"Just like us humans, learning to drive and navigate seemed to have a relaxing effect on the rats. In a control experiment, they found rats had higher levels of cortisol when being driven around in remote-controlled cars than when they were allowed to steer themselves."
Seems like a terrible control imo for me to say driving intrinsically has a relaxing effect. A better control would be rats doing nothing vs rats driving and seeing if the rats doing nothing were more stressed than the driving rats, meaning the driving rats were actually lowering their baseline stress.
In this experiment the control of being a passenger in a terrifying vehicle moving all by itself with no autonomy or control over the situation can quite likely be the thing causing elevated stress, rather than rats driving depressing levels of stress. Imagine if someone suddenly strapped you into a bubble that started moving by itself and you have no idea why this is happening, no control over the situation, or where you're going or what's going to happen to you. Stressful af. Hell, people get stressed just being in the passenger seat watching someone else drive.
The vast majority of people prefer having autonomy and control over their own motion vs being helplessly navigated by someone else you don't know/trust with zero context and no idea what's going on. A little misleading if this reflects the actual study.
Two dogs in separate rooms with floors that can give them a mild shock. Arranged so they get exactly the same shock. One dog can turn off the shock by performing an action; the other has no control.
This experiment turns the second dog into a shivering nervous wreck... but the first is fine. Same shocks; only difference was control.
>A better control would be rats doing nothing vs rats driving and seeing if the rats doing nothing were more stressed than the driving rats, meaning the driving rats were actually lowering their baseline stress.
What if it's the opposite? What if rats that do nothing are under a higher stress and driving simply allows them to get back to their baseline stress?
That’s a different thing, the actual control was as you describe (measuring stress markers over time).
The thing mentioned appear to be an attempt to confirm some previous study's finding about self-sufficiency, which is pretty much related to what you say about autonomy and control.
Never assume bad science when bad journalism would suffice.
Furthermore, the rats that lived in enriched environments drove for the joy of driving, whereas the standard caged rats only drove for the food rewards.
"As hypothesized, the animals living in the enriched environment performed better at the driving test, indicating that they did a better job at learning a new complex skill. The enriched rats also maintained a strong interest in the car, even after the reward of food was removed.
On the other hand, the researchers were surprised at the lack of interest shown by the non-enriched rats and their level of underachievement shown in the driving task. "
Until they put the rats in rush hour traffic, then see how relaxed they are :-)
This was a really a fun paper, I'd love to see it reproduced. Perhaps they could compare mice behavior to rat behavior, although given their size it might be more interesting to train a mouse to ride a tiny motorcycle.
I took my first driving lesson on an automatic today, and it was kind of a surreal out of body experience. I felt like I was playing a video game. Maybe because I could control something that was moving the world around me?
Reminds me of the chapter of Blink where Gladwell delves into the correlation between a doctor's bedside manner / tone of voice and the likelihood of them being sued for malpractice. The whole thesis of the chapter seems to be that people are more willing to sue docs who are less nice, and then at the end he says if you don't like your doc, your intuition is probably right!
If the rats are able to communicate with each other then I think you might find the consensus would not necessarily be in your favour.
What happens if you get allocated five 'teenage' rats who just love pushing your Tesla to its limits! I mean it's scary enough when it's just me and the Autopilot on the autobahn at 240 km/h.
This is where my mind went as well. But perhaps we could find better uses like rats trained to drive mini 4x4 solar powered vehicles through a crop stopping at weeds with their little machine and plucking up the weeds all while not damaging the crop.
"During World War II, Project Pigeon (later Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviorist B.F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-controlled guided bomb."
OMG at the bottom of the page is a link to a bat-bomb
"Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target."
At one point some bats escaped, roosted under a fuel tank, set fire to the testing facility and burned down a hangar as well as the overseeing General's car.
The bats needed to be put into hibernation to get them into the bombs, but sometimes they weren't awake enough before being dropped, so the bats would plough into the ground still frozen.
The project was cancelled just after the invention of the atom bomb, on the grounds that it might do a bit more damage than a few bats. Dr Adams, the dentist who came up with the bat idea, still thought his was better. Don't disagree.
> At one point some bats escaped, roosted under a fuel tank, set fire to the testing facility and burned down a hangar as well as the overseeing General's car.
I wonder if this was the start of the trope about the experimental subject escaping containment and destroying the secret facility.
To make this idea more concrete: why not use the brain of the rat (or any similar animal) in place of the NN, I.e. remove the brain in embryo stage and train it with visual stimuli relevant to the problem to be solved.
I’d wager that a rat brain would be more powerful than any state of the art AI systems in solving complex tasks such as this. How to sustain it biologically and train using optical paths are complex problems but I could be easier than training the animal and much more scalable: make NN layers with these brain-based nodes.
It's not clear how the BM cookie technology works (https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie) but is understood to be hardware based, i.e. not brain in a vat, biological technology I described above.
Well, much like a service dog (or a horse!), you'd have to train the rat, and feed it, and change its cage. It would be less expensive to care for than those larger animals for sure, but still a hassle.
I don't think it would work. Aside from the ethical questions, I'm not aware of animals being used to perform complex tasks without human supervision and care. And if you have the human in there, you don't need a rat.
I remember a short-story where a cat learns to pilot a customized glider. It has always made me wonder about the plausibility of it. Were I not allergic to cat, I would probably have built a customized controller for a roomba and see if they are interested in learning to drive it.
I really wonder how far animals can in tool usage if we were to build custom-designed ones for them.
Not really surprising.
From what I have seen of rats, they are very good at spatial perception and physical manipulation of their environment, where they easily outperform most cats and dogs I have had the pleasure of knowing.
A smart rat clearly enjoys exploration and challenge, and likes to be in control - it would appear more unexpected if these joyrides didn't relax them.
ah, that is a nice movie but no, this is from early 1990s (or maybe late 1980s). The premise was kinda similar to Stuart Little but I remember there were multiple mice who were able to talk to each other, some toy car driving scene and a boy who perhaps owned them.
I see a lot of comments joking about rats driving Tesla's and maybe Uber could use them, obviously not but are there any real world application where this could possible be useful? The one I came up with was rats in a crop driving little solar powered 4x4 machines around pulling out weeds. Any other thoughts on how these could realistically be used?
I have a driving licence, but I don't drive and haven't for years. It's way too stressful, being responsible for a high-speed machine and all the lifes of people passing by, not even speaking about my own or passenger's. I can relax in a train, but definitely not in a car ;p
That's what I'd call disruptive technology. Imaginative even. I'd bet the dumbest flea on one of those rats is still way smarter than the gaudiest most over-hyped “AI” our professional snake-oil salesmen could throw at us.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart when posting to HN? We'd be grateful.
The story is that learning to drive relaxes rats.