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Comment by __s | Hacker News Reader

The crows aren't punished for not exhibiting this behavior. Positive reinforcement training is distinctively different than negative reinforcement training. Slavery is the latter

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>>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.

I really don't think it matters if it's positive or negative reinforcement. You are making their trained survival dependent on a contraption which accepts trash for their services, that doesn't sound like room and board to you?

> that doesn't sound like room and board to you?

No, sounds like a job: do a task, get a reward. You do it, janitors do it. If the crows want...

If you're talking about jobs, most humans have a plethora of survival options.

Once a wild animal is trained to an easy single source of food, it prevents them from naturally diversifying their diet to prevent starvation, removing that natural challenge could be deadly.

This isn't just about doing a task and getting a reward, this is about addiction.

This experiment would not be removing any existing food sources but adding another one. I doubt there will be enough cigarette buds for every single crow for it to become the dominant method of obtaining food for the whole species.

It does matter because the crows have a choice. They are choosing the easiest way to get food.

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