AI-Equipped Cameras Will Help Spot Wildlife Poachers Before They Can Kill (theverge.com) 69
Conservation nonprofit Resolve is using AI-equipped cameras to act as remote park rangers and help spot wildlife poachers before they kill endangered animals. "Today, Resolve announced a new custom-made device called TrailGuard AI, which uses Intel-made vision chips to identify animals and humans that wander into view," reports The Verge. "The cameras will be placed on access trails used by poachers, automatically alerting park rangers who can check up on any suspicious activity." From the report: TrailGuard AI builds on past work by Resolve to create remote cameras to aid conservation. However, early devices were bulky, had limited battery life, and were unsophisticated, sending images to rangers every time their motion sensors were tripped. This resulted in lots of false positives, as the cameras would be triggered by non-events, such as the wind shaking tree branches. The new device, by comparison, is no thicker than a human index finger, has a battery life of a year and a half, and can reliably identify humans, animals, and vehicles. The chip used by Resolve is Intel's Movidius Myriad 2 VPU (or vision processing unit), which is the same technology that powered Google's automatic Clips camera.
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Well, at least these surveillance cams are easy to avoid.
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Property damage. What else would it be?
A most dangerous game (Score:3)
Farming is likely the solution (Score:1)
Poaching will not stop.
That should be clear by now, with the immiment extinction of a range of large animals.
A solution may be farming.
Farming addresses the supply problem, which removes the economic incentive to poach.
It also massively increases population numbers.
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You eliminate demand by poisoning confiscated rhino horn and then introducing it back into the black market. You kill the customers.
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At the same time, make the live population a "profit center" (which will cause it to increase) as opposed to a "cost center" (which everyone tries to ditch).
Even that can be hard to do. Those African big game hunts you see all over the news every now and then that environmentalists get all hung up about? People pay tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, for the permits for these hunts. They can only hunt specifically identified individuals who are usually old and no longer in the breeding population. The fees from the permit are put back towards conservation, and the hunts help stimulate the local economy through guides, processing the kills, and just g
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Mostly because the animals are endangered, but the locals aren't - they are breeding like crazy.
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I am afraid you're misrepresenting past criticism of certain wealthy westerners who have travelled overseas to kill animals. The outrage hasn't been so much a rejection of killing animals for sport. Many of the public-outrage incidents you are probably referring to involved unethical hunting behavior that infuriates both hunters and non-hunters.
Idaho Game Official Gloats After Killing [npr.org]
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I am afraid you're misrepresenting past criticism of certain wealthy westerners who have travelled overseas to kill animals. The outrage hasn't been so much a rejection of killing animals for sport. Many of the public-outrage incidents you are probably referring to involved unethical hunting behavior that infuriates both hunters and non-hunters. Idaho Game Official Gloats After Killing Family of Primates [npr.org] Dentist Shoots GPS-collared Lion Lured from Preserve [nytimes.com] This isn't "hunting" so much as it is paying money for the opportunity to kill exotic creatures. The participants lack any skills or patience for "fair chase." They're not much different than a crystal meth addict hiding next to a barrel of rotten apples in a California forest waiting to shotgun (slug) a black bear so he can cut out its heart and sell it to a Chinese witch doctor. I admire the hunters who go after invasive species such as the Burmese python in the Everglades. It takes hundreds of hours and tons of legwork and concentration to find these monsters. Money doesn't buy an easy trophy there. Here's an excellent article about the erosion of "fair chase" hunting in America [mountainjournal.org]. Before pointing a finger at hunting critics, consider that there really are a lot of jackasses running around calling themselves hunters. The critics are largely pointing their fingers at these jackasses.
I'm not talking about the Cecil killer or the monkey idiot (one maybe, but a whole group was just excessive). But there was the dentist I believe that killed the rhino that was past breeding age and was a loner/was sick, and everyone freaked out. As for skill/fair chase, well, isn't really that hard to sit in a deer stand for a few hours and waiting to shoot a deer that can't even see you, is it? That's honestly one of the reasons why I stopped deer hunting. It didn't feel very sporting (wasn't crazy ab
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I'm with you on your rejection of the deer stand / feeder dynamic. That's not "hunting." It s
New Term for Actual Artificial Intelligence (Score:3)
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Why not just "intelligence"?
I never really understood the need for a distinction between biologically evolved intelligence and ones that come into existence by other means.
And I think it would be harder to make a marketing buzzword out of just "intelligence". :)
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It's also worthy of consideration why we are so prone to sharply demarcate anthropogenic advancements from otherwise natural or biological development.
Mankind is the result of a natural, biological process... it follows that advancements made by the planet's big-brained hairless monkeys are of nature.
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Exactly!
Max Tegmark is musing around exactly that line of reasoning and its consequences in his book "Life 3.0". Not a very good book in itself, but probably a should-read if you are interested in this topic.
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Almost, but not quite. There are three different fields and meanings of AI.
One of them is as you say, something that just displays a behaviour that is adapted to the situation. It does not have anything to do with real intelligence, just generally the best rational response to the environment and situation.
The other field is about creating proper intelligence, whatever that is. Some people here seem to think that this should be the only use of the term AI, and if it is used for something else, they feel com
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Remember, you heard it here first.
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Can they spot illegal immigrants (Score:1)
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Indeed, but what if the camera kills a rhino?
Btw, would that device be named a "Smart Camera" in the same way that an internet-connected microphone with an attached speaker becomes a "Smart Speaker"?
Re: Gun equipped Cameras can Kill poachers ... (Score:1)
Had to scroll all the way down to find the "it should kill on sight" comment.
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But what if it's just a local villager walking home at night? Better to intercept and question them. And let the innocent go on about their way. We need humans in the loop.
I say we organize some safaris for mercenaries. Come on over and you can kill as many verified poachers as you want. Some people would actually pay.
EdRanger209! (Score:2)
Old School Solution (Score:2)
So my classic "trip wire and hand grenade" solution is right out then?
What a great guy! (Score:2)
I'm not sure who this Al guy is but he's doing a lot of great things. :)
No match for human stupidity and greed (Score:2)