Book Review: How to Speak Whale - A Voyage Into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill

This is an excellent pop-science book. It gently weaves a personal tale (nearly getting crushed by a whale) into the current cutting-edge research of animal communication. It takes in along the way philosophy, geopolitics, and the crushing inevitability of death.

At its heart is this question - if modern AI is brilliant at extracting semantic meaning from unstructured data, can it do the same with whale song?

Mustill's joy of discovery is wonderful. He's adept at weaving autobiography into science and has a knack for finding the interesting nuggets amongst the tedious nature of natural research. The people he speaks to are adamant about changing the world in a variety of ways. It really did fill me with hope.

It is almost impossible to avoid anthropomorphising the cetaceans in the book. A fact which is acknowledged, but never quite resolved. Philosophically, we cannot quite imagine consciousness and language except through a human lens. We also get a bunch of unexpected moral questions. Do we have the "right" to listen in to whales' conversation? Should we apologise to them for the near genocide we inflicted on them? If they are sentient, are their recordings covered by GDPR?

Of particular delight to me was the use of properly semantic HTML footnotes. Wonderful! Of minor annoyance was the continual use of imperial measurements. Seriously, why?!

The book goes through the basics of biology and computer science, gradually building up towards a crescendo which never quite arrives. That the only downside - it doesn't end with "...and here's the full Human-Whale dictionary." But, it appears, we are tantalizingly close!

Best read in conjunction with The Idiot Gods and Pod.

This is an absolutely fascinating book.