Canon EOS 5D
ƒ/1.4
50 mm
1/160
1000

with Thomas Dolby and the band…

TED just published Joshua Klein’s talk on the vending machine for crows… where after successive training episodes, the crows picked up loose change from the streets, to deposit it for peanuts… all unsupervised, but set up in advance, like a SAW plot for birdies…

On further reflection, I bet that he is taking it to the next level… fetching paper currency.

Can you imagine how much loot the crows could get at outdoor cafés? Lurking in trees, they’d swoop down and beat the waiter to the bill every time.

7 responses to “Finale”

  1. Gwênlyn Avatar
    Gwênlyn

    He also mentioned training them to retrieve discarded electronics… just imagine how many cell phones and stuff the crows might snatch from their irate owners, all for peanuts.

    Reply
  2. rocketmavericks Avatar
    rocketmavericks

    OK. How about that post to J-curve we kicked around in the car…….

    I think its an interesting intellectual discussion worth the time for exploration. Particularly in light of the emergence of autonomous drones and their evolution towards Ray Kurzwell’s sigularity concept.
    It will be very soon that we will see Kurzwells equivalent of mechanical crows.

    Reply
  3. tifotter Avatar
    tifotter

    I love this story. Crows protect my ducks in my yard. They caw when they see a big eagle or hawk, and they give chase in big numbers, swooping and diving at the predator until s/he moves on. My ducks understand the "danger" caw and run to covered areas of the yard.

    In return for their good work in protecting my ducks, I give them a duck egg now and then, especially in spring time when they’re raising hungry babies and molting their feathers.

    Reply
  4. sbove Avatar
    sbove

    Those are Ravens in the video…calling them crows is very confusing…e.g., a Blue Jay (also very intelligent) is technically a member of the "crow family" (Corvidae)…however, all "crows" are not equal…Ravens are preeminent when it comes to "intelligent" behaviors…

    one of my local "pet" ravens here in mill valley (which provide constant entertainment: antics, barrel-rolling acrobatics, hawk & buzzard chasing, food caching strategies, team-harassment of my dog and various local cats) stole my keys last week (dropped in street, came back just in time to see raven flying away with them)…a glittery prize no doubt cached in some tree-hole…

    Howard Gardner breaks human intelligences (plural intended) into 8 (or so) discrete categories…there are many more intelligences in nature. Homo-self-centered-sapiens need to STOP being so amazed that other species exhibit intelligences (both individual and collective)…We are NOT the only minds in the survival-on-earth game – we just happen to be favored by the current milieu…

    Check out Bernd Heinrich’s great books on Ravens…or Irene Peppenberg’s work with African Greys…

    ps: Ravens and Greys like Whales and Dolphins, have complex possibly tone/pitch-encoded languages (imagine that all your friends and you have perfect pitch and that the same phoneme at different discrete pitches means completely different things). They have local dialects and possibly even separate language families from region to region that include "fifteen to 30 categories of vocalization" and soundmaking (clicks, bill snapping, wing whistling, bill hammering)…

    pps: what many people call "crows" are not American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) but juvenile ravens (Corvus Corax). Until ravens mate at around 3 or 4, they travel in packs of generally unruly juveniles. Their beaks start small and end up very large – until older than 3, they look a lot like "crows", although they unmistakably speak "raven-tone-gibberish" from almost day one.

    Wikipedia’s page on the not-so-common-Raven:

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Raven

    Reply
  5. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Very interesting…

    (I am on a phone and must be brief)

    Sbove: Yes… We have a long tradition of humanocentric egotism, especially in the domains of mystery and magic (from weather gods to Galileo). I hope the slow creep of science will continue to pierce the encrusted comforts of ignorance.

    I am also reminded of an earlier post here on the social intelligence of dolphins, related to a massive brain area recently discovered.

    Dolphin Crest

    RocketMavericks: thanks for the reminder! The legal implications are fascinating. If he tweaked the program ever so slightly to fetch paper currency, would it be illegal? Who is culpable? If the trainer, what legal precedent would that set for unsupervised evolutionary algorithms and iterative training sets? Think of robotics and AI… It could have a chilling effect on the primary path to complex systems development in the future…

    Could emergence become a crime? Only if predictable in advance? Only if purposeful?

    Reply
  6. juliacsmith Avatar
    juliacsmith

    Thanks for sharing via Creative Commons! This photo recently appeared on our home page blog:

    http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/Blog/Controller/viewEntry...

    Please let me know if you have any questions.

    Best,
    julia at idealist dot org

    Reply
  7. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    the research continues….they recently found that the ravens can do three sequential steps in tool making.

    Also, some Avian Einstein videos… =)

    Reply

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