just when you think it couldn’t be worse, you have to battle a creature
I’m choosing to believe him because I think there should still be mystery and adventure in the world
Okay I looked this one up. He said he talked to God, made up some songs, and lost nine kilos during his 20ish hours in the water. He was also completely nude when he was rescued.
Oo, I get to talk about an absolute CLASSIC marine ecology story!
This is not a story about AI being trained to pick plastic out of the ocean, but picking out something else that’s harmful to the ocean: The Crown of Thorns Starfish. (Also yes, that name DOES go incredibly hard.)
The COTS is a species of venomous starfish found on the barrier reef, and they feed on corals. They aren’t invasive, but they don’t have many natural predators either, so large outbreaks in their population can descercate huge portions of the reef at a time. That’s where this guy comes in:
This is Rangerbot. It’s a “cots bot” equipped with trained AI to recognize inditidual COTS. It then injects the COTS with bile, which is toxic to the COTS but harmless for the environment. This was effectively used to keep the COTS population in check, so the coral of the barrier reef had time to grow.
There’s an episode of Bizarre Beasts about the COTS (hosted by Hank Green himself) which I think is pretty cool and explains the whole situation in a fun way.
So, yeah! If an AI can be trained to recognize a species of starfish with %99 accuracy and effectively get rid of them, I think it is PERFECTLY reasonable to train AI to recognize trash in the oceans, at least in areas close to the shore, and have them clean it up.
SO I asked my Google home (shut up, I know, fuck off) to play music for me:
and do you know what playlist it started playing for me instead of “this is chvrches”, like I asked for?
I’m in actual fuckin tears
Sorry to bring this back but I went through my history to make sure I wasn’t insane and it really did do this to me. I wanted to grab the audio file but I don’t think I can
ALT
