Well, it looks like the Google X team has developed a search algorithm to identify cats in a digital image or video. This has always been difficult because AI is good at many things, but often not so good at recognizing what’s in a photo. Obviously there are military applications for all of this, for example an algorithm could go through a satellite photo and find anomalies, therefore targeting the enemy. But what about a more domestic need, something like choosing cats or animals in a YouTube video?

It’s kind of funny where high tech comes from. People like to stay alive, so high technology comes in the form of medical devices, just like people like to be entertained, so we find technology being developed for television, movies, and the Internet. We already mentioned military technology earlier regarding satellite photo imagery, and who knows if we put it all together, maybe you can find your missing cat in Google Earth’s “real time” feature. No, Google Earth doesn’t work in real time yet, but I imagine in the next five years it might.

Now, what if we take the facial recognition technologies that we have for humans that are using Facebook and other places to review digital photos and use it for other animals like dogs, cats, and dolphins? Did you know that they video dated chimpanzees on the other side of the world? They found that if they showed the chimpanzees images of potential mates on video, they could figure out which chimpanzees to pair up. This way they wouldn’t fight, and the potential for them to have offspring would be much higher.

Does the same work for Dolphins at Sea world? I bet it could. If every human face is slightly different, and every dog, cat, or dolphin is slightly different, perhaps we don’t need to attach sensors to wild animals to track them? In some cases, we can use facial recognition and simply place cameras in places where they are most likely to pass through during migration season. Or, as our satellites get better, maybe we can basically recognize a particular animal by its features from afar? Does it make sense to categorize all animals, just like we are doing with people?

Is it a good use of digital data to store it in the cloud? Potentially, we will learn quite a bit by doing this, and since we can, we should. These new algorithms for recognizing animals, and potentially animal facial recognition, is a breakthrough, and computer scientists are discovering new ways to do it. Please consider all this and think about it.