slothropCrows are intelligent birds and learn quickly – even from each other.In Sweden, they are used to collect cigarette butts and bring them to a machine that automatically rewards them with peanuts.
pelespiritAre they in line to use the machine? I don’t understand why they’re not fighting over the dispensed peanuts. Hierarchy maybe?
Edit: answers and video
Crows trained to pick up cigarette butts in Sweden
hohoho
oce 🐆
JohnnyFlapHoleSeed
LodraThis is much more than mildly interesting. I find this fascinating! The crows being so capable. The cleverly constructed symbiotic relationship. The fact that such machines are funded at all. Maybe I’m just jealous of what European countries can do with with public funds 😒
Monounity
tomiantI wonder if there are any downsides to machines like this. For example, do the birds grow dependent on the machines to survive? If so, what happens if smoking rates drop?
AllNewTypeFaceWhat’s the lifespan of a crow? If they have short lives but breed fast, one lean generation won’t be catastrophic, and enough of their young will astor to a tobacco-free world. In reality, the rate of decline in smoking will probably be sufficiently slow that, rather than being a catastrophic cliff, it will be a nudge to prioritise alternative means of sustenance.
I mean, or worked for humans… Ummm, wait…
There’s also the concern of the tobacco. Butts aren’t just filters, there’s plenty of sweet addictive nicotine left usually.
dumbassHow long till they work out there’s butts in that easily accessible plastic tub and unlocks the infinite peanut glitch.
cyberfae
dohpaz42
CatoblepasWhat kind of second hand smoke do they get? 😁 This is awesome btw.
The issue is the crows are going to learn about this, and start just fishing rubbish out of bins, because it’s the easiest way to get their reward.
There was once a Parisian dog who kept trying to push children into the Seine, because he had learned that if he ha saved a drowning child he gets tons of rewards.
RobotToasterOr stealing cigarettes from shops
CochiseThis phenomenon is called Perverse Incentive , also known as the Cobra Effect.
It’s how corporate America operates.
jqubedThe results of a perverse incentive scheme are also sometimes called cobra effects, where people are incentivized to make a problem worse. This name was coined by economist Horst Siebert in 2001 based on a historically dubious anecdote taken from the British Raj. According to the story, the British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, and the cobra breeders set their snakes free, leading to an overall increase in the wild cobra population.
It really is a shame how humans are so quick to jump on opportunities without caring about a single thing involved in the process…
Fucking Cobra Kai
Is the firebug phenomenon part of this?
gandalf_der_12tealso known as the broken window fallacy
It’s basically just another version of Goodharts Law:
When a measure (in this case “the amount of rubbish the crow brings”) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
See also: The NYT best seller list. Once that became popular, publishers started buying their own books during certain times, to make the list. Now basically every book in existence is a “NYT best seller” and the metric has become effectively worthless.
This is not quite correct, what would happen is that you would get one group of crows teaming up and robbing the hard working crows of their cigarette butts that they collected, and you’d get a little crow empire with a King Crow at the top just sitting on top of a mountain of cigarette butts in a posh parking lot and shitting on Lamborghini, Lexus, Cadillacs…
magnetosphereMeanwhile, smoking among Swedish peanut lovers is up 800%
TIL crows can read Swedish
Just the swedish ones. I held up a sign in my yard that said free peanuts and some of them came right away but when I held up a swedish sign they all completely ignored me. This was in America though, so they’re likely just uneducated.
M137
spittingimageHmm. If I want a peanut, can I do the same thing?
Mildly infuriating is more like it. This is abusing their intelligence. And describing them as “scouring” the roads for trash does not sound healthy to me. While it’s a neat idea im more concerned about the long term health implications this poses, both physically and mentally, along with any dependence issues if they stop foraging for for other food as a result of this.
watson
harkIs there a place online with plans to make one of these boxes on your own? I would probably just train them to pick up any random trash, but honestly I just want to reward them for interacting with it.
thecrowbox.com
For now. Until they use their intelligence to open the machine!
Is the machine in the picture the most advanced model ready to deploy in the streets? I’d love to see it in operation.
IninewcrowI think he’s seen just about everything because he’s seen an elephant fly
That’s a raven ☝️🤓
Cool study and application for crow-treat exchanges. But the image is AI. That is some gibberish Swedish text.
Bird return, food for rubbish, thanks for the help?
Oh, of course. You’re right. It might be a human who translated it poorly though, rather than an AI
There are things I don’t understand about the machine that also make me think AI, but Google Translate seems to understand it so I’m pretty sure it isn’t.