Animals are Talking to Each Other. Can AI Help Us Understand Them?

May 6, 2026

The people running technology companies love to make wild predictions about the future. They’ve told us that artificial intelligence will cure cancer, eliminate drudgery and solve climate change. But those utopian visions haven’t materialized. Where are the revolutionary moonshots we’ve been promised? Aza Raskin may well have one. Raskin is the president of the Center for Humane Technology and the co-founder of the Earth Species Project, a non-profit using machine learning to decode animal communication. Raskin and his colleagues are envisioning a world where birds can vote and dolphins get to represent themselves in court. That might sound hard to believe – but Raskin says they’re not far from making it a reality. So I wanted to ask him: what happens to our world – and to us – when animals have the right to speak?