Is your dog beside you right now? If not, stop reading and go call them, because they are really going to want to hear this.
It seems we humans finally have a way to enable our best friends to talk directly to us. And it’s a doggone shame this wasn’t around when my beloved Eskimo Pie was among the living because she would have leapt in with all four paws and some turbo-charged tail wagging.
It all started in 2019, when speech pathologist Christina Hunger got a lively new puppy named Stella. Struck by the eager way Stella communicated with body language, Christina began to wonder if the pup might respond to some version of the pre-recorded talking buttons used in her work with non-verbal kids.
At first Christina worried she was barking up the wrong tree; Stella ignored the single button (“outside”) for weeks. And then, one day, she got it. Soon the house was ringing with words like “outside” and “play” and “want want.”
The technology is simple, and nowadays button sets are cheap and readily available at pet stores and online retailers. They offer a host of symbols to link with the words you choose to record for your pet.
Not surprisingly, talking buttons led to an explosion of dog videos and online arguments. Naysayers scoffed that this was a hoax like Clever Hans, the horse that allegedly solved math problems but was actually responding to subtle cues from his handler. Pet lovers kept posting videos of their dogs inventing phrases, such as pressing “squeaky” and “car” when an ambulance went by sounding its siren. The barking from disbelievers just got louder.
Science finally weighed in with the largest animal communication project ever conducted. Federico Rosado, a cognitive science professor at UC San Diego, chose 152 dogs who pressed the buttons more than 260,000 times in 21 months.
“The dogs initiated the majority of these interactions, suggesting it’s a useful tool for them to communicate,” said Federico. “And while a few of the dogs seem to just be randomly smashing buttons, a majority of them were using them intentionally.”
Like Federico’s dogs, we humans are now learning new skills we never dreamed of. Thanks to the rise of the machines — including automation and AI — millions of jobs are becoming obsolete. Just this week the New York Times revealed Amazon plans to replace 600,000 jobs with robots. This reflects future hirings, not firings, but still. On the brighter side, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, there will be a net global gain of 78 million jobsby 2030.
What’s hot? What’s not?
Cashiers, accountants, security guards, and others in the declining industries should consider upskilling (expanding your existing capabilities) or reskilling (educating yourself in something completely new, like teaching or nursing).
My friend Maritheresa Frain has spent a lifetime learning new skills and parlaying them into interesting jobs all over the planet. “I studied Spanish starting in fourth grade in Philadelphia,” she told me this week at our favorite Seville coffee house. “And I just fell in love with Spain.”
Maritheresa at a coffee house in Seville’s casco antiguo (old quarter).
“I was one of the smartest girls in my old Catholic girls’ high school; I was doing calculus and other crazy, crazy stuff. But my mother made me take typing and stenography because, and I quote, ‘The day your husband leaves you, you’ll have some skills to get a job.’”
Egads! Really? Luckily that grim prediction never came true. And as it turned out, those secretarial skills did come in handy, enabling Maritheresa to earn extra cash in college as an office temp.
“In many of the jobs, I was like, oh my God, I have to study even more; I’m not spending my life in these jobs,” she recalled. “The key one was the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority complaint department. I never had such a depressing experience. I felt so bad for the people who worked there as their real jobs, answering the phone, yelling at people.”
She earned a BA in Foreign Service and International Politics from Penn State University and an MA and PhD in Government and International Relations from Georgetown University. She went to work for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC and got grants to do summer research projects in Spain.
In 1992 she married Juan Rivera, a Sevillano whose job with Abbott Laboratories involved living in Greece then Madrid, where Maritheresa worked as director of transfer students for St. Louis University.
“Then I got pregnant, and my husband comes home one day and says, ‘I have good news and I have bad news.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, what’s the good news?’ ‘We have a free trip to Moscow!’ And I was like, ‘What’s the bad news?’ ‘I think we’re gonna go live there.’ Which wasn’t bad news at the end of the day; it was an interesting place. We’re talking 1997 so it was still a little rough around the edges. I signed up for Russian classes.”
Maritheresa and her daughter, Carmen, in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, 2005.
After years of globetrotting and a succession of Homes 2.0, Mariatheresa settled in Seville and found two of her most remarkable jobs here — in a city where it’s notoriously tough for anyone, especially foreigners, to find substantive work. She spent 14 years as Center Director of CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange), a nonprofit study abroad and intercultural organization, and served for five years as the US Consular Agent.
Now she’s facing her toughest job ever: creating a satisfying retirement. “It was a crazy work life, enriching, fulfilling. I was always working, always traveling. Now? I have a full schedule, but I feel like I don’t have a purpose.”
She’s exploring options for volunteer work and community activities. Earlier this month she helped launch the Ideas Club, where we talked about artificial intelligence.
“AI presents a double edged sword for education,” she said. “It can help teachers teach better and support students learning better. A win/win. However, there are many challenges, too — ensuring students develop critical thinking skills, controlling access to data/privacy issues, and setting up guardrails to limit systemic biases.”
My dog Pie was super smart, but no, she could not actually read. However I feel sure she’d have signed up for the Ideas Club if she could.
So far we haven’t figured out how to incorporate dogs into the Ideas Club, but clearly it’s only a matter of time. When I talked to Rich about this, he said, “We just need two buttons: ‘good idea’ and ‘bad idea.’”
Hey, let’s not sell these hounds short. They are very, very clever. Christina’s dog Stella knows 45 words and can form sentences. And then there’s the late, great Chaser, known as “the world’s smartest dog,” who learned 1,022 words, one for each toy given to her by her owners. Put another way, Chaser got her family to buy her 1,022 toys. Well played, Chaser, well played.
Border collie Chaser became a celebrity, hobnobbing with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, appearing on “60 Minutes,” and being called “the most scientifically important dog in over a century” by Brian Hare, co-author of The Genius of Dogs.
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