How Understanding Animals Can Help Us Maximize Artificial Intelligence

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every day countless headlines emerge from myriad sources across the globe, both warning of dire consequences and promising utopian futures – all thanks to artificial intelligence. AI "is transforming the workplace," writes the Wall Street Journal, while Fortune magazine tells us that we are facing an "AI revolution" that will "change our lives." But we don't really understand what interacting with AI will be like – or what it should be like. It turns out, though, that we already have a concept we can use when we think about AI: It's how we think about animals.