the widely celebrated The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, which won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award (2022), has been translated into seven languages, and featured in a TED talk in 2023.

QUOTES:

  • We’ve discovered that fish and coral larvae can distinguish the sound of their home reefs, plants emit distinct ultrasonic noises when dehydrated or distressed, and flowers respond to the sound of buzzing bees by flooding with sweetened nectar.

  • Using this technology to generate what are essentially deep fakes of animal sound would be unhelpful if not dangerous for other species. I think where we'll eventually get to is some combination of neurosymbolic and classical forms of AI with large language models.

  • The bigger implication is that it may be that every single organism alive is sensitive to sound. And they may be more sensitive than us, because in the case of coral larva, they are listening with their entire bodies.

  • Essentially what we are doing is engaging other species in dialogue using sounds that we generate through our digital devices aided by AI. And we do that in a world where other species do not have rights or personhood, and cannot be asked for their consent. And we don't know whether they're actually even interested in speaking with us.

  • The silver lining when you reduce noise pollution is that the effects are immediate, significant, and long-lasting because noise pollution doesn't persist in the environment.

  • What must it be like to just be hanging out on the ocean floor doing your thing, and all of a sudden, all your cells explode because of sound.

  • The analogy would be — imagine there's a large blast near you. You lose your hearing. Your eardrums are ruptured, but also your stomach explodes, so you cannot digest food. And then the blast also disrupts your sense of gravity. So you don't even know which way is up. You can't walk.

  • I compare it to an acoustic smog. Imagine you wake up every day and go outside your house and you cannot see more than a foot in front of your face. Well, you would be debilitated because so many aquatic organisms see the world through sound. That's how debilitating sound is for these organisms.

  • We cannot congratulate ourselves about this. It's a worthy thing to do, but it does not truly mean the whales have agency. If they did, they probably wouldn't choose to live in a world where cheap goods are floating around by container ship and threatening them and their children. However, in the strange times we find ourselves, perhaps it's the best we can do.

  • The longer term possibility is that we do create new political frameworks, frameworks for expressing political voice that are nascent examples of a multi-species democracies, in which other species’ data is incorporated in a way that gives them some influence on human action.

SHOW LINKS

CREDITS

Photo Credit: Karen’s Book Cover 

Sounds: Compilation of healthy coral reef sounds: Tim Lamont; Bat sound of Pipistrellus Nathusii: Tomáš Bartonička, Jahelková, Helena, Ivan Horáček, and Tomáš Bartonička. "The advertisement song of Pipistrellus nathusii (Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae): a complex message containing acoustic signatures of individuals." Acta Chiropterologica 10, no. 1 (2008): 103-126.doi: 10.3161/150811008X331144

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