Hey, everyone, it's Tristan, and today we have a bit of a departure from our regular content

on this podcast. As you may know, we've spent the last few months working incredibly hard

to deal with the threat of the AI dilemma, which we outlined in a previous episode,

and to help pause and redirect the resources of the raised deploy runaway AI into something

that would constitute moving at the speed that we can get this right. But as I've said before,

we're not opposed to AI or artificial intelligence. In fact, is it built an entire non-profit

that's using artificial intelligence to learn how to communicate with animals? It's called

the Earth Species Project, and in this special episode, Asa's going to tell you all about that work.

Okay, over to him.

Hey, everyone, it's Asa, and you probably don't recognize that sound. It's the communication of

orcas recorded in Antarctica. Studying animal communication is part of my work with an organization

I founded back in 2017 called the Earth Species Project, or ESP. And what we're aiming to do is to

decode non-human communication, basically learn how to talk with animals. The goal is to transform

the way we communicate with and relate to the rest of nature. In this case, I like to think of AI

as a kind of telescope that opens the aperture of the human mind. Why is that so important? Well,

if we could draw down all of the carbon art of the atmosphere tomorrow, that may help

ameliorate climate in the short term, but it doesn't solve the core problem, which is human ego.

And I think of Earth Species as one of many different types of projects to try to patch human ego.

Now, we know through our work on AI and exponential growth of this technology that it's going to be in

the next 12 to 36 months that we should be able to imitate whale or crow communication in such

high fidelity that we will be able to build a synthetic whale or synthetic crow or synthetic

beluga or synthetic seal that they won't know is not one of them. So that's the plot twist. We'll

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