
newsJan 24, 20261:03:17pending
Gašper Beguš on Why Language Doesn’t Make Humans Special
About this episode
Yascha Mounk and Gašper Beguš also talk about what whale communication and the recent progress on AI tell us about the human brain.
Gašper Beguš is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, where he focuses on interpretable AI and combines linguistics, cognitive science, machine learning, neuroscience, and marine biology.
In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Gašper Beguš discuss what makes human language exceptional compared to animal communication, whether whales and other animals have true language capabilities, and how properties like cultural transmission and recursion distinguish human speech.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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