Possible: Jane Goodall on hope, AI, and the natural world

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1:07renowned zoologist and primatologist Jane Goodall. It's a wide-ranging discussion about how AI can support conservation efforts and even helped discover a brand new species in Tanzania. Jane also reflects on her legacy and shares stories of defying the scientific community early in her career. Please enjoy. Every one of us makes an impact on the planet every day and we can choose what sort of impact we make. And as that spreads, it's a way of giving people hope. Too many people look at the problems of the world and they get depressed. And of course they do. So I say to them, what do you care about in your own community?

1:53What is it that you dislike intensely? Is it waste? Is it the way we treat people? What is it? See what you can do about that. Get your friends to help you. And then you find that you can make a difference. That makes you feel good. Then you want to do more. And then you inspire others to do more.

2:18Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman. And I'm Aria Finger. We want to know how together we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future. With support from Stripe, we ask technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers to help us sketch out the brightest version of the future, and we learn what it'll take to get there. This is possible.

2:46When Dr. Jane Goodall first embarked on her research with chimpanzees in 1960, the idea of animal sentience or sapience was a near impossibility in the mind of the scientific the community. Scientists were trained to observe behavior, not to interpret experience. But Jane didn't follow the rules. She gave her subjects names, not numbers. She documented tool use, play, grief, and affection. Her work changed how we understand chimpanzees and ourselves. Slowly, the scientific paradigm shifted. We began to accept that the line between us and the rest to the natural world was far blurrier than we'd imagined.

3:31Science evolves, and sometimes that evolution doesn't just bring us new knowledge, it expands our moral imagination. Today, as we build artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies, we're once again being asked to redraw the boundaries of who counts, what matters, and what kinds of intelligence deserve our care. What might it look like to build technology with all life in the loop, not just humans? Could AI help accelerate research that protects the natural world? Could it become a tool not only for efficiency, but for empathy? Few approach these questions more thoughtfully than Dr.

4:16Jane Goodall, our guest on Possible this week. Jane is a legendary ethologist and conservationist whose 60-year study of wild chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, transformed the field of primatology. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, the global youth program Roots and Shoots, and serves as a UN messenger of peace. Her lifelong message that hope is a form of action has inspired generations. I took this conversation with Jane Solo, and she and I explored her thoughts on technology, legacy, and the future of all species.

4:58So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Jane Goodall.

5:07First, Jane, welcome to Possible. I am so honored and pleased that we made this happen. I am too. So we're going to start a little unusually. I'm going to turn it over to our showrunner, Sean, as we've got a game for you and me called Name That Baby. He's going to play a few mystery sounds and you and I will guess what animal it is. These are all vocalizations from young animals. Sean? All right, here we go. Let's warm up. Here's the first one. oh goodness that could be a crow or a parrot or yeah i was going for parrot or a parrot or a love bird or a parakeet or you're you're getting very close because that is within the set but this one in fact is a goat a goat a goat all right here's number two we both fail yes exactly zero so it works for the goat next one

6:12orangutan no okay it's not a monkey oh you may have already guessed this animal crow bing bing bing bing bing that's a crow that's a crow a baby crow all right now we're getting closer to the subcontinent that was mentioned

6:31well that also sounds to me like a bird well baby baboons can sound like that but it isn't a baby baboon you're the expert crocodile crocodile i would never in the even on the pink moon i wouldn't get all right very difficult i don't know anyone who would get this anyway thank you so much for trying that we'll have another uh acoustic array for a later question. All right. So we started with my complete lack of knowledge of young sounds. Apparently mine too. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about, I think most people are familiar with the kind of decades of dedication and research and conservation, but probably most people aren't familiar with the fact that you've actually engaged a serious technology in this effort.

7:20You know, you've been leveraging cutting edge technology to help with conservation for decades. Talk a little bit about, you know, kind of use of satellite geospatial imaging to understand animal migration, forest evolution. And then what's the most interesting ways that technology has actually kind of enhanced your work? Well, can I go back a moment? Absolutely. Because I think what's interesting, when I was growing up, television hadn't been invented. You know, so in my 90 years, I've seen the advance of technology. I mean, when I began, all my notes were handwritten, and then I graduated to a typewriter, finally was persuaded to go onto a computer.

8:04So the technology came into our field research with a wonderful young man who did his PhD at Gombe with satellite imagery, GPS, Lillian Pintea. And he's now our head of conservation science. and he's the one who introduced all these technologies and it's enabled us to do a lot of things. You know, part of our conservation is you can't save forest chimpanzees or anything else unless you have the local communities behind you. When I flew over them in the mid-1980s and what had been forest was Bear Hills and it hit me that if we can't help these people find a way of making a living without destroying their environment.

8:51We can't save anything. And that began our Takari program. And it started with just growing new food and scholarships for girls. And then Lillian came along and trained young people who volunteered to be forest monitors, to read iPhones or iTablets, to monitor the health of their forest so that it could be uploaded and visible to the village chiefs and so on. And, you know, so then it just went from one thing to another thing. So it's just enabling us to do things now which I couldn't have dreamt of before. What kind of like one or two of them has been the most surprising or magical for you in the use of technology for conservation for the local communities?

9:40Well, quite a few actually. The use of satellite imagery to enable the villagers to make land use management plans and for the first time set aside areas for conservation with the villagers approving of it. Because thanks to satellite imagery, they understand the value of these mappings to show where they, you know, when there's a lot of rain, you get landslides because people have been cultivating too steep slopes. But then, you know, exciting for me was when drones came into the picture and the drones could go and map areas that would take weeks to go on foot. And then I think even more exciting, the technology that allows you to not only look down at the species of trees, but measure the height and width of a tree and calculate how much CO2 it can store.

10:37So these things are revolutionary. Camera traps, fantastic. And these auditory, I don't know what they're called, but little microphones that we set up all around Gombe. And within two weeks, identified two species that we didn't know were there. The incredible team at the Jane Goodall Institute and Wild Mon, with funding from Google, used a super cool acoustic array to discover a brand new species of bush baby in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Thomas's bush baby is a fascinating species of primate that's native to sub-Saharan Africa. Here's a clip from that super cool acoustic array where you can actually hear the call of the newly discovered bush baby.

11:35and how did you because it was like we don't know what that sound is so what is that species how how did you go from your acoustic array by by some i mean it was pretty obvious that both of them were galegos you know these little prosimian creatures and so obviously we don't have the expertise to know what they are, but it was clear they were new sounds. So we sent it off to the Gallego experts. When you can hear the sounds, and this is all from nighttime, nighttime recordings, when you hear the sounds, you can tell something about the number of species that you have. Probably AI would help you to find out if there's any communication between different species, which is something that fascinates me.

12:25Something about the nature of the calls. Are they alarm calls? Are they friendly calls? That sort of thing. And to make distinctions between, I mean, sometimes at night it's loud calls of all sorts of different species and presumably AI can untangle those so that you can hear the individual species separately. and that's all really fascinating. And in addition to acoustic arrays have you been doing cameras and discovering different kinds of social behavior or? We study chimps in six other African countries and it's been absolutely beneficial to studies where the chimps are not habituated. Through AI we can actually from the camera trap from the images of the chimps work out the individuals which we couldn't do otherwise.

13:17I know nothing about, or know very little, about the kind of on the ground ever been to any of your conservation sites, but I know a little bit about AI. You know, like one of the things that I've thought about AI is you can like pipe kind of through a camera and ask the AI to study for certain things and highlight certain moments and so forth. Like, these are some of the things I was thinking about AI when I was thinking about your work is, What questions has it made arise for you? Well, I have to say that to start with, I was really scared of it. And in some ways I still am because in the wrong hands, it can harm communities and individuals.

13:58And I've seen examples of that in some countries. And I'm really afraid this may come to the US at some point. But my son is a passionate advocate of AI. and he's always telling me, you know, new things. So I've got a sort of idea as to how AI can help when it's in the right hands and it's a tool. And, you know, it's a tool and some people, and I'm not sure I would like to ask you, do you think that it can ever have its own, I mean, can actually think things like humans or is it bounded by what we feed into it, which is our human brain? So I think in one pattern, AI will have some deep human resemblance because the central training is off over a trillion words of human writing and data and various things.

14:56So that causes a bunch of human patterns to be included. And it's also by doing reinforcement learning with human feedback that also tends to quote unquote humanize it some more. But precisely one of the things that, you know, as we kind of dive into some kind of more philosophical or cultural lenses, I think that the thing that we're going to get with AI is understanding in what ways its pattern of thinking, its pattern of inferring or reasoning, its pattern of experiencing or communicating is different than ours because I think it'll be very similar. And I don't know yet when and how it might go from being a tool to a creature.

15:44I think saying philosophically it could never be is a little silly. Just like, you know, as you know, I'm sure you encounter this a lot is most people tend to not realize how well animals, you know, not just chimps and gorillas, but like dolphins and whales think and speak. And octopuses and crows and all kinds of creatures, pigs and rats. Exactly. And so my hope is that by the lens in AI, we will begin to have a richer sense of, as opposed to, is it sentient or not, or does it speak or not? There's almost like a topology, a much richer ecosystem of types of sentience, types of communication, et cetera.

16:33And I think AI will have lenses of that. So it won't be exactly like human, but it also won't be unhuman either because of how it's made. And since we're first, like today, I think it's all tools. And as those tools are trained on kind of human data sets, that makes it very natural amplifiers of us. So for example, if you're thinking about conservation, you think about like, okay, what might it do to help me understand the world, to help me make that world visible, tactile, present to other human beings? Because human beings can only tend to be compassionate or engaged when they see it in some way, which is obviously what, you know, your life's work has been about making happen.

17:22And that's part of like, how does technology help you see it and help amplify it? That's the reason why I think it's more of a when and how than an if with AI. But I think that's the, that's my hopes around AI. You know, if AI can find a way of pulling together all the different strands of research and understanding to make one picture, because, you know, you learn very quickly everything's interconnected. And this amazing web of life where every species, plant, animal has a role to play and they're interdependent on each other. And so if AI can find a way of pulling these strands together into one picture that makes it easy for people to understand, because a lot of people find it hard.

18:14I mean, there are examples out there, but I think largely it's not really understood. That's something I'm always pushing in my talks. One of the things from some of your talks, I wasn't quite sure what you'd think about AI as a translator of animal communication. Yeah, that's a big thing. Now, I don't think it can. We can know an animal really, really well. I can know, I know the chimpanzees really, really well. I know what their calls mean. I know what their gestures mean. But to actually understand exactly what they're thinking and feeling and saying, I think I'd rather leave it that there are these pieces and we're all different and yet we're all connected and we're sentient and sapient.

19:09But there's got to be that little bit of mystery left. and and i i'm totally good with mystery but obviously you know kind of when i was thinking about this on some of your talks was because you know i i helped stand up this thing called an earth species project which is recording crows and whales and dolphins and so forth and trying to use ai to understand and also potentially to even have a conversation we needed ai to understand these animal calls at the beginning. Yes. And, and the, the notion is, I think we're in translation, there's always some mystery. Like, for example, if you say, well, you know, subjects that are deep around human beings, like, you know, what is the nature of love or compassion or friendship or family?

19:59And those concepts are probably different in, you know, kind of english-speaking cultures versus chinese versus japanese versus you know etc etc because that fabric comes together and that's a microcosm more easily understandable by us human beings and so there's always some mystery but i think like getting some like a deeper understanding like for example understanding how to have a conversation with a chimp like if we could make like at 2x the conversation it would be before, I would presume that would be a good thing. But I was curious, but given some of your talks about whether or not you thought that would be good, mixed, bad.

20:41Well, I think it would depend on who was using it. I would love to be able to use AI to get into the brains of people doing horrendously cruel experimentation on animals. If they could find a way of feeling and seeing and having exposed to them the suffering of the animals they're working on. They seem oblivious. And if AI could do something about getting through to them, that would be a very good use. Indeed, it would. You know, what I hope is that we, if we can get, just like, for example, we learn more compassion for other people when we learn to listen to them. If we can learn to listen to other species and the earth better, We also learn more compassion there.

21:28What are some of the principles that you've kind of learned on your own listening journey that like AI technologists should think about, right, in building things that other people can listen to? Say, for example, you have a new apprentice coming on to Gombe. How would you train them to listen and to see the right way? Because that training process would be the kind of thing that we would hope, like what What would be the principles of look for this or do this and don't do this, which would help technologists think, well, how would we build our machine to learn the similar kinds of lessons? Well, I have to say that, you know, you have to answer part of that question because we're still observing the chimps in the same sort of way.

22:19Technologies come in and that the field staff can take little recording machines with them. machines that record like every five minutes what they're doing. But I've always stressed, we also need the written notes about events that happen, which cannot be recorded in a format like, you know, every five minutes. And if you don't write what happens between the five minutes, then you miss out. And, you know, I was taught when I went to Cambridge, I wasn't taught, I was told, not told because I didn't listen, but I was told that when you see a behavior just once or twice, it's anecdotal and anecdotes are not important.

23:05I totally disagree because I think an anecdote, something that's rare, can give you a feeling of how a species can behave. It gives you an insight into what they can do when the circumstance arises. We've seen many examples. I collect them. Now, if AI can help with that, I don't know if it can. Actually, I think it can. It's actually, again, a when and a how, then an if. But my guess is even now, because you have these multimodal systems that can take in video. I philosophically or intellectually agree with you that it's actually in fact the very interesting lenses into some very unique behavior that discover what the worldview is or what the experience that is.

23:58What were some of those anecdotes that kind of made you begin to realize that there were many more similarities with the chimps than with us? Well, there was one which I always remember very vividly. It was when we were feeding bananas and the chimps weren't completely habituated. Some were, but some weren't. and there was one very intelligent male who actually used his brains to become top ranking. But on this occasion, there he was and they all love bananas. So I held out a banana to him. He was beginning to lose his fear and he looked at it. He didn't dare come up. So when a chimp is angry, they shake something like that.

24:50That's one of their threats. So he shook a tall patch of grasses which was near him, one of which touched the banana. And it was just like this. From that moment of this touching it, he let go of those grasses. He picked up a long, thin, wiggly stick, dropped it, looked around, picked up a thick stick and knocked the banana from my hand. So it was that immediate, you know, from a thing touches the banana. Okay, that's what I can do. and that that really gives you some insight into how their minds work it's an ah moment an aha moment well because one of the things that if um the complete scope of tool usage is one of the things that i'm sure you've seen more than the vast majority of human beings is that they they Like that same like visual thinking or similar, not same, similar visual thinking tool use.

25:52And so like if you see, for example, then if another chimp saw this chimp do that, they go, oh, I could do that too. That's right. That's right. That's right. I mean, when I first mentioned that I thought chimps had culture, I was blacklisted by other scientists. That's unique to humans. Just like tool using and tool making. And gradually, every time we discover one of these attributes in animals that used to be thought unique to humans, mainly by Western science, I have to say, then they find something else. And the last barrier is language, which, okay, animals communicate in very sophisticated ways.

26:34Chimpanzees can learn to use computers. a parrot. I know a parrot who knows over 1 ,000 words and can write poetry and does extraordinary things. So animals have the capacity, but they haven't developed the words that enable them, like, I can talk to you about things that you don't know about. You can talk to me about things I don't know about. We can learn from each other. That's, I think, what animals can't do. We can teach our children about things that aren't present we can bring people together as ai does i'm sure from different disciplines to to solve problems yeah no exactly that although one of the things that i've because i have studied bits and pieces of animal cognition because i've been curious about how cognition works generally ours that's how i got an ai because i was curious about human cognition right it's kind of like okay what's the what's the lens of looking at this and like for example um some of the studies of rats when they are um the neurological studies when they are navigating you can actually see that they have something of a simulation of the world right which is the no no uh i go here and i go left and i press that button and you know like like that kind of thing and so um please after this google five amazing rats okay i will i think you will be amazed okay i'm sure i will yes that'll be great all your listeners five amazing rats i look forward to it so one of the things that i love about your lifetime of work is that you will go and talk basically to anyone with an attempt to build a bridge and an understanding of the world we're in, of the connectivity we should have between human beings, between human beings, the natural world.

28:29What has been some of the work where like, for example, you know, even working with, you know, oil companies or others that has been part of that, that building bridges journey and what did you learn from it? Okay. Well, I have to say there are some oil companies I wouldn't even want to make a bridge with. Got it. But when I first went to Congo, and there were all these orphan chimps whose mothers had been killed, and it was desperately important to make a sanctuary to look after them. And Conoco was there then. And they were the most environmentally friendly oil company I'd ever met. And, you know, they were so concerned about the environment that rather than drive a bulldozer through for their seismic exploration, they would go around sacred sites.

29:23They would walk and have supplies dropped rather than destroy the environment. They would put earth to the side, and then if they found nothing, they'd bring it back. They had botanists. Of course, it was too expensive to sustain, but that was their ethic. and the reason I began working with them, I thought it through. So I thought as I was about to arrive, I'm on a plane. I'm using fuel. I'm going to be met by a car. I will be taken to where I want to go by using petrol, fuel. And yet I don't want to take their money to do something that's good. So I, you know, I think that we have to think in that way every time we want to make a bridge.

30:16And I did the same with chimpanzees in medical research. Our closest relatives in five foot by five foot cages with bars all around, bars ahead, bars below. And so the first time I went into one of these labs, I was so emotionally shocked. And I came out and, you know, I was feeling just close to tears. And I was sat at a table and the heads of NIH involved with the animal research, I didn't know they were going to be there. They were all sitting around this table. And I sat there and I saw they were all looking at me and waiting for me to speak. And what can I say to them? So I said, I imagine you're all caring, compassionate people and probably feel as I do about what's going on in there.

31:11So they couldn't exactly say they weren't caring and compassionate. So they expected me to harangue them and point fingers at them and tell them what bad people they were. No, I showed them pictures of the chimpanzees in Gombe, lying around, grooming each other, lying in their nests, playing with their young. And I could see them turning inwards and thinking things through. And, you know, eventually with lots of other groups helping, the chimps are all now in sanctuaries. Yes, that's great. Actually, I recently saw a documentary about a chimp sanctuary in Louisiana, which is very large. Yes, I've been there.

31:53Yes. just look lots of characters in the in this documentary so i have a quote from uh dr leakey that i'd be curious your reflections on we must either redefine man redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as men as human as human yes yes exactly yeah um what are your reflections on that quote? Well, the quote came because I'd seen that chimp I named David Greybeard breaking off stalks of grass, using them to stick down into a termite mound, pulling them out and eating off the termites. I saw him picking leafy twigs, and then he had to carefully strip the leaves to make a tool suitable for fishing for termites.