While Humans can be seen as the most intelligent, we are hyper focused on "human way of thinking" in a way that we lose our "basic" instincts and abilities that other animal have.<p>My dog can understand my voice tone and emotions way better than I can understand hers, also animals can understand the difference sounds we make (words) that affect them, way better than our understanding of animals sounds.<p>Don't get me wrong we can make tools and we can experiment and be able to suppress all other animals. But a solo, "naked" human is like an office worker in world of manual labor.
We can understand animal emotions (mammals at least) reasonably well if we choose to try, and even in the absence of understanding, we can assume, for example, that caged animals would rather be elsewhere. But self-interest (or economic interest) often makes it more convenient to ignore what's obvious.
But AI is currently failing at American Sign Language, notably at facial expressions, miserably.<p>Yes, we are working on that but I see writing on the wall and it is not soon enough.
I wonder if it's possible that what is actually happening is that human ability to understand animals is not optimized towards "understanding objectively what the animal is feeling" so much as it is optimized towards "understanding how to get them to do what we want."<p>Assuming that a significant portion of our ability to understand animal behavior comes from evolutionary instinct or ancestral folklore, then it seems reasonable that the result might be highly pragmatic. For example, our ancestors may have only cared about identifying whether a dog was communicating sufficient submissiveness to indicate that it would follow orders. Whether that submissiveness came from love or fear of punishment may not have been important.
> “But it turns out there aren’t that many pictures of dogs and cats and sheep on the internet”—at least not ones where it’s clear how the animals are feeling, he says.<p>Sheep I can understand -- most people online are urban and the people who upload the most are urban -- but it also was difficult to find relevant pictures of housepets?
For some reason a lot of people seem think animals are smiling, when they're making what seems like a pretty obvious distressed face, in a situation one would imagine is distressing.
Humans are clearly bad at analyzing other people emotions based on how much misunderstanding there are out there. Just look at how bad people are in relationships. Someone shared their experience in an event talking to a girl. I just listened, thinking, "Do they not realize that you were clearly in the wrong here?".