Transcript 1 | William Lynn: Ethics and Interspecies Internet
Will Davis
Okay, wonderful. So the lecture is going to be roughly an hour and we're going to have questions at the end. If you could hold your questions to, then if anything comes up during, you can add them to the chat. Otherwise, at the end of the session, we're going to use the raise your hand button. So if you just use that, then I can navigate to you. And now please let me hand over to Diana Reiss, the chair of the Interspeace Internet Board. Thank you.
Diana Reiss
Well, welcome everyone, and from all of us, all the founders of the Interspecies Internet. I'm speaking for Vin Cerf, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld and myself. We all welcome you to this first Talk of our 2021 Interspecies Conversations lecture series. It's such a pleasure for me today to be introducing our first speaker, William Lynn. By the way, he likes to be called Bill. After our Interspecies workshop and public conference last summer, many of you in attendance and others began to self organize and form slack channels on our Interspecies site. And this is really terrific and it's exactly what we had hoped would happen. One of the channels focused on ethics and rules of engagement, something that we're all very interested and dedicated to discussing. And Bill has been an active participant and one of the founders of this particular Slack channel. So we're really thrilled to have him here today to share his ideas and his work.
Seeking King Solomon's Ring, we've been talking about that goal, acquiring the ability to understand the communication and signals of other animals, to really decode and find ways of effective ways of communicating with them. Finding these new kinds of interfaces really is a path breaking scientific and technical challenge for all of us. Alongside of these challenges are profound ethical issues and implications that must inform this work from the very outset. Bill is a research scientist at the George Perkins Marsh Institute of Clark University and he's a research fellow at knowledge, a collective of scientists, writers and educators dedicated to studying and untangling complex social issues. This is one of them. Bill is a real thought leader also in animal and sustainability ethics. He explores why and how we ought to care for people, other animals and nature. He conducts practical research transferring insights from interdisciplinary training in ethics, geography and political theory into public dialogues over social and environmental issues. And I've been working with Bill in this particular ethics Slack channel, and I've been terribly impressed by not only Bill's thoughtfulness, but his way of communicating and bringing communities together. He also serves as an ethics advisor and facilitator, helping nonprofits and public sectors make better policy decisions by using ethics. I also want to mention that Bill has also recently founded PAN Works. PAN is an acronym for People, Animals and Nature, and it's an independent, nonpartisan think tank cultivating compassion, respect, justice and well being for animals. I'm really hopeful that Bill will have time to discuss this in more detail with us today. So with no further ado, Bill, it's all yours.
William Lynn
I was muted, sorry. It's a pleasure to be here. I recognize some faces and there are new faces and hopefully we'll get a chance to chat. Have I. Do I have a shared screen for the presentation?
Will Davis
Yeah, you can share screen.
William Lynn
All right, great.
So this is pretty simple. We're going to talk about ethics and interspecies IO. Just a little bit of housekeeping on my side here. I like to distinguish between points of clarity and points of discussion. So if I'm running through this presentation and something I say just doesn't make any sense, please write something in the chat channel so we can get a heads up about it, say point of clarification and that way we can distinguish between those things that we have to deal with right away versus those things that we can get to for a longer conversation later. Also make sure that the correct name you want to be known by is listed in the Slack chat because sometimes I'm not just going to take a question. I'm going to want you to unmute and talk with me a little bit. And that way we have more conversation than we have presentation. So that'll be helpful as well. And I think those are the only housekeeping elements that I had.
Let's talk about ethics and interspecies IO because of the nature of this project, which is looking at science and technology that has ethical implications, we're talking about a big bundle of stuff here. I'm not going to get into detail over absolutely every element. The person you see beside me or the tail is my research assistant, Cleo. What I am going to do though is I'm going to walk through these slides, not read you a script, talk through the presentation, what those slides mean, give us some ideas and talking points that shared together. We can have further conversations down the road about ethics, science, technology and interspecies IO so let's talk a little bit just about ethics.
[Understanding Ethics in Research]
There's lots of definitions about ethics. We can really get in the weeds. But the best definition, shortest definition, is that by Socrates. Ethics is about how we ought to live. It's an expression about what's right or good, or just or of value. It's really a concern about doing right by people, animals and nature. There are some very theoretical ways of thinking about ethics. There are some very practical ways of thinking about ethics. I tend to focus on the more practical approach to ethics. All of them are valid, but this is based, basically, this is what ethics is thinking about, how we ought to live and in that way, how we do right by people, animals and nature.
Now, within the domains of science and technology, you have, or within the areas of science and technology, you have two domains in which ethics is located. One is about maintaining research integrity, and the other is thinking through the consequences of science and technology in the internal domain about the integrity of the research process, the scientific process. You've got concerns like fabricating data, falsifying results, conflicts of interest, plagiarism. In the external domain, you have questions about how science and technology impact social justice, animal protection, ecological integrity, sustainability. They're different domains. They obviously intersect. We often talk about ethics and science only as if the internal domain matters, but the external domain matters as well.
Now, how we've dealt with the internal domain mostly is through codes of conduct. These codes of conduct might be professional codes of conduct, they may be legally mandated best practices, but it's primarily codes of conduct that control and try and prevent people from fabricating data, falsifying results, etc. When it comes to the external domain, we've turned to public policy. The codes don't work, we turn to public policy. This involves basically two elements, guidance about what public policy should look like. This might be the Nuremberg Code (1947) that came out after the Nuremberg Trials, after World War II, responding to Nazi experiments on human beings, as well as the Belmont Report, which came out after our National Research Act, which took the Nuremberg Code and expanded it and sort of deepened what that code meant for thinking about how we conduct research on human and animal subjects. And then, of course, legislation. I've already mentioned the National Research act, which actually legislates and sets up an institutional structure for research in this country (USA). And following on that, the Animal Welfare Act. There are many other acts, but these are just two good examples of that. It's in this context that you have the birth of bioethics. Now, why am I going to bioethics? Bioethics is the single most important public policy, relevant ethical practice in the United States and across the world. The reason for that is pretty simple. It involves human beings. It involves harm for human beings. So human beings have really paid a lot of attention to bioethics, giving us guidance and rules for medical and research experiment on human beings and to a lesser degree, animal research subjects. Landmark events in the formation of bioethics were of course the Holocaust and the Nazi experiments on people, Tuskegee down at the bottom there, and the syphilis experiments which victimized people on the basis of race. And then an event that captured the public imagination and that was the American Museum of Natural History being a called account for vivisection experiments on cats. Out of this, a variety of national institutions were built. And here I'm talking about the United States States, because I can't talk about the rest of the world and I don't know exactly what's going on in every other place in the world, but this will give you a sense of what's happening. There's analogs to this in Canada, in Europe, in Africa. Elsewhere we have a national Bioethics advisory commission at the presidential level and it runs down various agency guidance inspector generals, institutional review boards that occur at institutions for human subject matter research, institutional animal care and use committees, also for the protection of animal subjects that are also at individual institutions, a university institution, a college institution, for example, and finally clinical ethics committees for medical treatment and end of life care. Many of these ethics committees have been activated in the United States and across the world to deal with triaging patients during the COVID 19 pandemic. You've got, from a national level right down to a very granular health care level, an institutionalization of bioethical thinking to help protect human beings into a much lesser degree, animals. You also have, external to the institutionalization of government and policy. You also have think tanks and watchdogs that are looking at these issues. The Hastings center was the first bioethics think tank that emerged. The Union of Concerned Scientists and its Democracy and Scientific Integrity project is another one, the Non Human Rights Project, which is looking at the well being of animals that may be subject to these kinds of experiments, especially invasive and captive experiments. And then places like the Yale Interdisciplinary center for Bioethics, all of them are thinking through these issues and are serving as watchdogs to make sure that we're thinking straight about the ethics of how we deal with people and animals in a scientific and technological context. Now let's just talk about some lessons from bioethics.
[The scope of Bioethics and One Health concept]
Bioethics has been around formally since about the 1960s, 1970s, so we have a good period of time that we've learned from this. One is the intersectionality of what it means to have ethical integrity, the internal domain and the external domain. The practice of Doing science and the consequences of that science are tightly interconnected. Think about the falsification of data or results and then how that might impact, let's say, in terms of medical treatment, the well being of people who receive medical treatment based on falsified results. There's been many instances of this to date. There's the scope. It used to be believed that bioethics only applied to people and some people were arguing for the inclusion of animals. And there's something called now global bioethics that's also looking at primarily looking at animals in nature. So bioethics has a scope and the importance of that scope is to recognize that there's an interconnection between the well being of people, animals and nature. Think of this in terms of one health and pandemic disease. COVID 19 is a disease that jumped from animals into people and it did so in large part because of disruptions to the environments in which those animals are located. So thinking in a one health perspective about the linkages between human beings, animal reservoirs and vectors and environments from which these diseases might arise is really key to thinking about our own well being as well as the well being of other animals and the rest of the planet. There's a tension in bioethics, especially around science and technology. We want to search for knowledge and we want to relieve our ignorance. But we also at the same time want to protect the well being of others and prevent ourselves from doing harm. And that sometimes there is a tension. There's often called harm benefit ratios. When you undertake an experiment that might have some kind of risks for human beings or for animals, about how much harm you're willing to accept. The recent debate over the Johnson and Johnson vaccines and about the very, very rare blood clot issues that may arise for specific people is a good example of just that. There's also a role of moral principles. And this gets back to ethics. Formally, moral principles aren't just something that happens after the science is done. It's shot through the doing of the science and the outcomes of the science in the design, the conduct and the use of it, so to speak. But there are two orientations to how we think about moral principles and briefly. One is that they're moral insights. They're not absolute truths, they're rules of thumb that give you guidance about what to do. Another is their absolute moral truths, their rules. And their rules are not to be brought under any sorts of circumstances. Bioethics has chosen to follow sort of the moral insights as opposed to the moral truths orientation with respect to moral Principles. And one example of this is something called principalism. And that's where they take principles of autonomy, beneficence, non malfeasance and justice as four basic principles to help us think through ethical conundrums. Autonomy is about the respect and dignity of the person and respect for their agency and their decision making about whether to participate in experiments or not. Beneficence is about our motivations of trying to do the right thing and benefit others, whether they be people or animals of nature. Non malfeasance is more like a stopgap. There said, you may not undertake experimentations which have a sort of discriminatory or harmful intention. Here we're talking about Nazi experimentation, racist science, and then finally justice that the outcomes of science and technology should promote the well being of society overall, not just for a thin slice of the population, but for the entire population. Finally, I think this is my final lesson from bioethics is that ethics and science are complementary. Ethics helps keep our values transparent and accountable. Science does the same for the facts. So when we get into a policy discussion or policy dispute, we can use ethics and science to figure out what are the best values in the best facts to inform the policy. In this way we make better from worse public policies. All right, let's talk a little bit about methodologies that are used in bioethics that can be transferred over to thinking about interspecies IO. There's a scale of analysis issue here, a very broad scale, let's say a social global biodiversity scale, right down to a very micro scale, similar to the Presidential Bioethics Commission on down to the hospital Clinical ethics Committee. At the highest scale is this ethical, legal and social implications research. This was innovated by the National Human Genome Research Institute, which was set up back in the 1980s, I believe, to decode the human genome. And what they did is they sent a portion of their budget for this aside to look at the ethical, legal and social implications of decoding the genome. Because they realized that decoding the genome could allow us to start engaging in eugenics and that could be very, very harmful to individuals as well to society as well as to the human species. This was a very broad set of studies that were looking at all the issues that could possibly arise by decoding the human genome. At a middle level, you've got this notion of precaution. Now, precaution is often thought of, especially in the United States and Canada, other Anglophone countries, as a principle for scientific uncertainty. That's true insofar as it goes but it misunderstands what precaution really is. Precaution is Vorsorgeprinzip, the original word, the Principle of Fore-Caring. It's a principle applied to policy, a moral principle about ethical policy that's designed to help us foresee forewarn and forestall harm to people, animals and nature. Here there's a discussion about burden of proof. Who has the burden of proof there? How much certainty should you have? There's a whole variety of issues we could get into with respect to precaution, but it basically is a moral principle that helps us in specific circumstances think through ahead of time. Will there be harm from what we're going to do? This might be something that we think about when we talk about communicating with whales, let's say. Finally, there are ethics briefs. These are like amicus briefs in law, done from an ethics perspective that look at very, very concrete issues and precisely iron out what the ethical issues are. What ethical guidance might help us grapple with specific issues. This is from an ethics brief I did for barred owls in the Pacific Northwest for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
[Ethical capacity building in research]
Okay. So I think there are some challenges and opportunities we face when we think about integrating ethics into a science and technology project like Interspecies IO. This is the integration of the ethics itself, ethical capacity building, rules of engagement, of funding. Let me just go through them in turn. Integrating the ethics is hard because most of the time our moral sensibilities are latent. They're not manifest. We want to do the right thing, but we may not know what the right thing is. We really don't know how to talk about it. We don't have any rules, institutions, practices, education programs that help us do that, to take the latent moral sensibilities and make them manifest into particular values that we want to actualize. This means we have to go from having a moral motivation about doing the right thing vis a vis interspecies communication to actually building institutions that help us do that. To do that, you're going to need ethical capacity building. Once again, ethical capacity building depends on the complementarity of science and ethics and involves education, facilitation of important conversations that will have impacts on how we think about or what we do in terms of studying interspecies communication and training in ethics. For that purpose, it involves rules of engagement that Diana Reiss referenced before. The rules of engagement are going to involve an overview of the ethical issues, such as a precautionary methodology or an ELSI methodology might point out. Developing general ethical guidelines that give people sort of A sense of how they ought to go about doing their work without prescribing for work that occurs in very, very different circumstances across a whole array of species. What that might be, provide a space for people to get guidance on their specific issues, whether it be at the beginning, the research design phase, all the way to the, through the conduct of the research design, to the analysis of that. And of course it always has to be practical. This just can't be arid theory up in the clouds. It really has to deal with the concrete realities, issues that people are facing when they're engaged in interspecies communications research.
There's funding issues very quickly. You can have dedicated or episodic funding. You can have it from public, private or nonprofit sources. Why does that matter? Because who funds the projects and how they fund the projects is going to have a huge impact on what kind of research gets done, the quality of that research and then the use of that research down the road. So it's all, you know, follow the money, right? So you just want to make sure that you have not only a good mix of funding but stable funding with the right intent behind it so that you produce the best possible research that you possibly can, can produce. Now let's, this is the, this is the end of the presentation and then we'll move on to a discussion together. Let me just talk to you about some enduring issues that I think are going to be devil and delight this project for decades to come.
I think we've got four. There's of course many others, but I think we've got four. One is our intentions, what it means to understand in interspecies communication, the well being of others in this project and the question of personhood take them in turn. It's always helpful to have a concrete case to think through, even if it just keeps you in touch with what's going on the ground. National Geographic a couple of days ago released this marvelous story about this marine biologist Shane Gero at Dalhousie University who has set up Project CETI, the cetacean translation initiative and using machine learning, artificial intelligence, camera design and a lot, a lot of field work, they are trying to decode the language of sperm whales hanging about the Dominican Republic, which is where, which is the research study site that Shane Gero has been going to for decades now.
Let's talk about the intentions behind this kind of research and other kinds of research in interspecies communication. There's obviously the curiosity dimension. We were curious about these whales. We're curious about how they Communicate. We want to build scientific knowledge, ethological knowledge, about what's going on there. But do we approach that curiosity with indifference to the well being of those whales themselves or because we care about those whales and we want to do something right by them by learning about how they communicate? You can have knowledge, you can do well and do the right thing at the same time scientifically. This is often said about Quakers. They did well because they tried to do the right thing. You can do that about science. But you do have to think through your intentions, be aware of the community's intentions and make sure that indifference to the well being of these whales does not sneak in. What does it mean to understand? And this has to do a bit with the metaphor of the Rosetta Stone versus Solomon's Ring. In hermeneutics, in cognitive linguistics, we make strong distinctions between language, that human language that describes or expresses, let's say, names an object or expresses how I'm feeling, you know, book or hungry, and what are sometimes called constitutive expressions which have to be interpreted for their meaning, such as a worldview, a political ideology, what the meaning they say. If I said I am a libertarian, that isn't just a description or an expression, that's an entire worldview encapsulated into a particular term that needs to be understood. If, if decoding the language of these sperm whales gets into questions of meaning, it's going to be much more the process of trying to interpret and understand the worldview, the world experience of the sperm whales, then it is simply going to be using a Rosetta Stone to translate the whale word for predator or the whale word code really clicks for Hungary. This is an open question. We don't know what's going to occur in that regard. But lots of misunderstanding of human language in the past occurred because we thought human language was simply about describing and expressing as opposed to world building. You may have heard of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis about language, about how language sort of creates a worldview by which you experience that world. If you change that language, you change that experience. You often have that with people who are very multilingual. They can get that sense of different worldviews.
[Interdisciplinary approaches to decoding animal communication]
So if this is true, we're going to need interdisciplinarity of a different kind, not just the natural sciences and technology married together to try and decode, find a Rosetta Stone, so to speak about interspecies communication. But we're going to need those who specialize in the humanities and the social sciences to help us Engage in the interpretation of the meaning of another species communications. Now this can have consequences. I think of the work of Gay Bradshaw on trauma, psychological trauma on elephants. Elephants clearly understand what human beings are up to in terms of their poaching, their killing, they're driving them out of their habitat, etc. The behaviors of elephants have changed remarkably because of the threats. Once they used to transition across the Serengeti, trumpeting people would come out to see them. There was not much danger. Now they scoot across, often at night, making no sounds. And humans who encounter them can be mortal. Danger, because the elephants are terrified. They're traumatized by what we've done to them over the last 50 years. We have to think about that, about the well being of what our work does in terms of searching out interspecies communication.
Let's talk about. I've said well being multiple times now. Let me just express what well being might be. Well being goes beyond just mitigating harm by reducing it or preventing it. Well being is about accepting and honoring the agency of other animals. It's about attending to their physical and their psychological and social integrity and all of that towards allowing them to thrive in their own ways, for their own reasons, in their own lives. Think about this in terms of methods of study. I've listed just three here. Invasive study where you actually vivisect animals, or let's say we implant things in their brain. Captive study, where you may not be engaged in invasive research, but creatures are taken out of their natural context and they're held in captivity. There are other forms of captive research, sanctuaries for example. But right now, I mean, whales put in a tank and studied in that regard. And then there's observation, observation out in the wild. One might say that, well, observation in the wild might be better for the well being of those animals. But as Diana was cluing me in the other day, that's a sensitive issue too. Apparently dolphins, when you use drones to study dolphins and those drones are at a height of about 500ft, it doesn't seem to bother the dolphins. You can observe them in their natural habitat with the aerial drone and not have negative consequences for their well being as best as we understand. Try that with manatees and it's a very different matter. The manatees flee and they don't engage in their normal behavior. They stop feeding, for example, and would flee. I'm not sure why this is the case. We might speculate it's because of the noise of the drone sounding similar to the noise of a propeller manatees are much closer to the surface and are more likely to be hit by boats, as opposed to dolphins who can dive very deep. It might have some ocular issues of whether you can see a potential threat or not, I'm not sure. But thinking through the well being of those animals and how our practices impact the well being of those animals is key. And thus we have responsibilities. These responsibilities are ecological. We don't want to be disrupting the ecological relationships that exist in the animals we're studying. But they're also social and individual about those individual creatures and their well being and their social groups and how those social groups operate. And finally, this is the most controversial one. This is where the controversy about these kinds of projects start or end. And this is the question of non human personhood. Who is the person? In public policy and law, we generally make hard, fast distinctions between persons and property. Human beings are natural persons. The law can make, let's say, ships and corporations legal persons, but everything else is regarded as property. You have moral responsibilities to human persons, natural persons. You don't have really any moral responsibilities towards property. But what science and ethics has been telling us for the last couple of hundred years, since Darwin, is that other species are sentient, I.e. self aware, sapient, self aware and social, engaged in sophisticated relationships. So much so many of these species have culture. Take these whales that Garo is studying. They exist in matrilineal family groups that are organized into related clans. They transmit sophisticated culture about child reading, rearing, feeding, babysitting from one generation to the next, and to new whales who join into those families. They communicate in very sophisticated ways, including clicks that seem to be names for individuals, how they identify themselves and call to others. And they talk quite a bit, which is why this, Garo’s interspecies communications project started up. They qualify, just as we do, for these reasons of their sentience or sapience and their sociality, to be called persons, non human persons. It doesn't mean that you treat them like human beings or you think they are just human beings in whale bodies. You don't want to anthropomorphize, but you can recognize that personhood is a characteristic of these beings. If that's the case, then these beings have what we all see ourselves as having as an intrinsic moral value. We are not just instruments to be used for other ends. We're intrinsically valuable in and of ourselves. We're not just biological automaton or ecological units, functional units of ecosystem services. We have an intrinsic moral value that can be helped or harmed our well being can be helped or harmed their well being can be helped or harmed. There are many ways to discuss this issue about the moral status and standing of animals and of the animals that we're likely to be researching when we're looking at interspecies communication. But if you don't understand how important this is to people when they think about these issues, even if it's only latent and how this is the core of the debate over how we ought to live with non human animals, then you're missing a big, big piece that needs to be integrated into our thinking about the ethics of interspecies IO and with that, I'm going to close out and I'd love to chat with you folks more about this.
[Q&A]
Will Davis
So we have a question in the chat from Vint, if you want to start with that.
William Lynn
Sure.
Will Davis
Some people believe that active efforts to communicate with non human species is disruptive and even harmful. What are your thoughts?
William Lynn
I think it depends, and I say that a lot. I'm sorry, and I don't mean it as a cop out, but I think it depends. It depends on who you're communicating with, how you're communicating and what you're communicating, and that really matters. I, you know, honestly, I worry about communicating with whales in large part because we've done so much harm to them, and I wonder whether they think about that and I wonder whether communicating with whales is going. That's going to rise as an issue. It may have be no issue at all. This is really an empirical question. It may be that whales speak expressively and descriptively and not in terms of a worldview. Their clicks and the coding that clicks is going to reveal those descriptions and those expressions, but not a constitutive system of meaning, in which case it's not a big deal. And certainly Garo’s research is designed to be non invasive, non captive observation. So that's partly the how. And that seems to me a really good step. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it's great the kind of research that's being done there, but we've always got to think about those questions of well being, reminding ourselves. And at each step of a research project for each and every species that we look at, we have to be asking ourselves afresh, what are the ethical issues here? Are we doing harm? How are we protecting their well being? What are we going to do with this knowledge to make the world a better place for us, certainly, but also for other animals and the rest of nature. Does that answer Your question, Vint.
Vint Cerf
Thank you. I want to add one small example to elicit a reaction. Let's suppose that we're interested in intraspecies communication. What vocalizations or other signals do these animals generate? We decide that we will. In order to elicit some of their responses, we're going to introduce predators into the scene in order to see what the prey do. That might be an interesting. Raise, interesting ethical questions. Would you care to respond?
William Lynn
It certainly does raise an ethical question. In that case, we would be, when we do that, actively introducing harm into their lives. Not with a sense of restoring a lost sort of ecological function, like restoring wolves into Yellowstone. That would have an overall benefit for the community, but to create situations of psychological and physiological stress to see their reactions. That's going to be a real ethical hurdle to jump there. I'm not. I'm not saying that may not be necessary. At certain points, I always want to hear the reasoning and evidence for doing something like that. I would be predisposed to say, unless you have damn good reason and evidence, that's not a good thing to do. It might be better though, because I don't deny that what you're envisioning might produce some information to have a more clinical approach, as in clinical medical research, where you're not creating an experiment yourself, you're looking for natural experiments in which those situations occur. In that case, you're not creating more harm, you're just observing what harm may occur.
Diana Reiss
Yeah, I just wanted to add that the very nice example of that are studies that have been done where they've shown referential or semantic meaningful signals in animals in their own habitats. Robert Shafa, Dorothy Chaney and Marler did a set of beautiful experiments where they looked at vervet alarm calls, predator alarm calls in their own environment. And without introducing new, they did a set of elegant studies using playback. Those are great models. For example, I just wanted to mention.
Will Davis
We have a question from Stephanie Moran. Do we want to communicate with animals or invite animals to communicate with us?
William Lynn
I think we communicate with animals all the time. I mean, you saw my research assistant, Cleo. Here she is constantly communicating, communicating with me. So too are the chickadees out in my backyard. Feeders that were born last year that grew up around us. We didn't try and socialize them, but they're used to us. And when I. When I go out and I put food out for them once a week, I tried. I don't feed them. I do an intermittent feeding routine so they don't become dependent. I'll call, I tell, I call the birds and I say, the food's here. And they come, the blue jays come, the chickadees come, the crows come, they come, they know, they know what's going on. And sometimes they'll hang out and they'll look in the windows like, come on, you know, it's time, it's Saturday, it's time to put the food out. We're communicating with animals.
Vint Cerf
Oh, what, Pardon me, stupid humans, you know, it's time.
William Lynn
Exactly. Exactly. So we're communicating with animals all the time, directly. Directly. We're also communicating with animals all the time, indirectly. I think myself that as long as we take, we engage in strict ethical and scientific scrutiny about the studies we conduct in this regard and we think about the well being of those other animals along with ourselves because we're animals too. I don't see in principle anything wrong with speaking, communicating, talking, conversing with other animals per se. Now I'm completely open to reason and evidence if that's wrong.
Will Davis
Yeah. I think that also moves nicely onto another point that Stephanie had about thinking about the differences between communicating with domestic animals versus wild animals and what we need to be aware of.
William Lynn
Yeah, yeah. Well, so, so when I communicate with Clio, well, this is very, this is different. This is difficult. Okay. When you're communicating with your dog, you're clearly communicating with an animal that's been domesticated. When you're communicating with a cat, there's a real argument about whether cats are domesticated animals or not. There may be. In fact, they're likely to be much more mutualistic creatures who have learned to live amongst us. You are communicating in some senses in terms of exchanges of information with other animals out in the wild. If you spend any time. The number of times I've come across wolves, and I did a lot of work with wolves in my past, and the number of times I've come across wolves in the wild is more than 10. And there's been the gaze and there's been the distance and there's been the moving apart, the communication of non threat on my, my ability. But I don't think that really answers Stephanie's question. I think my guess is, and I'd love you to say more about this, Stephanie is sort of imposing our desire for communication in a way that might cause harm instead of being, how say, humble enough to say we should just leave those creatures alone. Is that. I'm not sure what you're thinking there, but I'd like to hear more.
Stephanie Moran
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking Hi. I was thinking, you know, in a sort of more experimental context, for example, or like, in this context of like trying to understand what animals are saying. Are we trying to like and communicate with them in order to communicate our message or to have an actual conversation? And if it's a conversation, do they have the opportunity to not participate? And how might that affect how we then treat them or include them or not in decisions we make about them?
William Lynn
Right, right. That's good questions. It's good questions. There's all sorts of things here too. Because when you think about part of the evolution of dogs, the co evolution of dogs and human beings is that dogs have become, they have literally evolved sort of visual practices by which they can communicate with their humans. We lost a lot of olfactory capacities in that co evolution with dogs. We don't have the same sort of things with cats. We have to read them in terms of a different kind of body language. I have, you know, I would love to go out into the sea with Garo to learn about sperm whales. I have no idea beyond decoding their language how it is that you would communicate with them except through gestures. There do seem to be times where whales come up to people and touch them. There's cases where whales and dolphins have saved people either drowning or folks who are at risk of predators such as a shark. That's obviously kinds of communications. I think this is wide open, but you raised this question about their autonomy and their agency and I think that's key. It's wide open for us to look at. As long as it isn't a matter of capturing them and forcing them to converse, so to speak, then you raise issues of real harm, especially if these creatures are non human persons. To go back to the principles of the Nuremberg Code after the Nazis Nazi experimentation.
Voluntary consent to participate in an experiment or research is the foundation of good bioethics. And we might think about adopting that with respect to interspecies IO.
Will Davis
Peter has a question.
Peter Gabriel
Well, no, it was just, I think in all the discussions we've had so far, partly inspired by Diana's approach, is that the understanding was that choice and control should rest in the hands of the non human. And that should be a starting point for any interaction. And I think there's a very good argument, particularly highlighted by what you're saying, that perhaps for anyone to be associated with this project, there would have to be a review of any interaction by an ethics committee or two or three people. So there's some sort of basic agreement on rules of engagement. We're bound to get it wrong sometimes. But at least if we start off trying to do it right and get some underlying principles established, then I think we've got a better chance.
William Lynn
I think you're right about that. I appreciate that. I appreciate the point of good faith failure or being wrong in good faith at times. That happens with all of us. But we also know that there will be people who abuse what we learn or the research techniques with respect to other creatures. That's something that I think having this conversation and making that a principle could be one way of mitigating that, at least for this particular project. Some in full agreement.
Peter Gabriel
Just one come back on that and then I'll get out the way. But just. We're entering the age where thoughts are turning to video, where we're reading the mind and you know, within, you know, it's happening now already, but in five years, 10 years, this is going to get very sophisticated. So if, for example, an ape is to watch me put this helmet on and then turn that into video and they choose to do that themselves, then suddenly we're going to get into their thoughts turning it into video and there's a new age coming. So we better think it through.
William Lynn
I agree. I agree completely. I love the example you give too.
Will Davis
Okay, Frank F. Has a question, she's gonna unmute you.
Frank F.
I thank you kindly. Thank you everybody. The dialogue is just absolutely fantastic. Right, so I'm a layman, you guys. I don't have the scientific background and of most of you in this venue today, my point of view, I, I go out. I loved what you said about just doing the next the right thing. When I go out back in the evening, I don't live in a wild habitat as one might define it, but when I go outside at night in the Napa Valley here in California, it's quite wild out back. Everything is at peace. When I go out non intrusively in the night to peer at my spring garden, let's say when I go out back with a headlamp on to really look, I create this chaos of this system of coexistence out there. I see panic in cats in the night, a possum or a raccoon or insects for that matter, right. What should I be doing? Should I stop doing that and just let everything be right in harmony to allow more of a less intrusive coexistence? And I'm sorry, it's a question and a comment, I reckon, William. And thank you everybody for being here this morning.
William Lynn
Right, well, thanks. It's a very good question. There needs to be an argument for not doing this, for not engaging in interspecies communication. There needs to be. We need to accept that that is an option and we should think that through. After all, human beings interventions in the world have been very depredatious towards animals and nature and we need to have a. And I think the kind of question that you're asking forces us to look at ourselves humbly and with the harm that we can do. At the same time. Well, let me say. And there are, there are people, practices, philosophies such as the Jains in South Asia who are very, very careful to minimize the harm they do to insects and, and microbes. And I, I respect that. I don't live that way myself, but I respect that. I respect that intention. I think we have to realize two other things at that exist simultaneously. One is that while there may be a lot of peace and harm and mutual, or peace and cooperation and mutual aid in nature, there is also competition, conflict and violence. And so when you or I may go out and we sit quietly, we may hear the harmony, a certain kind of harmony that's existing, then we might not see or hear some of the disharmony that's occurring at the same time. It's not one or the other, it's always both. And also that both natural and animal, natural systems and animals themselves have often high degrees of resilience. I'm not sure when you go back outside and someone scurries away, that's necessarily creating chaos per se. They are moving away from a potential threat. Yes. And that's good because it's about their awareness, their sensory acuity, them acting appropriately when a human being comes into the mix. But I'm not sure you're engaged in real harm in that sense. The real harm is systemic. Let's take these whales. Again, the real harm is systemic. It's the pollution. It's the reduction of their food sources through overfishing and through damming up fish run rivers. It's the noise pollution from all the shipping that is occurring as well as all the recreational boats. That's where the real harm is coming from. I'm not sure that us seeking to understand how other beings understand themselves, especially in a non invasive observational way, is really creating a lot of harm. It may in certain instances once again always be open to evidence of reason. I would rather see us pursue a project of interspecies and interspecies communication to learn for scientific reasons, but also to be able to do good in the world, while at the same time. And that's something else to consider for this group, helping to sponsor the kinds of transformations about our political economy, our recreational practices, etc. That do do so much harm to some species.
Will Davis
Diana has a question.
Diana Reiss
Yeah, Bill, So first of all, thank you so much for this discussion already. It's just fascinating. One of the things, I guess I want to ask you how you feel about this, and you kind of were talking about it already, there's this tension between not wanting to do harm and it gets into intention. What you've talked about, what is the intention? Why do we enter into these experiments where we want to have do communication or why do we want to decode? Is it just for our curiosity? Is it to do good? And I suspect that most people who are involved in decoding or wanting to have interfaces, at least the majority of people I know want to do good. They feel that they can give voice to animals because we've come from a point of view historically where we think they don't have the kind of mentation we think about, and then we can ignore them or treat them badly. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about intentionality. And then I'm just going to ask you one more question. You're using the example of whales in the environment, or if it's gorillas, and the idea of working with captive animals versus wild animals. If we are to do interspecies interactions where we're teaching them codes because we have so much difficulty decoding and an approach would be giving them artificial codes, and we've learned so much from those studies. Should we do those kinds of interactives where we're giving new codes to animals with animals in the wild, or are we somehow disrupting what they're doing? And that's a huge thing. That's a big question. And I don't think it's been addressed very much, you know, so could you talk about that a little bit?
William Lynn
Well, you're right.
Diana Reiss
Sorry to throw that one to you.
William Lynn
It hasn't been addressed much to my mind, and I don't know the answer to that. But I think it's incumbent. It's an obligation for us who are interested in this project to look at that question and to come up with at least some provisional answers. I think once again, context is going to play a huge role. It depends on what creatures, what kind of art, you know, what kind of teaching them of a new kind of code, what impact that has on those creatures. It may have no impact whatsoever. But if it has a strongly negative impact, we have to be ready to monitor that, measure that, and adapt to that as soon as it rises.
Diana Reiss
Thank you.
William Lynn
Thank you.
Will Davis
Perfect. Does anyone else have any questions? That brings us perfectly to the end of the hour. If not.
Vint Cerf
Actually if I could just jump in and ask Bill one more question. This is a domestic question. We live in a neighborhood that has a bunch of dogs. And because I haven't been traveling, I've been taking walks around the park on a pretty much daily basis. And I also bring a bag of dog biscuits. Biscuits with me. And what I found is amazing, is that it didn't take very long for the dogs to figure out that they don't know who I am, but they, they know I'm the dog biscuit guy. And it's astonishing how few interactions lead to the, you know, yank the owner as fast as possible in the direction of dog biscuit. Or sometimes they'll just take the dog off the leash and bam, they take off at 100 miles an hour. How the hell dogs figure this out so quickly? I mean, this is a small number of examples generate recognition and even plans. I mean, like, you know, you still off the leash. I'm just amazed at the level of cognition from small number of examples.
William Lynn
Yes. Yeah, yeah. It is amazing. It is amazing. You see that? You see that with cats too. Most cats, well, a majority of cats have a second family if they live in suburban and rural areas. And so they'll get fed in the morning and then they'll go off and they'll find their second family and they'll get fed again and they hang out with their friends and they very quickly figure out, especially feral and community cats who are the cat people and who are not the cat people, who is going to chase them away, sic their dog on them or who is safe to be around. Even you even have cats in sanctuaries and sort of animal caregivers who will present themselves when they are in need, they're starving or their kittens need help. They'll present themselves to people they've never met and they seem to know the folks who are going to be open and welcoming to them. I'm not. Maybe that's observation. Maybe it's some kind of communication. Maybe they have some sense ability about sort of sniffing human hormones and figuring out who's a pro animal person and a non animal person. I don't know. But yes, I've noticed what you're, you're talking about very much. I think what it speaks to. Is the. The idea that animals are just biological machines, automatons, and that they're just bundles of evolved behaviors is fundamentally wrong and always was fundamentally wrong. We're talking about creatures with, to use Diana's word, deep mentation of their own sorts that sometimes, if you're thinking in Darwinian terms, probably has a punctuated continuum with human beings. We're all evolved and Darwin. We're all evolved in similar streams. Darwin thought that the moral and social sentiments that allowed us as human beings to communicate and live together in groups, but also communicate and live together with other animals, specifically domestic animals, ran all the way down to the social institute. Insects, termites, and ants. So your observation is very well taken, and I think it's wonderful. You're the dog biscuit man.
William Lynn
Other questions. I'm happy to stay if you have other questions. Don't feel that you've got a time pressure.
Will Davis
Okay, perfect. Well, thank you so much, Bill. That was absolutely wonderful. And thank you so much for everyone for joining. Round of applause for Bill. Thank you. Thank you. That's for all of us, and I hope we'll get to see you all next month. We have a talk from Adrian Stanley on the neural circuit for associating sound and safety, which looks to be fantastic. So we'll hang around here. If anyone has any questions for Bill and doesn't want to do it in the big forum. And everyone else can drop off if they would like to. Thank you so much.
William Lynn
Thank you, folks. I think it's fascinating to look at the pictures that people have put on their zooms.
Will Davis
Yeah, exactly. You get great insight.
William Lynn
Yeah. Yeah, you really do. Some are cartoons, some are, you know, fun. Some of our other animals doing cool stuff. It's really fun. There's Natalie coming out of the cave. Hi, Natalie.
Natalie
Hi.
Diana Reiss
Natalie's been one of the active members of the ethics discussion group, which has been so fascinating.
Will Davis
Yes. And Natalie's actually also giving the June lecture as well, which is amazing.
Diana Reiss
Yes, we're excited about that one.
Natalie
It's been terrific to be involved in that ethics group. I mean, I learned so much.
Diana Reiss
I think we all have. Bill gave us a preview of this, and I got so excited when I saw this, the talk. I said, you got to give it to the bigger audience.
It's. It's really wonderful. Hi, sue, by the way. Good to see you. Too long.
Will Davis
You're on mute. Sue.
Frank F.
So I must say that, you know, roughly one year back. One year back, I. I was in hospital. I was in the Hospital quite ill. And I was. I was. I was very sedated and they allowed me my. My mobile device and I saw a link to this, this forum and I clicked on it, not really knowing what to expect. And I was. I was allowed in a really swift registration process. But I'm very sedated and in the hospital and I was so intrigued by what was going on. I immediately there and then on the spot, right. Began to try to interact with. With all species in a hospital sterile setting and was breaking out.
And of course, doctors and nurses are saying, what are you doing, man?
What are you doing?
And you wouldn't understand. I'm on a much higher level of plane than you currently. And here I am, much healthier and awake doing the same thing. Right? So how lovely it is to. Yeah, yeah.
William Lynn
Well, many, many people. Many people think being sedated is the best way to approach ethics because it's just too much. Right.
Well, folks, we have some more folks who are hanging about. Do you want to talk about stuff? I'd love to hear thoughts from you folks instead of just questions. To me, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts.
Diana Reiss
Hey, sue, what do you make? You have any comments about this? I'm sure you have a ton of them.
Sue Savage
Well, I've been out of the loop for two reasons. One, I. I was trying to get some stuff out of my truck and I got up and pulled open the thing and the door flipped back and I fell back on my head off of the truck really hard and had a concussion to go to Massachusetts to stay with my son for recovery. And then I got back into things and, oh, there's Sally. I'll just have to talk to her later. I got back into things and I had identity theft.
Diana Reiss
Oh, my God.
William Lynn
Oh, geez.
Sue Savage
I've had a lot of people hacking into my computers and sending my emails places and things like that. So I'm trying to get all that resolved, which I think that I have. I'm close to that, but I've been sort of. I was actually cut off Zoom. This is the first zoom I've been. I've done in maybe four or five months because I had to get my whole Zoom account worked out and everything. So in the meantime, while I was in Massachusetts, I started observing squirrels and I started interacting just with the squirrels when they wanted to interact, because they wanted to interact. And I started setting up feeding sites like I had for Kanzi, all over the backyard with food there sometimes and not other times. And I found that squirrels Are just highly deliberate. And they started watching me in the house and they'd look through certain windows and they'd get my attention. And they would make little tail gestures at me, you know, and I could talk to them. I could say, do you want me to go get some more food? And they'd make little tail gestures. And I just was amazed at how much I could communicate with squirrels just by. I actually had a study in that room and I was also doing other things. And so the squirrels had the opportunity to, to watch me and to solicit communication with me. And I had the opportunity to ask them questions back and forth, Much the same way I, I would with apes. But they were completely, you know, they weren't captive or anything. And it was their own choice. And of course, then cats began to come around and raccoons began to come around. And I even saw one of those cats, those big Max cats that they talk about. And the squirrels began to try to tell me what kinds of food they'd like me to leave. And the squirrels that I saw were highly cooperative. They didn't fight over any food. They took turns and they decided when. Which squirrels came down and which squirrels could go where, Just like I had seen the bonobos do in the wild. It was completely from anything I had read in the squirrel literature, which I just started to read and realized what I was seeing was not what was in the literature. So I started thinking about how to design a keyboard for squirrels. And then I started thinking how to design an all species keyboard. And that's what I'm working on right now.
Diana Reiss
Great. That's good news, Sue. Keep us posted. You know, I just want to add, we. We had a funny squirrel up. Since we're on squirrel talk here, we had an interesting one this morning. We're up in Connecticut rather than being in Manhattan. And my husband and I were. We feed squirrels out here all, all the time. And we have raccoons and squirrels and chipmunks and everybody and owls. But I noticed this morning I don't let my cat out loose. Obviously he's an indoor cat. But if I go out, he can go out with me and then I bring him back in. And when I. The squirrels wait for us in the morning, it reminds me of Lauren Isley's poem called Magic. When he talks about being enchanted, the famous anthropologist being enchanted by a cardinal who watched him as he was watching each other. There was this mutual communication. It's a fabulous poem. And the squirrels now come to our doorstep and wait in the morning and they've learned what sounds like. I think we've all experienced this. But when we're out there, they're silent watchers. And when my cat came out today, I heard they started chattering because he was. And as soon as I did a little experiment, as soon as I brought him in, they stopped. You know, when I went out and they were quiet. And you know, you see this. They have a lot. They know we know they have alarm calls, they have, they have escape route calls. But you can do so many experiments in your own backyard that are non invasive just. And get kids involved. This gets into all this kind of citizen science and education to get kids aware of how the power of observation, you know, can have King Solomon's Ring so easily by simply getting out of your own way and observing and listening. And so it's such an exciting time for us now that we have cell phones that can record sounds of animals and sharing these things. It's just exciting. And having plants like Sue and other people help to guide some of this, give kids ideas about how to do it. I think it's a resource we can start putting out there.
William Lynn
Yeah, it's another initiative for interspecies IO in terms of a K through 12 education program. It really is. I think of I've associated through a National Science foundation grant with the New England Aquarium and they're using the aquarium as a site to teach about climate change and they never once involve their own, the animals that they have on site or the animals they know so much about that are in Massachusetts Bay, etc. I'm like, why aren't you connecting with the animals and why aren't you doing animal based stuff? Well, they're inner city kids, they don't care about animals. And I'm like, are you kidding me? That's not true at all. It's just, you know, there are plenty of squirrels and birds and other things. It's just a matter of getting them interested, introducing them to it, etc. And often that isn't done.
Diana Reiss
Yeah.
Natalie
Yeah. So now I had a question for Belle. Coming back to the. The sort of, the value. Sorry, I'm not going to turn on my video because I'm having a bad hair day. But anyway, like, so. I have a.
Lot of sort of a few colleagues, scientific colleagues who work with wild animals and they don't do any ethical like procedures like they don't think it concerns them. And I sort of, sort of had arguments with them about that. But I was wondering if you could give me maybe Some. Are there any, like, historical precedents or it. Can you talk a bit more about the value of going through these ethical considerations and what, like, what can it bring? It's sort of like, you know, so I could sort of talk to my colleagues and tell them, give them some reasons why they should engage with these issues a bit more and what they might, what they stand to lose or what the risk could be if they ignore them.
William Lynn
Yeah, yeah. Well, my assumption is you're talking about your colleagues at Max Planck.
Natalie
I'm not going to name any names.
William Lynn
Okay. All right. I did. All right. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to locate the colleagues in a particular jurisdiction, whether it's the United States or Germany or someplace else jurisdictionally, whether it's controlled by the home office, as it is in Britain, or it's controlled by the Institutionality Use Case Care Committee, as it would be in a home institution here in the United States. Generally, wildlife research is rubber stamped as long as it has a phrase saying no significant impact on the population. And that's because wildlife research is thought to be only about aggregates, collectives, and if you're not harming the population of wolves, you can do all sorts of harm to those individual wolves. Now, an interesting exception to this is under the Marine Mammal Protection act in the United States, where marine mammals are seen as having an individual status, where individuals matter. It's not expressly moral, but because the Marine Animal Protection act was so motivated by outrage around whaling and of course the public falling in love and having an absolute transformation from killer whales to orcas, you do have a framing about the individual well being. So it's a very difficult institutional context you're talking about. If you introduce for wildlife researchers the question of a moral obligation not only to the species, which may limit some of their research or population, but to individuals that could reduce one of them, that could impact one of the main tools that they have used in wildlife research to date, which is killing. So, for example, Sophie Chetrovinsky, an old friend of mine, did, I don't know whether she's doing it right now, predation studies about black bears and brown bears and their impact on elk and black tailed deer in Saskatchewan. What she did is she killed the bears and then wanted to see what the absence of predators did to the population dynamics of the ungulates. Well, we all, you know, frankly, this was research that was being sponsored by the Saskatchewan government for the purposes of increasing hunting tourism in the province. We all know what's going to happen when you kill off the predators vis a vis the ungulates. And there are details that she learned about different forest environments and different kind of black bears versus brown bears. But, you know, they said the general sensibility was the same thing. If we started thinking about harm and well, being with respect to individual predators, if we started seeing those bears and bears legitimately so are non human persons, then that calls that into account. They have a vested self interest in not acknowledging the ethical questions. So then this is the last thing I'll say. Often research is stymied, stopped, or funding is cut, et cetera, when the public gets wind of something that they find deeply morally objectionable. This was an issue with the spotted owl and the northern. The northern spotted owl and the barred owl in the Pacific Northwest. And that's the one where I did an ethics review and an ethics brief for the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service. Getting out in front of the moral concerns not only can help you do better science, but it can also provide some kind of shielding against public blowback that you're not prepared for and can stop your research over time. So it's a matter of good science, it's a matter of good ethics. It does also mean a paradigm shift for those people in conservation research who are doing lethal harmful work. And the whole field of the growing field of compassionate conservation and rewilding with compassion. Another field are two responses to try and provide a paradigm and a welcoming community for conservation researchers who do want to change their tune and start thinking about the animals they're interacting with from a significantly more ethical standpoint. Does that answer your question?
Natalie
Yes. Thanks a lot.
William Lynn
Perfect. Does anyone else have anything else to add? Ah, Peter, you're on mute still. Oh, what's your dog?
Well, we're seeing. We're seeing the dog.
Peter Gabriel
That's my research assistant.
William Lynn
Yes.
Oh, that is an English lab.
Peter Gabriel
That's is right.
A golden retriever.
William Lynn
Golden retriever, yeah.
Peter Gabriel
Rafa.
William Lynn
Rafa. Wow. Yeah, wow.
Peter Gabriel
He plays tennis when he's not.
Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. We had two beautiful English labs up till a few years ago. All right. I miss them tremendously.
Will Davis
Frank got dog too.
Diana Reiss
Hey, Bill, I just wanted to mention one other thing that struck me that you said, you know, you mentioned thing about whales and just their responses to humans, you know, that there was so curious when we saw the phenomenon of the friendly grays down in the Baja lagoons. It speaks to this continuity across species of curiosity and animals being curious about others in their environment. I think, again, as we proceed, this is a discussion that should be continued throughout our adventures. Interspecies communication. I think you're such an important person and, and Natalie and the group and having more of these talks each year, it sharpens our critical thinking skills. It forces us to question motives and what's right for all of us. It was just. I just so appreciated you speaking today. I think you could see the audience really responded. These are really interesting discussions. I know, Peter, you had kept on talking about rules of engagement the first day we got out there. And I think this is just a lovely call, you know, callback. And thank you all so much for.
Will Davis
Yeah, I wonder if there is a way of like, standardizing the ethical regulations of research and, you know, potentially having like a seal of approval, like, like you were saying before, currently is a very minimal one, but maybe that, you know, the much more higher superior animal welfare one that could be something that's produced or thought about or something like red tractor labeling for food.
William Lynn
Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, we put together something like that and we've just, you know, sort of just briefly, briefly previewed that with Diana as a possibility to think through. There are complications here. One is because different jurisdictions have different way of handling the animal ethics of experimentation. So you, you always have. You. You have to defer to those institutions. You're talking, though, about, like you said, a certain brand or a. A certain certification that people can. Can claim for having training in this area. And we could definitely put that together. That's. That's definitely doable.
Will Davis
Yeah, I think something that could be trusted. Of course, like the food in the uk, there's like, you can have free range, but everyone doesn't really know if that actually means anything. And then you have. Have the RPCA standard, which, you know, is like the best one. Yeah.
Approval that's kind of backed by all these incredible individuals who are working on this initiative to give people that kind of. That reassurance. Could be a fantastic idea.
Diana Reiss
Yeah. So the AZA and World Zoo and Aquarium association that work with animals in captivity have standardized guidelines. It's a booklet so that if you're thinking about doing enrichment for a species, how to think about that, to address the need. And something like a course and some kind of manual and standardized guidelines for thinking, for critical thinking about this. It's a nice way of saying it. We're not doing regulations as much as it's guidelines. And it's a group of people, pluridisciplinary view from philosophers to Scientists to what are suggesting something that could be so helpful. And sometimes these things really can change thinking and whole paradigms.
Will Davis
Absolutely. It's important to have this conversation at least once a year. We bring everyone together. So why not have some form of publication that is produced, post conversation that is just an ongoing thing that we add to. We're reevaluating, we're rethinking.
William Lynn
Well, I'd be having to talk about that more and we could, you know, we could have a meeting and lay out some ideas and. And see what could be done in that regard. Wonderful.
Peter Gabriel
So. So maybe, maybe it could be something like you, you know, series of YouTube videos so that you know, if we're going to try and repair a car or do it undertake anything else now we always turn to YouTube videos. So if. Yeah, you know, as a. As a person thinking about interacting with some other species in your garden or a serious bit of research, there'd be a different sort of appropriate video. These are the things that you have to think about exactly what you've been telling us that but is sort of quick digestible gets to the core of it.
William Lynn
Yes.
Peter Gabriel
Very quickly. And then, and then ideally if we have somebody that is sort of lightweight enough that it can float a little bit and be flexible and learn and adapt. Because the trouble is about setting up institutions that are often so created to protect us is that they become weighty and slow moving and can't really respond to new information, new data in a way that is helpful. And it seems if we're going to keep moving forward, I mean this, this fundamental is that, you know, choice and control over participation in anything for the non human that seems to be ground. I mean certain ground rules but a lot of the details we're going to have to learn on the hoof, I think.
William Lynn
Yeah, agreed. Agreed.
Diana Reiss
Great.
Peter Gabriel
Thank you so much for. Because this is really important stuff for us because it could.
William Lynn
Thank you.
Peter Gabriel
It could allow us to thrive or die.
William Lynn
Let's thrive. Let's thrive.
Diana Reiss
Thanks again.
William Lynn
Okay. All right folks. Thank you very much.
Will Davis
Okay, thank you everybody.
Diana Reiss
Have a good weekend all.
