[ballooney]

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?

[ks2048]

There has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful.

From Google, 2019,

https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...

[lapetitejort]

Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?

[sonofhans]

Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.

[lapetitejort]

Before focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0].

[0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...