A lunchtime discussion of new work in progress

In contrast to the moral panics about the ways that AI chatbots may be shrinking people’s social worlds by replacing human-to-human interaction, there is an incredible optimism in some corners that AI will radically open up the social world to include animals, enhancing or enabling new forms of interspecies communication. In this new research project, Prof. Handman explores the different ways that AI is transforming our ideas about language and humanness by seeing how people are imagining some kind of AI-enabled interspecies communication. How are animals-as-speakers getting folded into democratic, legal, and even economic systems? People who are interested in interspecies communication range from animal behaviorists, to Silicon Valley investors, to members of the public. One of the current challenges of the project is how to describe this world of interspecies communication in a way that pays close attention to the diverse forms of participation in it.