In her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker outlines some of the most ground-breaking experiments in animal and plant communication.“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” writes Bakker, a director at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.“Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities,” Bakker writes.The next step for many scientists is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to sift through these sounds and enable robots to “speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication.”She cites a team of researchers in Germany that have taught tiny robots how to do the honeybee waggle dance.Bakker warns that the possibility of exploiting animals “raises a lot of alarm bells” and that our “newfound powers” should never be used “to assert our domination over animals and plants.”The post New AI Tech Allows Humans to Talk to Animals first appeared on Dornob."