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We were promised better Siri, better Alexa, better everything. Instead we’ve gotten… chip bumps.
We were promised better Siri, better Alexa, better everything. Instead we’ve gotten… chip bumps.
I wouldn’t call the verbalization in that video “nonsense.” He’s choosing to say those words and phrases, and often saying them in concert with actions we can recognize as being related. Knowing the kind of memory birds have for all sorts of things, I would also not be surprised if he was thinking about something and verbalizing those thoughts - but how could we ever know that?
I mean at one point he says “step up” while stepping on a branch. Nothing else he does seems terribly related to physical actions. And this makes sense because his brain didn’t evolve to communicate complex ideas using words.
And this is my point. We’re seeing them as being related, but I think we are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here assigning intelligence where there may be a lot more random noise. Like if after being trained to identify objects he spent his time practicing identifying objects, that might convince me he’s doing something intelligent, but I think it’s more likely he just likes hearing himself vocalize.
“No biting” stood out to me, too.
But some of them most certainly communicate with vocalization. The fact that some birds are able to mimic the non-bird sounds they hear points to their being very good with vocalization. What’s in a word besides being a set of vocalizations that communicates some meaning to another creature?
Possibly, and I’m not a bird lawyer. It starts to get kind of meta from this point. What is intelligence, and are we the arbiters of its definition?
Like with “step up” and “no biting”? Don’t get me wrong, you make good and valid points. I just think it’s more of a “grey” area (pun intended).
That’s why I said “complex ideas.” Like a dog will yelp if it’s hurt, or stare out the back door when it wants out, but I wouldn’t consider that “language.”
The only difference between yelping and what Apollo is doing is that he sounds like a person.
And maybe discussing animal psychology is a little too off topic from my original point which is that things can seem more intelligent to us when they look or sound like people.
Like the fact that kids can form an emotional bond with a Tamagotchi which is no more sophisticated than a Casio wristwatch speaks more to how humans assign intelligence to life-like things than to how intelligent a Tamagotchi is.