5 ms·
Why bother with all that trouble of teaching computers to drive by themselves, when you could just get some rats instead? I would love to see fleets of rat-pil
by mattkevan 7y ago
Why bother with all that trouble of teaching computers to drive by themselves, when you could just get some rats instead?
I would love to see fleets of rat-piloted quadcopters delivering parcels, or to grab a ride in a rat-taxi.
Plus, considering you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat, the convenience would be off the charts.
- whylo 7y agoB.F. Skinner trained pigeons to pilot bombs during World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 14 7y agoThis is where my mind went as well. But perhaps we could find better uses like rats trained to drive mini 4x4 solar powered vehicles through a crop stopping at weeds with their little machine and plucking up the weeds all while not damaging the crop.
- pattisapu 7y agoThe ancient Egyptians trained baboons to wait tables. Source: Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts
- starvingbear 7y agoI'm guessing just one incident was the end of that idea
- tempguy9999 7y agoWellll, you jest but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon "During World War II, Project Pigeon (later Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviorist B.F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-controlled guided bomb."
- tempguy9999 7y agoOMG at the bottom of the page is a link to a bat-bomb "Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target." That's ingenious, and even more horrific.
- mattkevan 7y agoAnd highly unsuccessful. At one point some bats escaped, roosted under a fuel tank, set fire to the testing facility and burned down a hangar as well as the overseeing General's car. The bats needed to be put into hibernation to get them into the bombs, but sometimes they weren't awake enough before being dropped, so the bats would plough into the ground still frozen. The project was cancelled just after the invention of the atom bomb, on the grounds that it might do a bit more damage than a few bats. Dr Adams, the dentist who came up with the bat idea, still thought his was better. Don't disagree.
- darkerside 7y agoIt was better, in terms of not outright vaporizing entire cities in a single flash.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- khafra 7y ago> At one point some bats escaped, roosted under a fuel tank, set fire to the testing facility and burned down a hangar as well as the overseeing General's car. I wonder if this was the start of the trope about the experimental subject escaping containment and destroying the secret facility.
- Asooka 7y agoI don't think it would work. Aside from the ethical questions, I'm not aware of animals being used to perform complex tasks without human supervision and care. And if you have the human in there, you don't need a rat.
- ivankolev 7y agoBut if one human could have a hold of a mini army of rats, would that not result in some efficienies to be gained :)
- mattkevan 7y agoIt's certainly possible - saw a documentary once about some rats that cooked so well they wowed a top restaurant critic.
- gambler 7y ago>I'm not aware of animals being used to perform complex tasks without human supervision and care. Shepherd dogs did legitimate work with minimal supervision. Guide dogs effectively supervise their owners. Animals aren't nearly as dumb as people seem to think based on their interactions with cattle and decorative pets.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoWell, much like a service dog (or a horse!), you'd have to train the rat, and feed it, and change its cage. It would be less expensive to care for than those larger animals for sure, but still a hassle. Interesting world to imagine though!
- mattkevan 7y agoUber's problems with driver classification would disappear overnight. Are drivers contractors or employees? No, they're pets! And the cars would still be cleaner than some of the NYC yellow cabs I've been in...
- Jun8 7y agoTo make this idea more concrete: why not use the brain of the rat (or any similar animal) in place of the NN, I.e. remove the brain in embryo stage and train it with visual stimuli relevant to the problem to be solved. I’d wager that a rat brain would be more powerful than any state of the art AI systems in solving complex tasks such as this. How to sustain it biologically and train using optical paths are complex problems but I could be easier than training the animal and much more scalable: make NN layers with these brain-based nodes.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoDo you work as a writer for Black Mirror by chance?
- Jun8 7y agoI take that as a compliment :-) It's not clear how the BM cookie technology works (https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie) but is understood to be hardware based, i.e. not brain in a vat, biological technology I described above.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoI was speaking more to the general theme of callous disregard for suffering.
- excalibur 7y agoYou did see how often the rats drove into the wall, right?