Cat GBT: Humans, Animals, and AI

Will AI destroy humanity's relationship with animals, or enhance it? 

Artificial intelligence has and will inevitably continue to reshape our world and the way that we interact with it, from helping us to write emails and essays to driving our cars and diagnosing diseases. Our relationships with our jobs, businesses, and governments are all also consequently changing. As researched more recently, AI could impact our relationship with animals, too. 

Setting aside ethical concerns and the technology's environmental impact, how people view and interact with animals could be just one of the many aspects of our lives poised to change as this technology evolves. Not everyone is an animal person. There is little doubt, however, that human-animal relationships matter. Livestock, domestic pets, and assistance animals all have close living and working relationships with human beings. Though as technology advances, these dynamics are increasingly at risk. The farming industry is starting to use AI. It is expected to continue doing so, to coordinate animal feeding and monitoring — jobs previously done by humans — which essentially destroys the relationship between these animals and their human custodians. 

In our day-to-day lives, AI comes in the form of robotic animals. Software programs mimic behaviours and could essentially allow for ‘codable’ pets such as Sony’s AI-powered robotic dog, AIBO. This also includes assistance animals such as JustoCat, the robotic therapy cat. Zoos have already begun using robotic animals to avoid keeping their biological counterparts in captivity while still providing a source of entertainment. On the surface, it poses as an excellent innovation for animal welfare. 

With increased automation and the replacement of animals with AI and AI-assisted robotics, we could soon live in a world where farm animals rarely, if ever, see human beings at all. For example, new technologies can detect animal pain and administer the needed medicine. We could see complete or nearly complete automation in the processing, milking, and monitoring of farm animals. Farmers could see their stock through screens instead of in the flesh, and you may go to the zoo and see a robotic bear lounging in a synthetic habitat or a robotic dolphin doing tricks. Maybe you’ll even take your robotic dog for a walk afterwards — that is if you don’t get an AI-guided drone to walk it for you (yes, those exist). All of these technologies, while fantastical, may distance humanity physically and psychologically from animals. 

It’s not all bad news, though: AI is also being used to take great strides in the fields of conservation and animal behavioural studies. Already, AI technologies are being applied to analyse data to guide and direct conservation practices. Interestingly, it is also being used to ‘transcribe’ whale vocalisations via machine learning. Before such software, all notations were done manually by scientists, which took significant time and effort.  But now, hours of audio can more easily be analysed to study distinct vocalisations (divided into segments called ‘codas’), family units (or ‘clans’), and cultures, painting them as creatures not too dissimilar to ourselves and allowing us to better understand our fellow denizens of the tree of life. Such technology can also analyse and recreate animal vocalisations in an attempt to communicate with them, hopefully improving humanity's relationships with other animals. We’re all a part of a larger web of evolutionary relationships, after all — why would we want to estrange ourselves from them? 

Illustration by Holly Ward