Artificial intelligence can do a lot of tricks, but it’s hard to imagine it bounding after a ball, licking your hand happily or barking at squirrels.
And apparently AI can’t do much more than chase its tail when it comes to sniffing out things that could pose trouble — such as diseases that threaten cherry orchards or electronic devices that are up to no good.
Dogs can, though.
In the past few days, we’ve published stories explaining how some specially trained dogs can help police investigators find maliciously placed tracking devices, while others can detect harmful viruses in cherry trees.
The Yakima Police Department introduced a dog named Router to the Yakima Domestic Violence Coalition just last month. The year-and-a-half-old Labrador retriever has already proved himself by searching out devices secretly placed in the vehicles of two local people. The devices are commonly used by stalkers who could pose domestic violence risks.
Router, whose work is fully funded by grants, is also a great ally as police investigate cases of child sexual exploitation and cybercrimes. And he’s a natural at comforting victims and witnesses.
His sensitive nose picks up the trail of hard drives, cellphones, memory cards, thumb drives and other electronic gadgets.
Out in the orchards, other trained dogs are getting good at rooting out little cherry disease viruses and the X-disease pathogen in trees.
“Dog testing is showing positive results, given that they can examine the whole tree,” Corina Serban, who leads Washington State University’s little cherry disease program in Yakima, reported at Cherry Institute meeting last month.
That’s a big advantage, because other early detection methods can only analyze parts of each tree, not the whole thing. Earlier detection could help local growers head off an expensive problem that’s been spreading at an alarming rate across Central Washington.
Could advanced technology do any of that? Maybe — but it hasn’t yet. And you can be sure that if it did, the cost wouldn’t be cheap and sooner or later somebody would figure out a way to hack it.
Dogs, on the other hand, work for cheap.
The disease-detecting dogs in the orchards seem happy with a chance to play with a toy for a few minutes after they’ve completed their tasks. Router’s content with some kibble whenever he tracks something down.
And seriously, what’s more user-friendly, a creepy robot voice that will probably ask you to accept cookies or a furry face with earnest eyes asking if you’d share just one of those french fries?
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