
Facial Recognition for Pigs – China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces - rm2889
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/business/china-pig-technology-facial-recognition.html
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rectang
_The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from
pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which._

\-- George Orwell, _Animal Farm_

When pigs are surveilled to the degree as human livestock, they will have
truly transformed into us and us into them.

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the_duke
That is a brilliant quote for the context, thanks!

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zawerf
Does it have to be the face? Just wondering if they could've used another
combination of body parts with sufficient variation and use those as the
"fingerprint" instead. Rather than "the bristles, the snout, the eyes and
ears" specifically.

Or are faces evolved to be unique in (social?)animals and nothing else is as
easy to tell apart?

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Aromasin
This just conjecture, but isn't the body slightly more amorphous then the
face? Body-fat and muscle can make someone, even a pig, look different but
variables like the eyes, nose and ears generally stay the same (at least past
puberty). We also have facial recognition technology already and it may be
that it's easier to adapt to another mammals face than it is to work from the
ground up again.

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Wyndtroy2012
Just look at the barn. Pigs are smart creatures. How can a creature be happy
in that barn? I had some of the best pork ever in Kauai where pigs roam
pastures. Isn’t that a better solution?

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Griceraae50100
Most smaller producers already recognize their livestock as well as family
resemblance. If African swine fever does in fact produce a fever, wouldn't
that be a better screening method? Like in an airport. Pigs are highly
intelligent, and "tech" enabling them to increase or decrease barn temperature
(up and down snout-pressed buttons) has shown to save money on heating bills.

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willismichael
How long until we have thisisnotarealpig.com?

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MayeulC
> You're in private mode.

> Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in
> private mode.

It is the first time I see such a nag screen. Is there any firefox Add-on that
could allow me a "stealth private mode"?

Meanwhile, I just disabled Javascript on this page, which works well enough
(except for the images, it seems).

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the_duke
Tipp: I recently started using uMatrix with default-deny for everything except
css/images.

It's remarkable how much faster most sites load (even compared to uBlock), and
almost every site can be made functional in ~ 30 seconds by editing the
settings in a nice grid view if it requires JS.

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FerosMorgen
"You can’t take a single picture of a pig,” said Mr. He, who is trying to add
to his database of more than 200,000 pig images. -Multiply by 400 million
pigs, then imagine the emissions from these data centers!

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wongarsu
I imagine the emissions are a tiny rounding error compared to the emissions of
those pigs. Livestock and the fields to feed them are one of the largest
contributors to climate change. If those servers improve efficiency at all
that will easily offset their emissions

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lolitan
pigman

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romanr
Straight from yesterday’s Joe Rogan podcast!

So this is the next step. First human-pig chimera hybrids. Now their
population is so big that they need to develop facial recognition.

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newsbinator
This sounds like one of the (few?) classes of problems that blockchain can
solve best.

Get every pig tagged and on the blockchain. Then a quick scan tells you where
it came from, where it's been, and who else it encountered along the way.

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moreira
Replace “blockchain” with “database” and everything you said still applies.

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taneq
I'm no blockchain fanboy but I believe the distinguishing features are
"decentralized", "permanent" and "verifiable". If you put that stuff in a
database, someone can change the database.

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krenzo
If someone can change a database, then why couldn't someone change data before
being entered into a blockchain?

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jacobush
That is still an issue but blockchain-ish tech solves the "double spend of
pig". I.e. you can't sell the same pig to many slaughter houses.

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Yetino
Except when you own more than 30% of the pigs then you have a higher chance to
double spend a pig

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kkarakk
that is doubly true for the owner of the database,atleast with a chain you can
tell when manipulation is going on(on a long enough timeline)

