Thanks Stephen,
I'm not familiar with the Feynman of which you speak, unless you mean the
physicist Richard Feynman. I do agree with the gist of that statement, if I
understand it properly.
Plato was also correct. We did lose something in moving from the oral-formulaic
culture of Homer to the world of written books, even if we gained something
else.
I'm not sure this particular amalgamation of technologies rises to the level of
Gutenburg's printing press. It seems to me more like a way for a few
entrepeneurial folks to cash in by combining technologies in a way that's been
foreseeable for some time, and they're hoping that all of us will help them
along that path to profitability.
If we're searching for philosophers to help us to understand this development,
the American philosopher William James with his concept of "the cash value of a
proposition" might be the best one.
All the best,
Joel
From: "Stephen T Bird" <isseki.ryotoku@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "boo" <boo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "clearwater" <clearwater@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Mary Garrard" <springazure1@xxxxxxxxx>, "Oregon Birders OnLine"
<obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 2, 2021 6:09:31 PM
Subject: Re: [obol] Re: Brave New Terra
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 < [ mailto:clearwater@xxxxxxxx ;|
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
