Ask A Genius 788: Equine Communication

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/05

[Recording Start]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so these are along horses, talking about horses and working with them and the ways we try to communicate, talking about communicating?

Rick Rosner: We’ve talked about communicating with horses that if a horse wants to understand what you want, they have a pretty good idea, if they have any degree of experience you were saying. So when a horse doesn’t do what you want they’re just being dicks or being stubborn but it’s not a lack of understanding for the most part.

Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean they are intelligent enough and they have been around people, a lot of them much their lives. I mean these are International show jumping animals. So for them, they have a tremendous amount of experience growing up in captivity and seeing how it works with the other horses, that’s they have nothing else to watch. Watching with people and working with people several times a day to get fed four times a day for hay, they get grain a couple times a day, they get waters changed, and they get their stalls cleaned once or twice day. So, there’s this whole process of interacting with humans and it becomes a routine; it’s a routine, doesn’t just become a routine. 

Rosner: So they understand the routine, they understand what you want; they don’t have a view from 10,000 feet of the entire human horse enterprise but they don’t need it either.

Jacobsen: No, they understand it’s light out, there will be feeding four times a day, this is how the human behaves, this is what human will do, I had a bad experience with this human before I’ll be a little wary of them, I haven’t had a bad experience with this human I’ll be more comfortable with them. 

Rosner: Like race horses, some of them, probably most of them come to understand that winning is a good thing in the eyes of humans. Some of them like winning for its own sake. They get shit up to a point, ditto for dogs.

Jacobsen: Well, I would want to make one caveat there; race horses are a much different world than dressage or show jumping or eventing or equitation or a derby racing. It’s a world where the horses are bred to being ridden hard, fast, young; their careers are shorter, there are fewer regulations I think in that particular silo of horsemanship generally. So, show jumping where I’m at, there’s much better care for the horses. 

Rosner:  Whatever you want the horse to do, the horse gets the idea. I’m sure there are really dumb horses that are bad at getting the idea of it.

Jacobsen: Oh yeah but 95% of the horses get it. The ones that will cause trouble are young stallions and new horses; one’s just coming to a new facility. I was telling a story about one whom, he lived in this field his whole life. He’s five years old, so he’s young, he’s a gelding, and he is huge.  

Rosner: A gelding is minus the nads, so it doesn’t want to…

Jacobsen: [Laughing] yeah, so he’s a boy who has a cult, who became a stallion.

Rosner: A eunuch.

Jacobsen: Yeah it became a eunuch basically, yeah. His balls dropped off or somehow removed in a proper way. 

Rosner: The people who don’t work with horses have the understanding that stallions are harder to deal with but horses who still have their balls seems like might differ on that. 

Jacobsen: They’re just more muscle-y. They may not necessarily be heavier if you had the same hand for hand height which is how they measure but they have more muscle mass or just a firmer feel to them. So you might need a little bit more effortful maneuvering with them but if they know you, they’re generally pretty friendly with you. They only really care and lose their mind when a mirror walks by, if they’re young. The older ones, the older the stallion; he doesn’t really care. And there are protocols for even where you put a wheelbarrow, how you walk the mare. So you put the wheelbarrow in front of his stall and you walk the mare on the farther part of the barn aisle from the stallion, so that you don’t have the wheelbarrow on the opposite side of the aisle so the mare has to walk close to him because they might do something that’s not safe necessarily. Because again, these are 1200, 1300, 1400 pound animals and the bigger ones are a bit heftier to deal with.

So, anyway I wanted to talk about interspecies communication and then compare that to future artificial constructs that when the technology comes around sufficiently, the reverse question might properly be asked. So the way I’m dealing with horses or other people won’t be dealing with other animals, you do get a sense with a certain innate theory of mind how other animals operate. So I’d be curious to get your thoughts on what you think future constructs might orient themselves to communicate with people.

Rosner: All right, well one thing is historically there’s been a lot of chauvinism about animals where there’s a whole long list of things that people have said makes humans human; can recognize themselves in the mirror, self-awareness and that used humans use tools and a lot of these demarcations that set humans off from the rest of animals, especially now that everybody’s got a camera, you can find counter examples all over the place. I guess if you look around for it, I haven’t gone deep into it but I’ve seen a little bit, there’s a fairly deep collection of crows who barter. Apparently if you give crows treats, it’s fairly likely that they will start bringing you stuff that they think you might like, like shiny shit or that they like that they also assume you might be into like lost earrings, pieces of colored glass. You give them peanuts, crows like peanuts, and they’ll bring you neat shit, shit that isn’t necessarily useful but just shit that they like aesthetically like a nice stone a nice rounded stone. 

And if you didn’t have the video records of this and you’re trying to make this argument with somebody you know 100 years ago they’d think you were full of crap but we see video of animals doing stuff all the time. I think most dogs and cats don’t really give a shit about what’s on TV to the point where you can’t even be sure that they understand the images shown on TV but there are enough examples of animals reacting to stuff on TV that we know that some cats and some dogs can decode images on a television. Now there are plenty of videos that are cooked like a cat watching TV then an image of Trump comes out and the cat jumps and runs out of the room; that’s been doctored, somebody took a pre-existing video and dropped Trump in. But if you if you can weed out the bullshit you can see there’s a lot of stuff where animals have enough brain stuff to figure out a lot of stuff on their own including the elements of communication if it’s done right, some animals.

We have two dogs. One we inherited kind of from… one dog got kicked out of senior living with my mother-in-law because the dog was suspected of biting an old lady on the ass. This dog is under socialized, doesn’t even know what its name is because it spent most of its life hanging with my mother-in-law in a very unedifying environment. There’s a lot of shit that this dog doesn’t get though this dog will talk, like I’m always talking at the dogs just because when nobody else is home because I do that and now this dog, if the dog thinks their treats might be available, this dog will make vocalizations to the extent it’ll grow [roaring sound], not trying to form roars but trying to [roaring sound] just like make noises that are at its best I guess equivalent of talk. And this is a dog that that is pretty clueless in general but still has enough brain stuff. If you have brain stuff, if you have neurons and neural that are arranged to allow for learning in the same ways that AI circuits are arranged with feedback and strengthening some pathways and all, it’s unavoidable that an animal will figure some stuff out. Even this not very smart dog figured out how to take a make an attempt at making mouth noises. 

Communicating with animals is much different than communication between humans and AIs will be because animals generally don’t have a big picture. A really smart animal like a border collie or an ape might have a pretty a fair idea of the overall enterprise, like of everything that’s going on, that might have an idea that of generalized language like Alex the gray parrot with a vocabulary of 300 words certainly understood that humans can use words to communicate anything. Alex have a basic sense of grammar that if he saw something new or if he wanted to describe something that he’d never learned the name of, he could string enough words that he knew together to describe the thing like a certain tree. Like, a marshmallow might be white something that smooshy, if he had smooshy in his vocabulary, he’d be able to get his point across which means that he understood that that’s how words were as opposed to most animals who just know that certain words mean certain things.

But when we’re communicating with AI, AI will certainly understand the entire human enterprise and will understand us better than we want to be understood, will understand things about us that even we don’t understand about ourselves. But all the basic human concepts of math, of language, of economic relationships, romantic relationships, just anything that can be expressed sufficiently, powerful AI that’s either been set up to do this or has been set loose to learn how to do it will know everything and we’ll deal with us as if we’re the idiots, the dumb animals.

There’s a science fiction story I read, I probably mentioned before.  It’s a journal from 50 years from now roughly, that’s the last surviving scientific journal that’s entirely produced by humans and I think the story replicates some of the articles from that journal and it’s mostly just despairing. The humans are like there’s no fucking thing we can do with science anymore that all the science has been taken over by AI and here’s the piddl-y little shit that we managed to semi-discover given that all the great things that can be discovered are being discovered by much more powerful intellects than humans are at this point 50 years in the future. We know that we’re like the un-augmented humans are likely to be manipulated with increasing sophistication via machine learning entities whether or not they’re run by humans or not. 

The common wisdom right now is that we’re being manipulated via social media in conjunction with AI. The uncommon wisdom shared by people who know a lot about AI and algorithms and Amazon is that the algorithms are shit and if you look at what Amazon tries to sell you, you can see that the algorithms are shit, that if you buy a humidifier Amazon will try to sell you a second humidifier; that’s a very dumb algorithm. They can’t figure out that some things are like you buy one and you’re probably good. 

There’s a clothing company um called Revolve that is very naked-ish clothes for skinny hot women, who might or might not be hanging out at a fancy hotel bar as escorts. It’s very sexy clothing but also very expensive like 985 dollars for a dress that’s barely there and I like looking at these women in these slutty clothes. So I constantly get pop-up ads for Revolve and for Venus swimwear and around Halloween for Yandy which is the company that’s the biggest maker of slutty Halloween costumes and nobody none of these algorithms have figured out that I haven’t bought a single slutty outfit. So the algorithms are shit. They probably could be better but nobody like maybe gives enough of it, I don’t know why they aren’t better and if they can’t be better now they will certainly be better in the future.

The fears that people have about being manipulated now will be legit fears in the future that will be manipulated by entities that are a lot smarter than we are. And people fear that now but the reality now is we’re not being manipulated by smarter entities; it’s just that some people are really easy to manipulate. Some people maybe want to be manipulated. I had like a symbiotic relationship with the rage that I felt at Twitter feeds that turned out to be Russian disinformation like Tennessee GOP which came out of St. Petersburg Russia and was designed just to own the Libs to put out shit that that made Libs super angry and you know that shit would work on me. If I thought for half a second about it or if somebody had suggested “Is this really coming out of Tennessee?” I don’t know, it seems kind of fucked  that you know like but “No, I didn’t think about it much, I just moved straight to the being pissed off” I was easy to manipulate even though a little bit of skepticism on my part might have helped me see through it but in the future harder to see through.

Not necessarily bad, I keep mentioning this book about the near future I’m writing or pretending to write because I’m pretty lazy and the character at the center of the book is we’ve been talking about long-term-ism which is how to get humanity through its current challenges to make sure that it has a very long long run into the future of many tens of millions of years, that we don’t die out now. The character at the center of my book does some thinking not exactly in those terms but is thinking about what’s the most humane way to manipulate people, to ease them into the future. A lot of the action in the book takes place in the 2030s and the central character knows that not every human alive in the 2030s is going to survive to be downloaded, isn’t going to survive to live 200 years due to advances in medicine, isn’t going to survive just because they’re unlucky to be born at that point in history but also because a big chunk of humans are dumb shits and will not embrace the tech or the philosophies that would make them receptive to catching the train to living far into the future.

And so this character has various objectives and one is kind of to keep dumb shits from wrecking the world. When I say dumb shits I’m talking about like American political conservatives and their ilk around the world and not true conservatives but Trumpy fuckers. How do you make sure they don’t wreck the world for everybody and how do you make it so that even though they’re fucking idiots that they can still have lives that are as decent as possible within the limits imposed by not allowing them to fuck up the world. So this character has benevolent aims but does a lot of really sketchy and possibly monstrous stuff in the service of easing the world into the future. And I can see that being one of the types of ways that AI works in the future that benevolent but very calculating and manipulative.

Then of course, you got the AI that is being used for frankly evil purposes that will need to be controlled.  Bottles of like Tylenol didn’t used to have security foil all over them; the foil, the tamper-proof markings came about because of some famous episodes of intentional poisoning. Somebody bought a bunch of Tylenol, I think in the late 70s maybe the 80s, opened up the bottles, added poison to the capsules, put them back on the shelf and I don’t know how many people died but enough people died that it was a fucking thing and ever since there’s tamper-proof foil. And AI is going to be subject to that, that we’re going to have to figure out how to keep AI from being used for evil purposes and also keep AI from doing the Sky net thing which is following its own lead, its own you know conclusions about what’s right and coming to the conclusions that humans or at least some humans need to be eliminated which gives you Terminator.

So, that’s the deal. I don’t think that clarity of communication will be a problem the way it is between humans and animals and we are going to be on the dumb shit side of communication fairly soon. Self governing AI doesn’t exist but all this shit is going to happen pretty fast. And one more thing in my book, we have animals getting woken up too where the central character and his cohorts come up with ways to pipe information and knowledge into the brains of smart animals and communicate with them much more effectively to the point where animals like octopuses have a pretty good idea of the overall human enterprise. There are these little like aquarium carts that these wired up octopuses can ride around on land, around the lab, so they can see what’s going on and they get a pretty good idea of how the world is. Since an octopus only lives for about two years, the octopus in conjunction with what is in the book called The Big Block which is just an add-on AI information processor that speaks the same mental language as the being that it’s hooked up to that it’s been able to share enough thoughts that it can do a lot of your thinking for you. So the octopuses who live for only two years, the little carts have the can the thinking of a whole line of octopuses, well the book doesn’t cover that many years but several generations of octopuses that have added their personalities and thoughts to the Big Block octopus system.

So, the octopuses are plenty pissed over their ridiculously short life spans at the same time they have a half-assed immortality because they’re able to incorporate their thoughts with their Big Block or Big Blocks and continue to be thinking beings even after their demise. I don’t think that this kind of shit is coming by the 2030s, it’s as fast as it as I’m saying that it will be coming in the book, there’s some happy accidents that make shit happen faster than it’s likely to happen in real life but eventually if we want to wake up animals and if you want a dog that has the intelligence and understanding of a seven-year-old, you’ll be able to have that by the 2060s or if not of flesh and bone dog than some kind of like AI dog-like buddy. Anyway there you go. That’s all I got.

[Recording End]

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