Can you imagine providing apes and other endangered species with their own digital currency to protect themselves?
The idea, called Interspecies Money, is the brainchild of writer Jonathan Ledgard who wants to use AI solutions to save wildlife from destruction.
I visited the Royal Institution in London to listen to the writer who is also a futurist thinker on risk, nature and advanced technology in emerging markets and founder of the first Interspecies Money service.
Before the talk, I wandered around museum, thrilled to be standing in the very building Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein over 200 years ago after listening to a lecture by Humphry Davy about how chemistry was key to understanding life and the natural world.
It’s pretty eye opening when you realise how many technological advancements there have been since, many leaps made by scientists at the Royal Institution, but just how little we have done for wildlife, well, apart from destroying 70 per cent of it over the last 50 years. We live among 8 million species and only 2 million of them have been recorded and the most value we put on them is for their body parts to eat or use in spurious ‘traditional medicine.’
In the same way, AI research has mostly been focused on us humans with the exception of the multi-story-style pig farms in China. Apart from this example, which only benefits humans after all, there is a massive gaping hole in data about most of the creatures and plants on the planet. Ledgard pointed out we don’t know how sea cows mate, or much about fruit bats despite them being the rewilders of the earth and the biggest planters of the redwood tree, thanks to their seed-heavy pooh.
There is some hope for animals with EarthRanger, a software solution to protect large conservation areas which was set up in response to the number of rhinos and elephants being slaughtered by poachers. Now run by the Allen Institute for AI , it helps managers and rangers of large areas to collect, integrate and display historical and available remote sensing data to provide an overall view of collared wildlife, rangers, enforcement assets and infrastructure within a protected area.
Ledgard specifically talked about using AI face identify for orangutans to trial the idea of Interspecies Money as their habitat is under huge pressure from palm oil plantations destroying the trees they live in, alongside the twin evils of illegal hunting and the pet trade. It’s estimated by that if we don’t do something urgent to protect these primates, they will die out within 50 years’ time.
The crux of the matter is money. The world’s richest and most diverse wildlife is found in the poorest communities. One way of helping the people living there – so they aren’t tempted to poach, hunt for food or destroy forests for farming or logging – is to pay them to collect data and protect the wildlife whose only ‘value’ at the moment is as meat, powdered bones and horns and tusks. They become the custodians of the wildlife and the animals, with their digital identity, become the valuable ‘asset’. If these ‘assets’ then cause trouble like raiding your crops, they’re already identified through AI and would pay compensation to the farmer. Some banks such as the Bank of India are apparently taking this idea seriously.
“We are on the cusp of having a different relationship with animals and what is happening is getting harder for us to ignore,” said Jonathan towards the end of his talk in which he mentioned that wildlife conservation will become more political like veganism and animal rights.
The tide seems to be turning at last in favour of wildlife. AI is already being used to protect the rainforest with devices hidden in the canopies to detect and measure the sound of gun shots, chainsaws as well as the forest wildlife’s calls. Hopefully, now chief fire starter Bolsonaro is out, there will be a new era of protecting the Amazon at least. But other countries like Colombia are ahead of the game, realising they need to approach the illegal logging, mining and destruction in other ways.
At last week’s Amazon Conservation meeting, a Colombian Government minister attended and explained they had come to realise, like the Interspecies Money idea, that nothing will work unless they talk to and collaborate with the indigenous people living in the Amazon – and pay them to protect the forest.
Storytelling at The Folkestone Bookshop
I’m doing a storytelling event this Sunday, December 11 at 11am at our town’s new bookshop aptly named The Folkestone Bookshop in Tontine Street.
It’s a wonderful bookstore, run by experienced booksellers, and filled with a fantastic range of books including a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while, the new biography of Shirley Jackson A Rather Haunted Life which I’m really enjoying so far.
More recently, I went to see inspiring Retirement Rebel author Siobhan Daniels talk about buying a camper van to travel around the UK and rebel against ageing stereotypes whilst campaigning to stop ageist attitudes towards older women in the media and at work.
If you haven’t visited the shop, please do. The folks who run it are so welcoming and there’s a space where you can have a cup of tea or coffee, plus they have a fantastic permanent Banned Books exhibition.
The exhibition of 399 banned books was set up during Folkestone Book Festival to commemorate 400 copies of Ulysses by James Joyce being confiscated at Folkestone Harbour in 1922 because the book was deemed obscene. Apparently one copy survived which was taken by the publisher.