At a global scale, we are in a crisis of collective decision-making, with concepts of democracy, identity, enfranchisement and citizenship under threat. In the context of the on-going Climate Emergency, as AI challenges our understanding of non-human intelligence, and as countries worldwide experiment with giving personhood and citizenship to non-human species, we believe it’s essential to explore new forms of multi-species interaction and conversation, within new open environments for both humans and non-humans to communicate. Collective conversation and decision-making is key to our shared futures.

While we don’t yet fully understand non-human communication, much progress has been made in developing authentic conversational interfaces (and understanding communication) for a broad range of non-human species. But we still aren’t sure what we might talk about, or what it means when we discover their personalities, perspectives and opinions conflict with our own. We have neither the language nor the cognitive skills to make crucial – yet complex – collective decisions about our shared futures; this only gets more acute as non-humans return (for it wasn’t always this way) to the conversation.