In the Phadreus, Plato condemned writing for trading memory for cheap
reference ad recall, and thus wisdom would be lost. What he failed to
foreshadow was the democratization of knowledge itself, or spirituality,
that came almost 2000 years later in the West as texts were translated into
local language and moveable print was invented, and maybe only realized in
the 20th century with mass literacy campaigns globally.
He still might have been right, we might have lost something while gaining
something else. Marshal McLuhan articulated we’re always going through
these cycles, new technologies just re-replacing and filling in the holes
left by the last technological revolution. The pandemic taught us in “Zoom
culture” all the “in person” birding talks I could now see.
Right now, the tech isn’t there for highly accurate ID. Maybe one day it
will be. I was long influenced (in hindsight I think I misunderstood) by
Feynmans statement that we shouldn’t care about the names of birds but
their broader behavior and place in the greater system of behavior. I’ve
since reconceptualized Feynmans words: I’m not sure I really care about
naming or even IDing a bird, I (personally) care about the trends I can see
in ecology, individual behavior and variablilty, climate and weather: birds
as global indicators, systems of behavior better and even within
individuals. That’s the fun stuff! Species (and marks to ID) are just
vocabulary to get there.**
Speculative fiction puts an AI bird classifier in everyone’s eyeball, to
look and with certainty see not just an identification but biostatistics
and movement patterns of every bird across the globe, individually and as a
mass, physiology, and predictive outcomes at each blink. Even stepping back
from that, I wonder how many more naturalists we’ll make, who then come up
with their own problems to solve and the knowledge to come with it, the
more we can democratize the passion. If we’re lucky, as teachers we’ll
leave a mark (and be left in the dust). Something will certainly be lost in
some cases, but the truly passionate I think (hope?) will still seek that
knowledge, and our passion adopted (at various levels of competence) by
more people.
I just imagine, what if driving down the road my windshield identified
birds, and told me in there was habitat loss or populations were declining.
Would it change negative trends?
To be less speculative, I agree I’m worried about the loss of field
biologists, but that’s a societal question (what our money should go to).
Someone still has to go out and put out all those stations and monitor
them. I think the knowledge, dare I say wisdom, will still be there, but it
might look different to us. The more we can do that with cheap tech (like
in farming) maybe we’ll open more doors too. I think Ai Wei Wei (artist)
said something like “Imagine a billion creative minds”: apply that to
birding/ecology/etc.
Best, and with deep appreciation of the thoughts on the idea,
Stephen
** I’ll say I’m not that dry, I have been known to look at individual
birds, out of place or not and ask them (out loud) “what are you doing
here?” “What are you up to?”
On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 4:48 PM Joel Geier <clearwater@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Mary and all,
Of course there may be people who enjoy birding with all the features
offered by the latest gadgets. Whether this "brings people closer to
nature" (the goal stated by one of the principals of the Terra venture) is
debatable and perhaps best left as a matter of individual taste.
My main concern with this development, as I expressed in the main part of
my original posting, is how it portends removal of human biologists from
on-site monitoring. Bob O'Brien picked up on one aspect of this in his
reply (the potential loss of seasonal jobs for young wildlife biologists).
The other aspect that concerns me is the loss of access by people who have
the ability to recognize other types of threatened species, in the course
of doing bird monitoring for baseline studies or environmental impact
assessments.
We were all conditioned from an early age, by our national culture, to
believe that that technological innovation by clever people can solve
whatever problems are created by human innovation. But as a
"last-generation farmer," after watching for 50 years now how innovations
in agricultural technology have tended to just accelerate trends toward
consolidation and industrialization of farms, accompanied by decline and
decay in the economic and cultural fabric of small towns, I no longer trust
those platitudes.
In my next step at a career as a young engineering graduate student, still
believing that technology could solve the world's problems, I was part of a
research effort that developed some of the fundamental ideas behind
hydraulic fracturing and other "enhanced" drilling and mining methods. That
approach eventually did succeed in solving one perceived problem at that
time (our national dependence on OPEC for oil). I'd like to think that we
also managed to get a few coal and hard-rock miners out of very dangerous
work environments by innovations that helped to automate mining equipment.
But over time I came to realize that we had caused other problems,
including birds whose habitat is now threatened by the "fracking" boom.
Turning back to the Terra "listening" system specifically, I agree, this
type of development in technology seems almost inevitable. The core
technologies that make this type of device and network possible have all
been under development for at least 15 years (when I talked to a mutual
engineering friend in Corvallis who was working on some ideas for automated
bird-song identification using the latest signal-processing technology).
Is resistance futile? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that we need to
hasten the arrival of these systems by donating to kickstarter campaigns --
especially knowing that the two other principals in this venture are
respectively the CEO and COO of a tracking-device company that stands to
make a mint as the supplier of these devices, if this initiative takes hold
and gives them dominant market share.
True, the kickstarter funds go to a "non-profit," but from what
information I could find on their website, it appears to be a back-pocket
sort of non-profit, set up just 5 years ago and with very few projects that
don't directly involve the for-profit company as a "partner." I could not
find any financial disclosures on the websites either for the for-profit
company, or for the non-profit. Count me as "skeptical" of the whole
operation.
All the best,
Joel
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
