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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda surprised the article doesn't mention (and I have no idea the feasibility of) a system that works in the opposite direction as well: somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance (maybe possible through some kind of doppler effect?) of a boat in such a way that whales will perceive and make themselves safe from collision.

Seems at least worth researching.

> Zitterbart’s aim is for ship captains to receive zero false alerts, so that every ping truly requires their attention. Removing human oversight risks flooding ship captains with false reports

This sounds great, as long as we're still on track for the whole "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

I don't want to be the one to explain to the whales, "No, look, it's not our fault that we killed your singing partner - the AI told us this was the correct route. See?"

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"somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance ..."

You'll need to speak "whale" first with this awful scheme.

A small whale is a few tonnes in mass a large one can be 150 tonnes. That is very easy to detect via SONAR.

Funnily enough a few specialised Japanese and Chinese ships are capable of detecting whales with amazing accuracy to the point of delivering small warheads.

Of course sonar works, but there’s a human operator…

Need to speak whale to make this AI-powered scheme work? Sounds like a job for AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680899

You just need to broadcast a made-up word of phrase with similar tones as the whales use, without you knowing what this means to the whales. The same noise should be used every time. Whales are smart, so they will learn to associate that incoherent utterance with ships.

That doesn't help if the first time the whale hears it is when it gets run over by a tanker.

That would be statistically unlikely. Whales have far more safe encounters with ships than lethal ones.

Persist in using the system for a while, on as many ships as possible, and the odds will get even better as time goes on. Whales aren't dumb, they'll figure it out and probably even tell each other about it.

No you don’t. You just need a consistent signal. It is how you can communicate information to a dog without speaking dog today.

Would large whales even have the concept of "I need to get out of the way of this bigger thing"?

Submarine could have used it against the mountain

If they're 60 years old and have lost three friends to boat collisions... probably?

Worth sending out enough information to determine.

Ocean noise pollution is already an issue as it is.

Thanks, but I've already been awake for several years.

The proposal was to add signal to the noise.

"This is a lighthouse. Your call."

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