[HN Gopher] AI can catalogue a forest's inhabitants simply by li...
___________________________________________________________________
AI can catalogue a forest's inhabitants simply by listening
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 152 points
Date : 2023-10-29 08:56 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://archive.ph/yBaZe
| bloqs wrote:
| It's headlines like this that really reinforce the idea that the
| main hinderance with AI is our intellectual ability to utilise it
| for things
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| I'm confused. How is this evidence for that? It seems evidence
| that people are thinking of interesting ways to use it, not the
| opposite.
| omneity wrote:
| My reading is: "This is a great use of AI. Others who
| complained AI doesn't have good applications are lacking
| imagination."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You've seen people complaining that AI in general doesn't
| have applications?
|
| Even more on pattern matching, where people have been using
| AIs for applications almost exactly like this one for more
| than a decade?
| gardenhedge wrote:
| What? Where is that idea mainstream?
| RetroTechie wrote:
| AI will do for human brainpower what steam engines &
| electricity did for physical labour.
|
| That's (probably) a big win for society, but not for everyone
| or in every application.
|
| So... Your AI Use May Vary (YAIUMV).
| nyankosensei wrote:
| Here's a link to the referenced article:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w
| jadbox wrote:
| Thank you kind sir. I feel like HN should be better at linking
| directly to sources.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I really wish journalists could cut the crap. If science
| reporting is this, that's grim
|
| There is plenty of interest in covering ideas, papers and efforts
| that are speculative, hopeful or early as what they are. Early,
| occasionally pioneering efforts to achieve something which may
| lead to success in the future, or enable new efforts to sprout at
| a tangent.
|
| Interview researchers. Ask them questions. Interview reviewers
| and peers. They're accessible. Communicate science. As it is.
| What science is, _is_ worth covering. Do your job.
| Angostura wrote:
| I'm not clear as to what your actual issue with the article is?
| It's a very short article, that clearly sets out the potential
| and alerts the reader to an interesting development. It
| includes a quote from an author, so they have spoken to him.
| defrost wrote:
| Have they really spoken to him, or just summarised the paper
| (perhaps poorly), or clipped quotes from a university press
| pack?
|
| _The Economist_ : Then it was the
| computer's turn. The researchers fed their recordings to
| artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using
| sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird
| species from their calls. "We found that the AI
| tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts," says
| Dr Muller.
|
| _The source paper_ :
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w
| In the next step, we applied an independent artificial
| intelligence model for bird species identification, developed
| and trained in the region of our study prior to our sampling.
| Despite the model identifying only ~25% of species detected
| by the experts in our data, the model-derived first community
| axis was the single best predictor for expert-derived
| community composition.
|
| The thrust of his work is about bird population estimates via
| vocalisation being used as a predictor for insect
| biodiversity - number and breadth of insects.
|
| There are several recent papers about this work, one that
| focuses on the bird <-> insect connection, another that looks
| at the AI utilisation to identify birds.
|
| It appears that as of now the AI isn't as good as identifying
| birds as experts, only being trained to recogise a quarter of
| the vocalisations, _however_ that 's enough of a bird sample
| to get a reasonable estimate on the insects.
|
| I strongly _suspect_ (I lack the smoking gun) that _The
| Economist_ has just sourced "quotes" provided in the full
| university presser (the Press Release pack they send out).
|
| See, the lesser presser about the AI work: https://www.uni-
| wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...
|
| and a presser about some of the insect work: https://www.uni-
| wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...
|
| There are multiple studies and multiple papers stemming from
| this project:
|
| https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-
| statio...
|
| and there'll likely be bigger press packs not directly public
| web hosted for newspaper journalists to pick from.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I guess I deserve the downvotes for coming in hot and
| opinionated.
|
| In my (admittedly lame) defense, mine literally is an off
| the cuff comment in a place intended for such.
|
| Your comment demonstrates well what I was (failing) to get
| at.the project is what it as and where it is. Whether or
| not that's really interesting is for a science journalist
| to decision.
|
| It can't be interesting enough to write an article about
| and not interesting enough to investigate curiously.
|
| It's not that hard to investigate. The people are not hard
| to reach. The good questions are not that hard to
| establish.
|
| Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.
| dalbasal wrote:
| It's puff, talking about what would be a breakthrough
| discovery without taking an interest in any more than it
| takes to generate buzz/content.
|
| How are be supposed to know anything about the space, where
| it is, how much promise it has, what that promise actually
| is. There's no meat in this burger.
| rchaud wrote:
| The Economist are op-ed writers, not journalists. They don't do
| interviews and haven't broken a story in their 150 year
| history.
| tomohelix wrote:
| A thing stands out to me about the machine learning is their
| ability to recognize patterns. We all know that human brain is
| also well adapted to this task. So adapted in fact that it is
| probably one of the most fundamental, ingrained thing that we
| have in the lizard part of our brains.
|
| For some reason, to me this kind of subconscious thing hold some
| special meanings. It feels like the current LLMs are actually
| going in the right direction to eventually emulate a conscious
| mind and it shows this by imitating what a mind without
| consciousness would look like.
|
| Personally, if I have to compare the current LLMs to an organic
| equivalent, I would say we are at the insect level. It can
| respond to things, know a few surprisingly complex knowledge
| (spider webs), but ultimately doesn't "understand" what it is
| doing and just robotically do what it was programmed to do.
|
| Good thing is an insect to even the dumbest vertebrate is pretty
| far away in term of mental cognitive ability so AIs aren't going
| to spontaneously gain awareness anytime soon.
| throwanem wrote:
| With so faulty an understanding of animal cognition - with not
| even the knowledge that insects _are_ animals! - I would
| hesitate in your shoes to attempt any sweeping conclusions
| about mechanical cognition.
| tomohelix wrote:
| You are right, initially I was thinking of a chicken. Then I
| forgot what branch a chicken is supposed to be in and wrote
| animal instead. Changed to vertebrate now. Probably closer.
|
| And yeah, this is just my personal view. I didn't say it is
| what it should be or how it actually is. Nothing sweeping
| about it. Simply how I feel based on my experience.
| throwanem wrote:
| Your experience ill equips you here, then; along with being
| overly general, your analysis is, I reiterate, very poorly
| informed.
|
| Spiders aren't insects, as I would have noted earlier had I
| been closer to awake when I posted my prior comment.
| They're arachnids. Arachnids and insects are both
| arthropods, but are no more closely related than that. It's
| not a rare confusion among laypeople, but it is also among
| the first things anyone learns in the study of either
| class. That you do not know it bodes ill for all that
| follows.
|
| You mention spiderwebs, which is especially remarkable
| because they are certainly among the best studied examples
| of unhuman engineering. Relevant research isn't hard to
| find, and you will if you feel like it; rather than dig up
| the same links you can, I'll tell an anecdote that bears
| them out.
|
| A couple of years back, an orb weaver began building her
| web on my porch every night, for the moths and flies drawn
| by the light from the front room. Because she opted to
| build right across the steps down from the porch, one night
| I faceplanted the web and broke a few strands extricating
| myself from it.
|
| The next night and every night after, she built in the same
| place, but not in the same way; instead of the classic
| round orb-web shape, she built wide and squat across the
| top of the space, retaining about the same prey-capture
| area and staying within the volume that was busy with
| potential prey, but with the lower edge of the web now
| about six feet above the porch floor.
|
| That's an interesting figure, because it exceeds by a
| couple of inches both my height and that of my partner at
| the time. The spider had no opportunity to size her design
| to us by eye, as neither he nor I was on the porch while
| she built this way the first night, and orb weavers'
| eyesight is far too poor for such a task in any case; by
| the time we came along to sit on the porch that evening,
| she had already finished her work.
|
| To build as she did, then, she would of necessity have had
| to understand and remember the spatial relationships
| involved in my face getting stuck to her web, and then on
| the next night implement a novel modification to her design
| such that we could and did pass beneath without conflict -
| not just with the web itself, but also with its guy lines,
| none of which crossed the space below the web despite the
| newel post finials offering a very obvious and easy pair of
| anchors. And all this while working with useful visual
| acuity in the span of perhaps one or two centimeters - to a
| scale which, in our terms, would be that of about a ten-
| story building.
|
| This is not the behavior of a creature operating solely on
| unconsidered instinct. I can't speculate on what goes on
| inside a spider's head, but that there _is_ something going
| on in there, I know better than to doubt; even had I been
| inclined otherwise, the actions of one spider over the span
| of a couple of evenings would have amply sufficed to
| disabuse me of the error.
|
| Lest it be said I am ungenerous in my critique, I'll note
| that, overlooking the taxonomic confusion already
| discussed, your understanding of insect behavior is roughly
| on par with that of the naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, whose
| writings on spider wasps were much celebrated in their day
| - which was roughly contemporaneous with the American Civil
| War. Much has been learned since, most of which Fabre has
| probably been unable to appreciate owing to his death in
| 1915. You and I are more fortunate. So if nothing else, it
| may be worth your while to take advantage of your luck, and
| pursue your study at least to within shouting distance of
| the present day before attempting to generalize.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I believe people who know about the current state of LLMs
| and/or human/animal brains have very different opinions than
| yours
|
| Common sense and metaphors don't really hold up in this context
| uoaei wrote:
| Consciousness has nothing to do with cognition. Also, if you
| look at _any_ complex natural system long enough, you will see
| an expression of learning. In that way humans and AI both are
| not particularly unique except in the cases of their input
| formats and the capacity of their internal representations.
| There is no step change from non-learning to learning system,
| it 's all a matter of their "computing" power so to speak.
| cushpush wrote:
| "Hey Alexa, document civilization"
| ukz wrote:
| "Hey Alexa, survey North Sentinel Island"
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I think the local inhabitants have not read and agreed to the
| terms and conditions of big tech :-)
| ImaCake wrote:
| People might be interested in BirdWeather
| (https://app.birdweather.com/) which collates data from people's
| bird listening stations (raspberry pi's with a mic and a modest
| NN to classify what is heard). Basically, the technology for this
| has already arrived as consumer tech.
|
| As someone who is a fairly serious volunteer birdwatcher, we
| could absolutely do with more of this. There are not enough bird
| surveyors (paid or volunteer) and audio moths hooked up to AI
| capable of filling in the gaps are badly needed to support
| conservation and re-wilding efforts.
| omneity wrote:
| I thought about setting up such a device outside of my window
| (there's a lot of birds nearby), and the obvious concern of
| setting up a mic in your house and uploading recordings is
| privacy.
|
| I found two privacy policies related to Birdweather:
|
| 1. https://www.birdweather.com/privacy
|
| 2. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/privacy-policy/
|
| The first one mentions the following:
|
| > You may choose to keep your audio recordings private, so that
| other Bird Weather users cannot access or listen to those
| recordings. This is configured on the Settings page.
|
| Except Birdweather explicitly mentions they're based on
| Cornell's BirdNET, whose privacy policy (#2) says:
|
| > BirdNET is an artificial neural network that identifies bird
| species by sound. Our servers process small audio snippets
| recorded with the BirdNET app to detect and recognize bird
| sounds. We store all submitted recordings on our servers.
| Therefore, we advise users not to submit any audio recordings
| that they might consider private. The collection of audio data
| helps us to improve BirdNET and we will use those recordings
| for research purposes only.
|
| Seems like Birdweather would benefit from clarifying how their
| privacy policy plays together with BirdNET's.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Seems clear to me:
|
| > Third-Party Research: We share the bird detections and
| audio as well as labeled data with the Cornell University
| Laboratory of Ornithology, so that they may use such data for
| scientific research and to help improve the accuracy of the
| bird sound detection.
|
| You can set the audio recordings to be inaccessible for
| _other Bird Weather users_. Ie. by default audio is shared on
| the website, but you can turn that off. _Independently,_ they
| also share the data with Cornell.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > BirdNET is an artificial neural network that identifies
| bird species by sound.
|
| A while ago there was an HN thread raving about how Seek by
| iNaturalist was fun (true!) and did such a good job of
| identifying whatever it was you were looking at (maybe!) and
| not overstepping the bounds of what it could know for sure.
| (See below!)
|
| So I set up an account and I tried it out.
|
| It's pretty clear that Seek places far more weight on giving
| you a full species-level identification than it does on
| whether it can be confident that that identification is
| correct. I guess it's possible that the stand of groundcover
| I found on the shore of an artificial lake in a public park
| is a different species from the stand of groundcover with
| identical coloration and shape about 12 inches away... but I
| doubt it. Even if they _were_ different species, I 'm pretty
| sure my low-resolution images of two stands of plants with no
| flowers or seeds wouldn't be enough for an expert to tell
| them apart.
|
| In a parallel occurrence, I took a photo of a local beetle
| that Seek identified as "Strawberry seed beetle", _harpalus
| rufipes_. I uploaded that to iNaturalist proper (labeled
| "beetles"; I already didn't trust the identification) and
| checked out some nearby photos. A very similar-looking beetle
| had been photographed in my area and identified as _harpalus
| sinicus_. So I left a comment asking how the tagger could
| tell that this was _sinicus_ and not some other kind of
| _harpalus_. And I got a response, saying "I'm not trained in
| entomology and I couldn't explain what the difference is. But
| me and my friend think this is _sinicus_. "
|
| I harbor a sneeking suspicion that the "friend" was Seek.
|
| They advertise that Seek is trained on labels from
| iNaturalist. But those labels appear to be generated in large
| part by Seek. Something needs to change.
| whyenot wrote:
| As a botanist, I have been pretty impressed with Seek's
| plant IDs. If it is uncertain, it will almost always only
| ID to genus or family. It doesn't always get IDs right, but
| it's good.
| itintheory wrote:
| I've been using BirdNet-Pi for a while and it's great fun. I'm
| a little confused about the commercial offering from
| BirdWeather - the PUC looks like a neat product, but I
| understood most of the BirdNet stuff to be Creative Commons
| NonCommercial. Maybe there's some nuance about how they're
| using it, or maybe some pieces have a more lenient open source
| license?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The PUC folks obtained a separate commercial license from the
| Cornell Lab of O.
| pjot wrote:
| How does one become a volunteer birdwatcher? Who are you
| volunteering with?
| ImaCake wrote:
| I volunteer with Birdlife Australia. If you are in the USA I
| think it's called the Audubon Society. They will have a
| number of surveying programs running at any given time.
| whyenot wrote:
| Thank you for posting this. I'm going to see about setting up
| one of these for my mom, who is a VERY avid birder (I already
| have the Pi and outdoor enclosure). It looks like one slightly
| difficult issue is finding a good weatherproof microphone that
| works with the Pi.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| I wonder if we can ever do this with babies to some degree of
| even limited accuracy. I know there was some efforts on this
| before.
| totetsu wrote:
| Ai to identify how many babies are crying in a forest? I think
| it's possible.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| The plot of The Simpsons S03E24:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother,_Can_You_Spare_Two_D...
| underseacables wrote:
| Could it do this for a city?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| There's automatic shot detection systems:
|
| https://www.soundthinking.com/
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...
| uoaei wrote:
| Worth noting that ShotSpotter isn't AI, and also largely
| relies on humans to listen to and classify sounds that are
| picked up. Based on what we've seen with other AI systems
| applied in these contexts we can only assume it would be even
| worse at its job in maintaining fairness.
| dartos wrote:
| In a non verifiable way, sure.
| qwertox wrote:
| I wish car engines had mics built in, as well as one close to
| each suspension.
|
| It would record for the first 5 minutes, then at certain
| intervals or at certain conditions.
|
| The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at
| and see how it changes over the years. No need for online-stuff,
| just an USB port where you stick in a big stick and software for
| your computer/tablet to evaluate/visualize it.
|
| If you'd then see some problems, you could ask for the audio to
| be recorded with it, which you could send to a friend who knows
| about cars or to your car workshop.
| curiousObject wrote:
| > _The car would give you FFT images which you could then look
| at and see how it changes_
|
| Good idea, though AI is much better at doing that in 90% of
| situations. So filter it thru AI first
| uoaei wrote:
| As darling of data science Andrew Ng said, "90% of machine
| learning is feature engineering". So you should probably run
| the STFT spectrograms through machine learning models rather
| than the raw audio signal. And anyway raw audio is over 41k
| samples per second so quite low information density compared
| to some simple and quite common transformations like STFT
| anyway.
| spyder wrote:
| There are companies working on that using AI:
|
| Acoustic sensors in the car: https://v2minc.com/#solution
|
| Skoda made s sound analyzer mobile app 3 years ago:
| https://beebom.com/this-ai-app-detects-internal-issues-in-ca...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ah damn I need this! My Skoda has squeaky brakes, except they
| only squeak when you _aren 't_ pressing the brake. Clearly
| something is rubbing but I can't see what, and it's
| intermittent and also impossible to Google.
|
| I'm skeptical it would actually work well though.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| At Heading On we had exactly this idea, plus using Canbus, to
| detect when cars would need maintenance. We ended up rethinking
| the idea because most of the people we spoke with weren't
| interested.
| akozak wrote:
| Yea, the bigger issue is that the maintenance itself is
| expensive and disruptive.
| snypher wrote:
| The old adage "you can schedule for maintenance or your
| equipment will schedule it for you" is true.
| morninglight wrote:
| The concept you outlined is technically very feasible but
| economically prohibitive. There are high value situations that
| incorporate these techniques as standard practice. For example,
| the diagnosis of rolling mill fault conditions with FFT
| vibration monitoring has been in practice for at least 50
| years. Of course when a cold strip mill goes down, the damage
| can be measured in megabucks.
|
| ..
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Nothing about this is economically prohibitive. This is
| predictive maintenance 101.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| For consumer level cars, it is not hard to predict or catch
| something that is actively failing with simple visual
| inspections, and scheduled maintenance.
|
| You can spend millions designing a fancy acoustic system to
| measure things indirectly, which will need to be installed
| at a cost of hundreds per vehicle and the be maintained
| itself. Or you just have the mechanic give it glance during
| an oil change (which smart mechanics are already doing free
| of charge), and pay attention to the dozens of existing
| sensors that are already reporting the critical stuff.
| Acoustic sensors won't catch everything so periodic
| inspection is still needed.
|
| Worth noting that all modern car engines already have
| acoustic sensing in the form of a knock sensor, so the car
| companies are well aware of sound/vibration sensing
| technologies.
|
| In other words I doubt that a fancier acoustic monitoring
| system would prevent enough maintenance/damage to justify
| its own cost.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It'll only make sense if insurance companies can use it to
| reduce your payout in an accident.
| 7952 wrote:
| I would love something that could use audio to diagnose
| problems in bikes. Issues can be hard to replicate on a repair
| stand when the bike is not under load.
| _flux wrote:
| I've been thinking the same, but for PCs.
|
| I guess nowadays SMART is pretty good, though, and you can hear
| if your fans are dying :). Maybe for computers that don't have
| RPM monitoring and aren't being listened to? It would at least
| be interesting data to correlate with other metrics.
| is_true wrote:
| It's a though market to enter, someone I know suggested doing
| this for a company that had a fleet of 1000+ vehicles and the
| representative from Bosch told them they wouldn't provide them
| with diagnostic tools anymore if they did.
| Animats wrote:
| When we designed our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle back in 2003
| I considered using a guitar pickup for that, to pick up
| vibration and get a measure of how rough the road was.
| michaelteter wrote:
| Most people don't care about maintenance. They do it only when
| they must. So I doubt they would pay a penny extra for accurate
| forecasts of maintenance needs. Insurers and other types of
| dealers might though!
|
| But wouldn't constantly changing road types and weather
| conditions create so much variable noise that trending would be
| sloppy?
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| True, but people who buy expensive cars care, which is
| exactly the target for such a system I imagine.
|
| I am not a mechanic but can at least hazard a guess at what's
| wrong with a car from the way it sounds with reasonable
| confidence. I imagine a purpose build AI design by the car's
| manufacturer with multiple microphones in the engine
| compartment and around the car could gain quite a lot of
| insight, perhaps even outside of identifying maintenance
| problems simply to tune the performance of the engine,
| especially when combined with other sensors.
|
| Having said that, we seem to be near the end of the line for
| ICE vehicles, so I wouldn't hold my breath for such a system
| to be developed.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I'm surprised after this many replies no one mentioned that
| cars do have something pretty close to this across virtually
| every modern ICE: knock sensors.
|
| Knock sensors are just ruggedized piezoelectric microphones
| that bolt onto your engine: when they detect a knock it's by
| transmitting the sound a knocking cylinder makes as an
| electrical signal to the ECU.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w
|
| The actual paper
| kriro wrote:
| Last time I was sitting in the garden, I was wondering how far we
| are with actualy understanding the bird chirp and tweets. I felt
| like there were certain patterns I could hear repeatedly in
| certain situations (danger approach warning, feeding
| communication, always the same sound before one bird flew out and
| collected food kind of like "make us breakfast" :P).
| Unfortunately some quick searches on Google scholar didn't help
| much, I feel like I'm lacking the right search terms here. Most
| ML in this area seems to be related to species classification. If
| there's any bird experts reading, what is the state of the art of
| "understadning" bird language? Any paper recommendations? I'm
| curious about basic things like...is there a universal bird
| language or does each species use their own language (can a crow
| understand a sparrow), are there some sounds that are identified
| with meaning etc. Edit: just checked my bookmarks and "Bird-DB: A
| database for annotated bird song sequences" was the most
| interesting find, along with some interesting datasets (NIPS,
| Cornell Birdcall).
|
| I was envisioning a ML powered device that could translate bird
| chirps to human readable text but my guess is that we're still in
| the fundamental research phase. One idea I had was recording
| stuff in my garden and running it through some unsupervised
| algorithms to identify some patterns than match it with video and
| maybe tag context. Would be really neat to find a pattern and see
| it correspond to the same situation (cat approaching). Seems like
| a neat summer project but I'm not even sure how to tag and label
| things :)
|
| A first version that identifies the individual birds and their
| species would already be cool and I suppose feasible. Bird A
| (sparrow) speaking...bird B speaking etc. would already be
| fun...might give them random names, too instead of A,B,C. That
| would also help with the next stage for tagging etc.
| tomrod wrote:
| I believe ML could certainly perform cataloging (clustering).
| That would be step one to assigning inherent meaning.
| defrex wrote:
| Aza Raskin's earth species project is working on this. He gave
| a ted talk about it recently, in which he also recommends a
| couple books.
|
| https://youtu.be/3tUXbbbMhvk?si=6ESL-zuPIHXFULbC
| jonah wrote:
| I recently saw Nathan Pieplow's talk The Language of Birds. It
| was a pretty good intro to the kind of things we know about
| bird communication (a fair amount) and what we don't know (a
| lot).
|
| https://earbirding.com/blog/talks
|
| Maybe you can find a recording somewhere or further references.
|
| The whole concept of birding by ear is pretty cool. We always
| have the Merlin bird sound AI app at the ready whenever we're
| hiking.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Thanks for the tip! It does look like there are several
| recordings on YouTube. I'll have to give this a listen.
|
| https://youtu.be/IO04p2qM5Y0?si=WY6MzH2c9QGcOHsf
| dylan604 wrote:
| this guy sums it up pretty well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By_rSYI0Ovs
| jnellis wrote:
| I use the Merlin app which is pretty accurate at identifying
| birds by sound. Once it hits on a bird it will give you a list
| of different calls that bird makes regarding what it might be
| trying to do (aka mating, predator near) so you can match it
| further but that part is not automated yet.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I've been living in southern Mexico in the jungle for the
| last year or so and this app has been a blast. Whenever we
| hear something new we all whip our our phones and learn
| something.
| tomrod wrote:
| Incompletely. This faces a similar issue to much of the bottoms-
| up air quality work I've been working on.
|
| Listening means that:
|
| (a) coverage is limited to receptor area, so proximity is
| required (proximity bias)
|
| (b) the inhabitants have sufficient volume to be heard (frequency
| bias)
| linsomniac wrote:
| Not necessarily true for (b): quiet inhabitants may be ratted
| out by other inhabitants. Birds will literally call out "snake"
| (in their bird language) or "puma" to alert others.
|
| Stuff You Should Know covered it on an episode "How We're
| Learning to Talk to Animals":
| https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269...
| hm-nah wrote:
| It's terrible, but this technology is likely coming to a
| bar/pub/cafe/store/park/trail near you... diarization, voice
| recognition... I'm concerned that in the near future, humans can
| no longer assume that their words are not being captured and
| potentially used for who-knows-what purposes.
|
| The commons, Alexafied.
| erkt wrote:
| Time to normalize personal white noise generators.
| renjimen wrote:
| I think that would just be an arms race that AI would
| undoubtably win at the expense of our sanity.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| It's not like recording technology is new. It's only because
| most countries have laws providing that tools like these are
| not widely used by government. And I don't believe AI is going
| to change the laws significantly. I don't believe most of the
| 1984 stuff will happen at least in near future.
| renjimen wrote:
| Easily solved with more tech! Subaudible recording with mic on
| throat --> encrypted transmission to peers --> peers' earbuds.
| Conversation 2.0, or something. Sarcasm, but wouldn't be
| surprising if it happens eventually
| ThrowAway1922A wrote:
| Freedom and privacy are rapidly going to become a thing of the
| past. You won't be able to escape even if you attempt to. The
| world is becoming a disgusting place and I want none of it
| anymore.
| belter wrote:
| Statement detected on web platform 'HackerNews':
| Autocorrelation in progress... Identity found: Subject
| #ThrowAway1922A
|
| Warning: Potential dissident behavior. Monitoring level
| upgraded to TIER-3. Recommendation: Dispatch surveillance
| drones for real-time observation.
| teitoklien wrote:
| What's more scary is you dont even need the tech of the
| future to do this.
|
| Just combine together the tech of now with some clever
| optimisations to keep resource usage low enough to do it at
| scale.
|
| When you think how they are slowly ripping apart schools
| systems, corrupting the integrity of our institutions both
| technical and philosophical.
|
| It really makes you think, if its all in the works
| mikrotikker wrote:
| Time to make the peasants peasants again, they wanna go
| back to feudal societies.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I think it more likely that it becomes something you pay for.
| Ads only pay so much, and richer people (upper-middle-class
| and above) can afford to pay more out of pocket than ads
| targeted to them are worth. Or, at the very least, it's worth
| enough for third-party non-ad companies such as LifeLock to
| run interference on other companies privacy invasion tools.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Fairly certain it's already happening in you cell phones.
| fsflover wrote:
| My phone has a hardware kill switch for the mic/camera.
| silenced_trope wrote:
| There is some future where AI, deepfakes, and what not become
| so indistinguishable from real people, that those industries
| (news media, social-media, etc) that make sport out of hearing
| "wrong speak" and performing shaming rituals will become
| obsolete.
|
| Same with the security state, if all the data is suspect, does
| it matter?
| spandextwins wrote:
| Can you imagine if they took the same money and time and just
| planted trees? No more global climate change.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| There is an app which [greatly] assists in determining if
| government-minted coins are in fact solid AUTHENTIC gold bullion
| -struck. It listens to the resonance after you tap the coin
| lightly with a lighter.
|
| Something to do with harmonics [I have a fairly good ear for
| this, myself, but only with well-known currency]. Similar to a
| digital guitar tuner.
|
| But this simple app really left me awe-struck. Many of the laser
| testing machines can be fooled in certain gold-plated frauds.
| Gold's "ting" is unmistakable. It's nice to have a virtual co-
| agreement when dealing in high-stakes quick transactions.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Miniaturize it and make it into a small, waterproof, rugged
| device that I can take backpacking with me and I'd pay a handsome
| sum.
|
| (I don't want a cell phone app, my cell phone remains off while
| hiking)
| lnsru wrote:
| I made it! The device is small and waterproof, but its battery
| weights 10 pounds. Continuous FFT processing and other
| mathematics are power hungry. Is was vibration logger for
| industrial applications. App would be definitely better for
| you.
| willcipriano wrote:
| No cell service where I'm going. Online apps are useless on
| most of the earths surface.
| samf wrote:
| I've often thought about how this sort of thing could be used for
| site security, much like cameras are used. E.g. it could hear a
| person's footsteps, and hear a person breathing, and it could
| distinguish between a person and an animal. With multiple
| microphones, it could determine a location.
|
| I wonder if this is being done already.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's a system being used now to attempt to triangulate gun
| shots, but it's not widely praised as being very successful
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| From what I understand about shotspotter it is really good at
| triangulating the location of a sound.
|
| The issues it runs into are all human. It uses humans to
| determine whether a recorded sound is a gunshot or some other
| sound. It is deployed selectively in cities, in areas chosen
| by the police department (very frequently in minority
| neighborhoods). Conclusions have been used as evidence in
| court without exposing the underlying data and algorithms
| used to reach the conclusion.
| Animats wrote:
| Log: Human footfall. Branch break.
| Human footfall. Branch break. Weapon cocking,
| AR-15. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing,
| AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon
| firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit.
| Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. ...
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Makes sense. Is "monitor forest restoration" the new "search
| and rescue" euphemism for military applications?
|
| _" We're going to use this robot to find people inside of
| urban rubble... uhh.... after earthquakes of course.."_
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I had the exact same idea, after I wondered why my dog seemed
| unnaturally eager to go out in the yard, even after he'd just
| been.
|
| It turned out there was a possum in the yard. I know they're
| quiet, in general, but they do make the occasional sound. I was
| thinking he must have heard it, which led to... this idea.
| Naturalists seemed like an obvious client.
| mikrotikker wrote:
| The dept of conservation in NZ is using a similar thing in remote
| locations to detect the call of a bird that we haven't seen in a
| while. It is thought to be extinct, but we thought the takahe was
| extinct too. From memory it's the one shown at the end of "Hunt
| for the Wilderpeople". Keep it skux.
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