Apes and Apps

Can technology allow humans to teach apes language?

Psychologist Sue Savage Rumbaugh spent 30 years engaging a family of bonobos in human ways of life and has found that the apes in her care at The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, could recognize their own shadows, learn to enter into contractual agreements, signal intent, assume responsibilities, distinguish between the concepts of good and bad, and deceive. Rumbaugh's findings raise a provocative question: can an animal develop a human mind?

Rumbaugh used lexigrams to communicate with bonobos and explore their cognitive and linguistic abilities. Her star pupil, Kanzi, recognizes nearly 500 lexigrams which he uses to make requests, answers questions, and compose short sentences. The spoken words he understands number in the thousands. He is able to string together symbols to create new words, punching keys for "tomato," "cheese," and "bread" to ask for pizza, for instance, or the symbols "slow" and "lettuce" to convey kale (which takes longer to chew). Kanzi will even add a "thank you" when given a treat.

With touch screens, tablet computers, and digital recording, researchers like Rumbaugh have powerful tools to expand research and unambiguously document human to ape communication. The research may shed light on the origins of culture, language, tools and intelligence. When photographing Kanzi and his family interacting with their Motorola Zoom tablets, I was struck by how readily they were humanized by technology and how comfortable they seemed adopting our tools. I was awed by how their image reflects ours. "We define humanness mostly by what other beings, typically apes, are not," says Rumbaugh. We have a need to feel unique, special and our capacity for speech has set us apart. But science is beginning to challenge this boundary.