“A new device developed in India listens for elephant calls and plays threatening sounds to keep the animals away from villages. Early tests show that the system can reliably detect and drive away elephant herds, avoiding potential traffic and trampling problems,” reports The Doomslayer.
Mongabay explains:
Engineer-turned-conservationist Seema Lokhandwala has developed an AI-powered device that listens for elephant vocalizations and plays sounds like tiger roars or buzzing bees to drive herds away from villages near India’s Kaziranga National Park.
Early field trials show the device is about 80% accurate in detecting elephants and 100% effective in deterring them, gaining support from local communities and forest officials despite limited funding.
When elephant biologist Seema Lokhandwala, with the Elephants Acoustic Project, visited a village near Balipara in India’s Assam state, as part of her fieldwork in December 2015, she witnessed firsthand what it takes to live alongside elephants.
After night fell, a herd of 150 elephants — “I counted them,” she says — devoured all of the freshly harvested rice stacked outside a woman’s house. Her entire year’s harvest, gone in minutes. Then, the giants ravaged her kitchen looking for salt, a mineral they need to survive, while the residents hid under the bed fearing for their lives. Just the previous night, elephants had mauled and killed a woman with three young children just across the street.
Artificial intelligence benefits many people while leaving a smaller number of people worse off. Artificial intelligence discovered a new material that could reduce lithium use in batteries, and thus our dependence on China.
Artificial intelligence is being used to generate highly-effective antibodies to fight disease. Doctors overseas are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively. An artificial intelligence algorithm outperforms radiologists in diagnosing prostate cancer from MRI scans, while cutting false positive diagnoses in half.
But the head of the Federal Reserve System says that “job creation is pretty close to zero” due to artificial intelligence rendering humans unnecessary for various tasks. Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms and robots are being used as waiters in restaurants in Korea.
The remote, landlocked nation of Zambia, which is poor and heavily in debt, found new mineral wealth using artificial intelligence.
