The article seems overly sensational, but the point is fairly interesting - people do not think about unintended consequences of delegating decision making to machines. While the crickets' fate is unfortunate, this article made me think about self-driving cars and all the wildlife that gets run over every day. For the larger animals, say a deer, the autonomous cars seems to promise the same safety as to a pedestrian,…
That was one of my early thoughts about automated cars: Will we see wildlife return to some areas in greater numbers? Even a small decrease in say mountain lions in LA killed by cars might cause a large increase in breeding over a few years. What about areas with a lot of deer? Might they become even more overpopulated? Will more starve? Will they be driven even further into settled areas? Even small changes in the n…
For the mountain lions, that would be overall positive from my view, but of course carries the risk of attacks on pets and humans. These can be mitigated with education, such as don't let your toy dog out unsupervised at night. Lived next to a nature preserve for a couple years and had a mountain lion visit the property on a few occasions. Never had a problem. Rattlesnakes... that's a completely different story...