For the dismally ignorant

[Mock Turtle]

In my experience with dogs, one can communicate with them, but via a type of blue tooth connection, associated with feelings. Humans mostly use word commands to create parallel emotions to the words. The animal senses the feeling, and this helps attach the word.

The human brain, when it writes to memory adds emotional tags to sensory content. With animals we induce the feeling first, and the word, by being a type of audio content, gets tagged for memory storage. Words can convey emotions; sit (stern warning) and point (visual cue) adds to the writing process.

With my Belgian Malinois, I invented a command I called "all done". This nebulous command meant that whatever we/he was doing, "all done", meant it was time to change what he are doing, no matter the circumstances, and do something new. He learned this open command and could be redirected from any behavior or fixation on any occasion. It worked because I originally associated all done and change to something new and fun. He associated it with happy to learn. This breed has very high adaptive intelligence. They can learn highly adaptive commands.

In a few experiments with my dog, I would use the learned command words but alter the emotion behinds the word to se if he reacted to the word or the new emotion. Bad dog with a playful smile and good dog with an angry voice, would reverse the meanings on command.

Sometimes, even today, if I am thinking and come to an exciting realization in my thinking, that causes a stronger inner feeling, my two smaller dogs will bark and start to act like an intruder is nearby, even from the other room. This may be connected to many years of censorship to new ideas. They feel a ping, and try to warn me of danger. I may tone down.

Language is newer than the domestication of dogs, so how did humans and dogs communicate before spoken language? The dog would associate visual cues based on human emotions. This is where AI has no clue, since machines lack feelings, Feeling are critical to writing to memory within animals. The AI will need a human to generate the feelings as an intermediary to words.

Interesting observation about your dogs - never had any or cats. I suspect in the early stages of any learning that AI might do, such will be more about intent, and as to this often being obvious in many species. As you mention, dogs seem to be able to read our intent through perceived emotion and such often being recognised by our tone of voice. Even if we discover that many species have hardly much worthwhile in their communications, this should be better than what we currently have - often just ignoring it. I'm sure much will be rather mundane though - as per much of human communications.

I'm sure dolphin communication should be interesting to unravel though - and perhaps most of the more social species - but I doubt anyone is expecting to have much in the way of intellectual discussion with any.

 

[Mock Turtle]

More evidence of intelligence and planning?

Cockatoos know to bring along multiple tools when they fish for cashews

Summary: Goffin's cockatoos have been added to the short list of non-human animals that use and transport toolsets. Researchers show that the cockatoos carry multiple tools to their worksite when the job calls for it. This behavior has only been previously reported in chimpanzees, our closest relatives.

Goffin's cockatoos are small white parrots that hail from the Tanimbar Islands archipelago in Indonesia. Captive Goffin's cockatoos use and manufacture tools, and a recent study of wild-caught cockatoos reported that they can use up to three different tools to extract seeds from a particular fruit. Up until now, though, it wasn't clear whether the cockatoos considered these tools as a "set"; it's possible that what may look like a toolset is instead nothing more than a chain of single tool uses, with the need for each new tool appearing to the animal as the task evolves. Now, a team of researchers have used controlled experiments to clarify that the cockatoos do indeed recognize when a job requires more than one tool. "With this experiment we can say that, like chimpanzees, Goffin's cockatoos not only appear to be to using toolsets, but they know that they are using toolsets," says first author Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. "Their flexibility of behavior is stunning." Osuna-Mascaró was inspired by the termite-fishing Goualougo Triangle chimpanzees of northern Congo, the only other known non-human animal to use toolsets. These chimpanzees fish for termites via a two-step process: first, they use a blunt stick to break holes in the termite mound, and then they insert a long, flexible probe to "fish" the termites out of the holes. In this study, Osuna-Mascaró's team tasked the cockatoos with fishing for cashews instead of termites.