Chimpanzee Browsing Instagram on iPhone with Precision | Hacker News Reader

Chimpanzee Browsing Instagram on iPhone with Precision

9to5mac.com

98 pointsokket36 comments

With precision is too vague. The chimpanzee actually chooses what to see: scrolls, watches chimp videos, swipes off boring snake videos, etc. It's said they are roughly as intelligent as a toddler, and it certainly looks that way. Awesome.

This sounds like a good demonstration of how mindless the activity of scrolling through Instagram truly is. (Even a monkey can do it).

It's similar to watching TV or mindlessly browsing the web for non-intellectual activities. Perhaps we should be concerned about the impact of these technologies on our evolution as a species. There does seem to be supporting research for this (sorry for not providing links/ref).

Why isn't it a demonstration of how intuitive the hardware and UI are.

haters gonna hate

> Perhaps we should be concerned about the impact of these technologies on our evolution as a species.

Tinder is already breeding humans in a sense.

Chimpanzees are not monkeys.

"Monkey" in reference to a Pan troglodyte?

About as mindless as friendships, eating, love, sex, handling death.

The bit of human sophistication and intellectual pleasures are no golden throne. We are animals with a kink for tech and thought, but not much more.

It's always interesting to see the opening scene, but of course that is too simple to explain what is happening over the world:

https://youtu.be/YwZ0ZUy7P3E

I used to play with an idea to build kiosks for wild chimps with video phone recording software. With an interface tuned for them, I wonder if you could build social software that actually provided utility to the chimpanzees. I can imagine something like TikTok being able to send news or otherwise connect them in a meaningful way.

There is a Ted talk about an “Interspecies Internet:” https://www.ted.com/talks/the_interspecies_internet_an_idea_...

Facebook is probably experimenting with that... except for humans. Explains why Zuckerberg would put tape over his own computers' cameras.

A 2005 study observed this behavior in macaques; male monkeys would pay some amount of fruit juice to look at leaders' faces or females' hindquarters ("socially useful information"). https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050131/full/news050131-5.ht...

Impressive, but I would be more impressed if it started posting and generating followers, then monetizing the followers into a media empire. Isn't that the whole point of instagram?

There's already a monkey selfie created by a wildlife photographer who set up a camera that monkeys could activate to try to get a picture of them. It's embroiled in a copyright dispute over whether the photographer or the monkey owns the photo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

> The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright

> In April 2018, the appeals court affirmed that animals can not legally hold copyrights and expressed concern that PETA's motivations had been to promote their own interests rather than to protect the legal rights of animals.

>whether the photographer or the monkey owns the photo

Or none of them

With a simpler interface for posting and a more stimulating like reaction, who knows?

She should try, I think she's got a great shot at being instafamous. I'll be impressed is she monetizes it.

Back in the old days there was slot of talk about how hard computers were to use, and how much work remained to be done to make user interfaces usable.

The task is complete.

Also here is a painting elephant: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=owSZs7H24UY

FWIW the elephant was tortured into learning how to do this.

It was? Do you have a source for this? That's horrible if true.

If this is the video I'm thinking of (can't open it at work), the elephant is chained to a post while painting. These types of "sanctuaries" are nothing of the sort, they exploit animals for tourist $.

There are tourist-friendly elephant sanctuaries that are built on respecting the animals' personal space; Elephant Nature Park in Thailand is one. Tourists are basically only allowed to observe the elephants in a forest/jungle habitat. At other places, tourists are allowed to hug and play with baby elephants, and the animals are trained to put up with it, while the mothers are chained and kept apart from the babies during "tourist time".

That's awful. Thanks for the info.

FWIW, I don't see any chains in the video, but it does seem more likely that they were trained abusively (like circus elephants) to get them to do this.

The left swipe doesn't work on my android phone, I have to click the icons. Does that only work on the iPhone?

Yes, it’s a standard iOS gesture with no equivalent on Android other than implementations that apps try to come up themselves.

Not entirely: the standard behaviour of navigation on iOS is to allow swiping from only the left edge to go back. It seems that Instagram added the ability to swipe left from anywhere on the screen, not just the edge.

I don't use Instagram, but I'm not surprised that they've decided to "customize" that behavior.

Oh thank god. I thought for a moment there the chimp could figure it out but I couldn't.

pretty much every android phone now has gesture support

Not for the gesture I'm talking about.

Can’t help but be reminded of a great album

https://youtu.be/uVSBawXaoT4

So there is at least one intelligent Instagram user out there.

Next unicorn IPO: Tinder for chimps

You kid, but...https://twitter.com/Sierra_2015/status/929822581699629061

Go monkeys go. Even title make me laugh.

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