Open Conversations: AI and the Language of Life (Aza Raskin)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 3:21
A co-founder describes how the Earth Species Project applies frontier AI to decode animal communication, from whales and dolphins to orangutans. The work began with a listening tour of biologists and, from 2020, moved to building AI tools, and one partner's elephant research reports that elephants call each other by unique names. The speaker argues the larger payoff is a change in how humans see themselves, comparing it to the Earthrise photograph, and says roughly eighty percent of animal communication is quiet and largely unstudied.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
Transcript
My name is Azar Rascin. I am the co-founder and president of the Earth Species Project. At Earth Species, we use frontier AI to decode animal communication. That is, can we understand the language of whales and dolphins and orangutans? And can we use that to transform our relationship as humans with the rest of nature? Genesis of the project started way back in 2011. I was listening to a radio piece on these amazing animals called gelata monkeys. They sound sort of like women and children babbling. It's like why aren't we using machine learning?
And why aren't we using like large scale microphone arrays to figure out what they're saying? Honestly, the first 3 years of Earth Species was essentially a listening tour where we went out and met with as many different biologists as we possibly could. That was when in 2020 we started to hire our first AI engineer and started to make the kinds of tools that we know we would need along the path to decoding. This was only discovered last year and it was discovered by one of our partners, Joyce Pool. What she found after analyzing a lot of elephant data is that elephants have unique names that they call each other by. They believe
their mothers give them at birth. And so when you think about what is the most personal part of our identity as human beings, well, it's our name. Like that to me is so exciting. Whatever it is the solution to humanity's problems, I'd argue it's not in our imagination because if it was, we'd be doing it. But we're not. But it's actually less, I think, about just what we'll learn, although that's deeply important. It's how it changes who we think we are. You know, when human beings went to the moon and took that photo of Earthrise and the blue marble, that view of us from the outside, that shift in perspective, it changed a lot. EPA was born, Noah was
founded, the modern environmental movement was started, the Clean Air Act was passed, and all in this was all in the Nixon era. And what AI is doing is it's throwing open the aperture of that which you can perceive. You know, if you were to draw all of time and all of space on a graph, like from like the smallest unit of time to the length of the universe, the human experience is this tiny little box. We can see almost none of it. Just to give one example, it's something like 80% of all communication that animals do is quiet communication, which they do with each other close to each other. And science doesn't even hear it because we just are listening to the calls that are allowed.
Imagine trying to understand what human beings are saying in our culture just from our shouts. It would be impossible. And so here is the super majority of communication that animals make. We're here in 2025 and science hasn't touched it. This is where we point our tools at what humans think is empty and what we discover is everything.