This new AI technology could help humans communicate with animals

Someday, researchers expect technology to bridge the gap between humans and animals and they are already making progress in that direction.

Robots powered by artificial intelligence are being used, though in very basic stages, to speak the language of animals, Canadian professor and researcher Karen Bakker told Vox in an interview.

She said in Germany, researchers encoded a robot with honeybee signals and put it inside a hive.

"That robot is able to use the honeybees’ waggle dance communication to tell the honeybees to stop moving, and it’s able to tell those honeybees where to fly to for a specific nectar source," Bakker said in the interview.

If one were to take it a step further, robots could also be implanted in the bee hives so they are accepted as "members of their community", the researcher said. This would give the humans such control as never seen before.

In California, the Earth Species Project non-profit is on a mission to use machine learning to understand how animals communicate, The Guardian reported.

But breaching the world of animals this way has its dangers.

Bakker told Vox technology could be used in two ways: to either deepen kinship with animals or increase control over them.

"This creates the possibility of exploitive use of animals. And there’s a long history of the military use of animals, so that’s one path that I think raises a lot of alarm bells," she added.

If used correctly, this new technology could help humans revitalise their ties to nature.