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Facial Recognition for Pigs – China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces
- dachshound665 8y agox07c0
- romanr 8y agoStraight from yesterday’s Joe Rogan podcast! So this is the next step. First human-pig chimera hybrids. Now their population is so big that they need to develop facial recognition.
- newsbinator 8y agoThis sounds like one of the (few?) classes of problems that blockchain can solve best. Get every pig tagged and on the blockchain. Then a quick scan tells you where it came from, where it's been, and who else it encountered along the way.
- moreira 8y agoReplace “blockchain” with “database” and everything you said still applies.
- taneq 8y agoI'm no blockchain fanboy but I believe the distinguishing features are "decentralized", "permanent" and "verifiable". If you put that stuff in a database, someone can change the database.
- krenzo 8y agoIf someone can change a database, then why couldn't someone change data before being entered into a blockchain?
- jacobush 8y agoThat is still an issue but blockchain-ish tech solves the "double spend of pig". I.e. you can't sell the same pig to many slaughter houses.
- suvelx 8y agoBut if I can enter stuff into the blockchain (And presumably I can, you can't breed pigs by consensus...), why would i care about double-spend? If I acquire some stolen pigs, or some pigs from a less than ideal lineage, I'll just enter them into the blockchain and say they're the result of breeding. Blockchain works because it's verifiable. Breeding pigs, digging carbon (in its many forms) out of the ground, turning these things into other things isn't.
- taneq 8y agoI'd presume that entering them into this blockchain would require submitting their biometrics, at which point it'd be indelibly recorded that you had 37 new pigs, 33 of which looked identical to pigs stolen last weekend. Or you could fabricate biometrics, at which point you're fine until you try to sell them and then someone notices that the pigs you have aren't the pigs you own in the system.
- jacobush 8y agoIt also makes it harder to keep, say, 2000 untaxed pigs, plus the 1000 pigs you pay tax for. Then sell the untaxed as one of the 1000 official pigs, but each official pig gets sold 3 times, each to 3 slaughter houses. If everything is publicly recorded, such as on a blockchain, you can't get away with that as easily.
- Yetino 8y agoExcept when you own more than 30% of the pigs then you have a higher chance to double spend a pig
- 8y ago
- dustingetz 8y agomaybe try git
- chvid 8y agoIt has to be a blockchain in a trustless pig-to-pig architecture. I don't trust the pigs not to manipulate the database; the incentive structure and the game theory is just not right.
- cm2187 8y agoYeah, encryption will ensure the farmer can't remove the tag and put the tag from another pig on a pig, or that when the tag was created, there was actually a physical pig!
- emiliobumachar 8y agoKeep the context in mind: face recognition. Plastic surgery is expensive.
- cm2187 8y agoI wonder if a little bit of lipstick can defeat pig face recognition.
- newsbinator 8y agoIt's possible to tag animals immutably. For example by non-painful branding in a specific location on the skin (e.g. behind the right ear.) Trying to modify that branding, in that location, would leave a noticeable mark.
- rectang 8y agoThe creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. -- George Orwell, _Animal Farm_ When pigs are surveilled to the degree as human livestock, they will have truly transformed into us and us into them.
- zawerf 8y agoDoes it have to be the face? Just wondering if they could've used another combination of body parts with sufficient variation and use those as the "fingerprint" instead. Rather than "the bristles, the snout, the eyes and ears" specifically. Or are faces evolved to be unique in (social?)animals and nothing else is as easy to tell apart?
- Aromasin 8y agoThis just conjecture, but isn't the body slightly more amorphous then the face? Body-fat and muscle can make someone, even a pig, look different but variables like the eyes, nose and ears generally stay the same (at least past puberty). We also have facial recognition technology already and it may be that it's easier to adapt to another mammals face than it is to work from the ground up again.
- rpeden 8y agoI've read that ears are pretty unique. But I imagine that mass surveillance based on ear profiles would be difficult just because ears are small so it's harder to isolate high resolution pictures of people's ears. Also because things like long hair exist that would thwart attempts automated ear-oriented identification.
- Wyndtroy2012 8y agoJust look at the barn. Pigs are smart creatures. How can a creature be happy in that barn? I had some of the best pork ever in Kauai where pigs roam pastures. Isn’t that a better solution?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lolitan 8y agopigman
- FerosMorgen 8y ago"You can’t take a single picture of a pig,” said Mr. He, who is trying to add to his database of more than 200,000 pig images. -Multiply by 400 million pigs, then imagine the emissions from these data centers!
- wongarsu 8y agoI imagine the emissions are a tiny rounding error compared to the emissions of those pigs. Livestock and the fields to feed them are one of the largest contributors to climate change. If those servers improve efficiency at all that will easily offset their emissions
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Griceraae50100 8y agoMost smaller producers already recognize their livestock as well as family resemblance. If African swine fever does in fact produce a fever, wouldn't that be a better screening method? Like in an airport. Pigs are highly intelligent, and "tech" enabling them to increase or decrease barn temperature (up and down snout-pressed buttons) has shown to save money on heating bills.
- willismichael 8y agoHow long until we have thisisnotarealpig.com?
- MayeulC 8y ago> You're in private mode. > Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode. It is the first time I see such a nag screen. Is there any firefox Add-on that could allow me a "stealth private mode"? Meanwhile, I just disabled Javascript on this page, which works well enough (except for the images, it seems).
- the_duke 8y agoTipp: I recently started using uMatrix with default-deny for everything except css/images. It's remarkable how much faster most sites load (even compared to uBlock), and almost every site can be made functional in ~ 30 seconds by editing the settings in a nice grid view if it requires JS.