Animal Workers

This video is making rounds on WhatsApp and Facebook for a few days now. It is supposed to educate masses about the importance of cleanliness, which is essential for well-being of the society.

This sparked another thought in my mind. In addition to our heavy investment in robotics and automated systems which do menial jobs, can we train other living organisms for a purpose that suits us? What if I train this little birdy to keep a beach clean, and give it hourly wage of food of his choice?

Birds are intelligent. They have demonstrated abilities to perform complicated tasks intuitively and with trial and error until they get success. We need to develop a way to harness that potential. Is anyone doing something like this already?

This is not animal abuse. Humans employ other humans for menial jobs in many industries. We pay them an hourly wage for doing that job, and it is a well-accepted approach in society. I am just introducing non-human elements in the mix. We need not stop at birds though. Certain species of monkeys have demonstrated smartness, so have dolphins. Dolphins are seen getting high on puffer fish and passing that little ball of poison among each other. Think about it, to our mutual benefit, we can train dolphins to shepherd certain types of fish, so fishing industry will be benefited, it can be fitted with deep sea exploration tools and sent deeper into the oceans to aid scientific studies.

The opportunities are truly endless. We are trying hard to design and build robots, which essentially are a ball of wires and circuits, which needs to be told specifically what to do in all the cases. However at the same time we are missing many other elements in the nature which are already wired by evolution. Elements which need training and understanding of the mutual benefits?

Am I making sense?