Episode #394 from 55:42
Plant communication
If I can ask a pothead question for a second, you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm like way. You're talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based on an objective function. Is it possible to have some kind of interface between another kind of organisms, humans, and nature? So like a human to have a conversation with a plant? There already is. You know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but actually it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other. The grass, when it's cut emits green leaf volatiles, GLVs. And those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass, "Be careful. Mind you, you're about to be cut." These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours. We use language models, they use molecular models. At the moment where we can parse, we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants.
People
Why this moment matters
If I can ask a pothead question for a second, you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm like way. You're talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based on an objective function. Is it possible to have some kind of interface between another kind of organisms, humans, and nature? So like a human to have a conversation with a plant? There already is. You know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but actually it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other. The grass, when it's cut emits green leaf volatiles, GLVs. And those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass, "Be careful. Mind you, you're about to be cut." These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours. We use language models, they use molecular models. At the moment where we can parse, we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants.
People and topics
People