Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by dTal on Monday October 16, 2017 @06:49PM (#15487285)

Slavery is not 'negative reinforcement training'. Indeed, it is possible to be a slave and be rewarded for good work. Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effectively, for the crows, the choice becomes "pick up cigarettes or starve".

I wouldn't worry about it though. If it ever gets tried on a large scale it'll be a hilarious disaster of unexpected second-order effects that will lead to the program's cancellation long before the whole crow species is subjugated.

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Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by eric-hu on Monday October 16, 2017 @07:59PM (#15487649)

> Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effectively, for the crows, the choice becomes "pick up cigarettes or starve".

This definition of slavery sounds a lot like capitalism.

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Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by jaggederest on Monday October 16, 2017 @08:45PM (#15487853)

It turns out, in an economic sense anyway, that paying people wages can be qualitatively worse than slavery.

To delve into the macabre, you can pay people less than the cost of maintaining a slave to do the same work, and those people are not a capital expenditure but an operational one, i.e. you don't take a loss if they happen to starve, get sick, or quit, you just hire someone else.

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[dead]

Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by Mtinie on Monday October 16, 2017 @10:19PM (#15488169)

Yo have the perceived choice not to work, but that doesn’t mean you’ll survive. A hallmark of capitalism is smoke and mirrors.

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Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by vortico on Monday October 16, 2017 @07:47PM (#15487590)

Isn't it normal for every animal for them to be required to "do work or starve"? By your definition, does nature enslave every animal except humans who for a select number don't have to work for survival?

Kudos on your last point though. The overreaction on this thread needs to be brought back to that reality.

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Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by dTal on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @06:16AM (#15489825)

Perhaps. I think the line is drawn when you don't have a choice as to the nature of the work. Which raises the thought-provoking question of how little choice is too little - freedom to choose which section of field you pick cotton from is obviously at one end of the scale. What's at the other? What about "you can work at any job you want, as long as you never leave the country or speak ill of Glorious Leader?" How many choices do you need to be offered before it doesn't "count" anymore?

Agriculture itself must have felt like slavery to hunter-gatherers - work the fields, or get killed by those who do.

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Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by CryptoPunk on Monday October 16, 2017 @08:22PM (#15487746)

>>Slavery is where you have no choice but to work.

Only if you are denied choices you are entitled to, like running away, through negative reinforcement. Slavery is not simply the state of needing to work to survive. Such a definition would stigmatize all poor people in developing countries as slaves, and anyone employing them as a slaver. It would imply that the natural state of man, where he must hunt and gather to survive, as slavery. That would obviously be inconsistent with what the word means in common parlance.

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Re:Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food by spaceribs on Monday October 16, 2017 @06:54PM (#15487312)

> If it ever gets tried on a large scale it'll be a hilarious disaster of unexpected second-order effects that will lead to the program's cancellation long before the whole crow species is subjugated.

This was kinda how I summed up the paper actually, the amount of side effects on any large scale deployment is mind boggling.

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