91av

ARTHUR’S workspace is pretty much like the others around him. He has his own
computer, his own chair and his own stash of goodies. Still, his behaviour isn’t
quite what you’d expect in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the MIT Media
Lab. He has a habit of dropping chunks of chewed vegetable on the floor, and he
sometimes attacks visitors. But Arthur has an excuse—he has a mental age
of about four. Oh, and he’s a parrot.

It’s not that unusual to see animals in the Media Lab. After all, lots of
researchers bring their dogs. But Arthur is there to work. Every day, his
supervisor, Ben Resner, gives him a specially designed clicker. One click
changes the image on his computer screen from a car to an owl. A second changes
it again, to an image of a woman. A third conjures up a picture of an African
grey parrot, the same species as Arthur. A fourth brings back the car. And if
you think that sounds a bit like browsing, you’d be right. Arthur is learning to
surf the Web.

“What we’re trying to do is to build a Web browser for parrots,” says
Arthur’s owner, Irene Pepperberg, a biologist from the University of Arizona.
Pepperberg is currently at MIT as a visiting professor, and she and Resner
believe that by teaching Arthur to use the Internet, they could liberate
thousands of captive parrots from a life of boredom and loneliness. It could
also reveal something about parrot behaviour and cognition. And once they’ve got
the birds online, they’re planning to do the same for dogs.

For Pepperberg, the InterPet project is a natural extension of her work with
African greys. They are among the most intelligent and communicative members of
the parrot family, and she famously taught one of her birds, Alex, to
communicate using spoken language
(91av, 15 January, p 40).
Alex is now 23, and can recognise and name around fifty objects, identify seven
colours and five shapes, count up to six and understand the concepts “same”,
“different”, “bigger” and “smaller”.

Pepperberg claims Alex’s skills are proof that African greys are at least as
intelligent as chimps and dolphins, and may even be able to outwit four-year-old
children at certain tasks. This intelligence, she says, is one reason they make
good pets. The other is their sociability. In the wild, parrots live in flocks
and become extremely anxious if they are separated from the rest. Captive birds
constantly crave attention.

But the very characteristics that make parrots better pets than, say,
sparrows, also make them hugely demanding. Brainy, friendly pets need
stimulation and company. Take those away—by going to work nine hours a
day, for instance—and you get a bored and lonely animal. “These really are
intelligent birds,” says Liz Wilson, a Pennsylvania-based parrot shrink who
helps owners with their delinquent birds. “If they’re forced to sit in their
cages for nine or ten hours a day with the same old toys, they get bored out of
their minds.” At best, an understimulated parrot will become withdrawn and start
plucking out its feathers. At worst, its relationship with its owner can
deteriorate to the point of conflict.

That’s why Pepperberg is so keen to get Arthur online. Although he’s her pet,
she can’t take him home because her flatmate in Boston has a cat. Poor Arthur
has to spend his nights alone in a cage in the lab, and he needs something to
do. Pepperberg and Resner reckon that the Web would be infinitely more
interesting than a ball with a bell in it. “Toys are okay, but we want to allow
him to be social,” Resner says.

At the moment, Arthur’s browser consists of a crude plastic box with two
clickable levers. The left lever selects pictures, the right lever lets him
choose snatches of music. The images are displayed on a liquid crystal screen
above his perch. Arthur won’t look at a conventional cathode ray tube because to
him it looks like a strobe light. Parrots’ flicker fusion rate—the
frequency at which their eyes convert a series of still images into a continuous
motion picture—is much higher than that of humans.

Unfortunately, Arthur doesn’t yet seem that enthusiastic. The images were
designed to produce distinct responses: the woman ought to be a favourite (it’s
Pepperberg), while the owl—a natural enemy—should be an instant
turn-off. The car is supposed to be neutral, while the picture of the parrot
should elicit different responses depending on Arthur’s mood. The trouble is,
the pictures seem meaningless to Arthur—he’s not especially moved by any
of them. “He’s acting like a child with an OK-ish new toy. He’s not that eager,”
says Pepperberg.

But she’s sure that some simple modifications can win Arthur over. For one
thing, at the moment his gear is right in the middle of a busy, interesting lab.
Pepperberg wants to put it in his cage so he can explore it when he’s bored and
lonely. She also thinks the system needs a general upgrade. “We haven’t got
software that he is interested in yet,” she says. “We need to get the ergonomics
of the clicker right so he plays with it more and enjoys it, and we need to put
up images he likes.” That’s why she is planning to install a video camera at her
parents’ house in Tucson, Arizona, where her other parrots are staying while she
is at MIT. She plans to feed the images into Arthur’s browser so he can contact
his old friends at will. He might even be able to videoconference them.

If that works, then it’s a short step to setting up chat rooms where parrots
can socialise with one another in cyberspace. Eventually, Resner envisages
special parrot pages on the Web. They would have to be ring-fenced to keep the
birds hooked up to interesting sites, but child safety software like Net Nanny
suggests this would be easy. And what would be in these parrot pages?
Video-on-demand, perhaps. Sound boutiques with new and exciting noises to
imitate, jukeboxes and basic video games. “If parrots like it and owners want
it, the service providers would be moronic not to do it,” says Resner. “Parrots
could be really heavy users.”