When states want to gauge quail populations, the process can be grueling, time-consuming and expensive. It means spending hours in the field listening for calls. Or leaving a recording device in the field to catch what sounds are made -- only to spend hours later listening to that audio. Then, repeating this process until there's enough information to start making population estimates. But a new model aims to streamline this process. By using artificial intelligence to analyze terabytes of recordings for quail calls, the process gives wildlife managers the ability to gather the data they need in a matter of minutes.

When states want to gauge quail populations, the process can be grueling, time-consuming and expensive. It means spending hours in the field listening for calls. Or leaving a recording device in the field to catch what sounds are made -- only to spend hours later listening to that audio. Then, repeating this process until there's enough information to start making population estimates. But a new model aims to streamline this process. By using artificial intelligence to analyze terabytes of recordings for quail calls, the process gives wildlife managers the ability to gather the data they need in a matter of minutes.

When states want to gauge quail populations, the process can be grueling, time-consuming and expensive. It means spending hours in the field listening for calls. Or leaving a recording device in the field to catch what sounds are made--only to spend hours later listening to that audio. Then, repeating this process until there's enough information to start making population estimates. But a new model developed by researchers at the University of Georgia aims to streamline this process. By using artificial intelligence to analyze terabytes of recordings for quail calls, the process gives wildlife managers the ability to gather the data they need in a matter of minutes.

Future AI may be super powerful but, as Dr. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath relates, that still won't make it a person. The desire to bestow human life on inanimate material has been a component of our collective imagination since at least the days of Ovid. In his work Metamorphoses he relates the tale of Pygmalion, who sculpted Galatea out of ivory and besought her animation at the hands of Aphrodite. Two thousand years later, we still see that narrative trope playing itself out in stories such as Alex Garland's Oscar-winning film Ex Machina, where an AI developer creates an autonomous female android named Ava as the key component of a Turing Test. From marriage to murder, the finales of these and other similar stories range from wish fulfillment to cautionary tale, but the psychological underpinnings remain the same: the aspiration to take something intrinsically non-human (such as ivory or silicon) and humanize it.

Zoltan Istvan believes that artificial intelligence will advance in 10 to 15 years. Such progress, according to the transhumanist politician, will address all of the concerns of the human civilization, including the slowing down or blocking of the aging process through the combination of technology and human selves. For Istvan, the likelihood does not include in the field of weird science fiction. He thinks that artificial intelligence, which is a computer brain that is capable of doing anything which humans do, is about to come soon, and that the US should develop it first. He noted that the government must have a plan in order to deal with it before the "arms race of civilization" arrives.