For four decades, Dr Diana Reiss has tapped the frontiers of technology to mend language barriers between members of the animal kingdom. “I’d like to think I’ve had close encounters,” she said at a Ted Talk in 2011. “Not with ETs, but with other kinds of minds. Remarkable minds.” In 1981, Reiss installed a keyboard into the wall of a swimming pool and watched as dolphins used their snouts to ask for food and toys, as if thumbing through a dessert menu.
Later, her experiments with underwater mirrors prompted a revelatory response from the mammals – whom she affectionately called ‘The Mentors’ – who wheeled, burped and winked at themselves like they were headed out-out. For Reiss, her research isn’t for those of us wanting to chat when no one else is up, but about giving animals choices – and a voice – in the world we share. In 2013, she cofounded Interspecies Internet, a global network of artists, AI scientists, computer systems engineers and biologists who, like Reiss, have dedicated their lives to decoding animal dialects.
Since Reiss’s retro-futurist keyboard arrived, the internet has shifted the conversation virtual. Last year, the University of Glasgow’s Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas launched DogPhone, a ball that, when bitten, sends a signal to the owner’s phone that lets the pair video-chat. “It became very exciting to get calls from [my dog] initially,” she said in 2021. “It became a bit more anxious for me near the end, because sometimes I wouldn’t get a video call. I would be thinking, ‘Aw, he usually rings me at this time!’”
If the internet shunted humanity into hyper-connectivity, AI is the event
