The next Internet shouldn’t be either AI or human—but animal

A forgotten but charming detail of Star Trek: The Next Generation (or TNG as the aficionados on our team call it, of course) that was never explored in the show, to its detriment, was that the crew of the Enterprise-D included not just a bunch of aliens, but cetaceans in special compartments below decks acting as navigation specialists.

Maybe all that was missing to get their help was the right way to make calls. Welcome to the next comms revolution: animal to animal.

Brace yourself for a bird-themed pun or two. Sorry (not sorry

While we (quite rightly) concentrate here on the potentially beneficial impact on business of innovations in 5 and 6G (and indeed, other technologies), now and again we widen the camera lens to look at the social and environmental pay-off.

We’d like to think we are always ready to promote and grow awareness of advances in things like wireless and IoT can make to the world, especially in connected-up agriculture, tracking migrating birds to help better protect them, and more.

But this one’s rather wonderfully new on us, and hopefully to you too. How about encouraging parrots to video-call fellow psittacines to ease their loneliness and share hints and tips?

Nope, we’re not making this up—researchers at Boston’s Northeastern University are sharing results of a project that allowed pet parrots to initiate video calls with other parrots using tablets, with the write-up deliciously entitled (and how could it not be?) ‘Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together’.

The goal was enrichment and improved social well-being for highly intelligent, social birds. In fact, parrots—widely recognised as some of the most intelligent and socially complex creatures in the animal kingdom, whose cognitive abilities seem at least comparable to primates and young human children, and who may be even cleverer than we already thought—might need our help quite urgently on these fronts.

Why? There could be as many as 20 million of the birds being kept as pets in the US, but often on their own and lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their uniquely high social, cognitive, and emotional needs.

When you think about it, given how much effort (and expense) we put into keeping our cat and dog animal companions stimulated, that makes sense. If you’ve ever shared your home with such a feathered friend, you may already be familiar with what can happen if no effort is made in the avian direction: ‘stereotypies’ (abnormal behaviours observed in captive animals) and which point to poor psychological well-being often include pacing, rocking, hanging on the sides of cages, walking in circles, excessive vocalisations or sleeping, self-mutilation, and feather-picking.

Learning and sharing that learning quickly--and efficiently

Poor Polly. The team at Northeastern says that after reviewing bird perception and agency literature, it tried to develop an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots. Admittedly, the initial effort was quite modest: following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we’re talking about just a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a P2P (parrot-to-parrot) video-calling system.

(OK, we made that last bit up.) But the results are fascinating. Scientists wanted to see what would happen in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits. To keep the animals safe, their caretakers were trained to end the call if their bird showed signs of stress, disengagement or left the space, but it looks like the animals were up for it: each bird was able to learn the association between ringing a bell (eat your heart out, Pavlov), touching the photo of another bird on their tablet, and being connected with that bird on a video call.

In any case, once the pilot commenced, what came back was that with 147 bird-triggered calls, 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits—some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly (!) by watching others.

The experience was even good for the ‘owner’: ‘Leveraging web technology ultimately allowed the birds to bond socially with other birds while also intimately reconnecting with their human companion,’ the study concludes. P2P could next be used, it suggests, for beaky love: ‘online bird interactions may also provide a simple way to introduce different birds to each other and help identify potential matching companion birds’.

The future is feathered. And furred. Scaled?

But why stop there? We’re genuinely not joking when we say there is huge potential for us, the apex predator, to use tech to give something back here. What if next-generation communications infrastructure isn’t just about connecting people, but about connecting species?

Highly social mammals in zoos could maintain stable group bonds across sites or even with their relatives back home. Relocated elephants might preserve matriarchal cohesion despite geographic separation; breeding programmes for endangered primates could use controlled visual familiarisation to reduce aggression before physical introduction.

Could an Animal Internet be just around the corner—or maybe even multiple ones for smarter animals, rolling out one-by-one (if not even two-by-two)? We built global communications networks to connect humans. Is the infrastructure now maturing enough to extend empathy beyond our species?

Could the next billion connections may not all be human? Wouldn’t that be wonderful. We’re off to talk to the animals--and hope you are too.