Note: I did not put 80% of these pieces together, nor am I really an expert. I was exposed to most of the ideas by Rick Dygert at the 2017 East Coast Rationalist MegaMeetup.
First things, first—this is going to sound crazy. When I and about 40 other people first heard this idea being presented, everyone gasped or laughed. It took a while for people to take it seriously. I know that it sounds crazy, but a review of the literature makes it seem…not crazy. Maybe even plausible. Worth trying.
Skip to 2 Facts and 1 Early Result: if you already think landmines are a serious but not cost effective problem to solve because it takes too long.
Some facts about landmines:
- “It is estimated that there are 110 million land mines in the ground right now. An equal amount is in stockpiles waiting to be planted or destroyed.
- The cost of removing all existing mines would be $50- to $100-billion.
- According to the ‘International Campaign to Ban Landmines network’, more than 4,200 people, of whom 42% are children, have been falling victim to landmines and ERWs annually in many of the countries affected by war or in post-conflict situations around the world.”
Source: Minesweepers
Some facts about demining: it’s slow, boring and dangerous work according to the military. And lots of people think it isn’t really worth it (and they’ve done the NPV calculations).
Interestingly, what causes it to be not cost effective is that it’s slow. It takes humans, dogs or machines (or all three) a really long time to find each individual landmine. And yes, they are essentially walking through minefields with metal detectors and probes, wearing Kevlar vests, helmets and visors. Since there are normally lots of landmines and you really can’t miss any before you declare an area “landmine free”, it costs a ton to clear an area even using low wage human labor—a deminer in Afghanistan only makes $145/month. And again, it costs a lot even though labor is cheap because it takes a long time, a study in Mozambique looked at a $40m project to clear 20 sq. miles OVER 10 YEARS.
So this leaves the average person (and certainly effective altruist) in the position of essentially thinking landmine clearance isn’t worth it. And they’re right.
Unless you can reduce the cost of clearance by 10,000 times.
And we can.
(This is where everyone’s jaws drop.)
With bees.
(And this where everyone laughs.)
But to convince you, I only need to you to accept 2 facts and that 1 early research effort is worth pursuing further.
2 Facts and 1 Early Result
Fact 1: Bees accurately communicate where sources of nectar are through something called the Waggle Dance.
“Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations.[1][2]…Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.[5]
…
The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the resource being advertised by the dancing bee. The resource can include the location of a food source or a potential nesting site.[7] For cavity-nesting honey bees, like Apis mellifera or Apis nigrocincta, flowers that are located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs.[1][8] The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase. The more excited the bee is about the location, the more rapidly it will waggle, so it will grab the attention of the observing bees, and try to convince them.”
Bees essentially communicate a direction and distance based on the location of the sun and the hive! Cool, interesting, but not unbelievable. As yet unclear how it connects to landmines.
Fact 2: Humans can hijack the waggle dance and train bees to detect things that aren’t nectar using their insanely good sense of smell.
“Sniffer bees or sniffer wasps are insects in the order Hymenoptera that can be trained to perform a variety of tasks to detect substances such as explosive materials or illegal drugs, as well as some human and plant diseases. The sensitivity of the olfactory senses of bees and wasps in particular have been shown to rival the abilities of sniffer dogs, though they can only be trained to detect a single scent each.
Bees and wasps are trained using classical conditioning, being exposed to a particular odour and then rewarded with a sugar solution.[3] Within five minutes they learn to associate the smell with an impending supply of food and this triggers the proboscis extension reflex (sticking out their tongues).[4]
Trained hymenopterans have been shown to successfully detect explosive materials including TNT, Semtex, and C-4 as well as gunpowder and propellants.[3][5] . ”
So bees can be trained to identify the scent of explosives. Now we’re getting somewhere. Oh, and good news, here’s a prototype of a machine that can train bees at scale. The company it was designed for went out of business, but it’s plausible their business model didn’t work, not that their product (tubes of bomb sniffing bees for airports) didn’t work.
At this point, we know that we can train bees to find mines and they can tell each other and highly trained humans where they are with a high degree of accuracy. That’s good and all, but watching bees do the waggle dance is labor intensive and requires highly skilled humans. We haven’t solved the problem yet. Other methods tried involve using thermal imaging to follow bees in coordination with other high tech mechanisms.
- An Early Research Effort Worth Pursuing: We can use computer vision to decode the waggle dance.
From The MIT Technology Review:
“Enter Tim Landgraf and pals at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. These guys have developed a neural network that can automatically decode honeybee waggle dances. “We have developed a system capable of automatically detecting, decoding, and mapping communication dances in real time,” they say. The new method has the potential revolutionize the study of honeybee foraging.
The waggle dance decoding system is simple in principle. It consists of a video camera that records the movement of bees on a honeycomb. This may look like a seething mass of random motion but there is considerable order here.
…
In tests on bees trained to visit a known food source some 300 meters from a hive, Landgraf and co say their system accurately identified the position of the food source over 90 percent of the time. That’s just as good as human observers. But crucially the machine vison system can work on much larger groups of bees over much longer time scales.”
To clarify what these folks have done: they used a $10 Playstation3 Eye camera to watch 2000 bees do the waggle dance and their machine vision software output this map that corresponded with 90% accuracy to the location of artificial feeders:
The full paper including setup and source code are here.
A Quick and Dirty Plan:
If you bring all these things together, then it looks to me like you have a possible plan to map minefields and demine them with blistering speed compared to the status quo.
- Get some test mines.
- Have a third party hide them in an area.
- Buy the bee training machine.
- Build waggle dance decoding rig.
- Rent bees from a nearby apiary.
- Train bees to find landmines.
- Install waggle dance decoding rig in hive.
- Set bees loose.
- Wait 3 days.
- Look at decoding map.
- Check for accuracy.
- Improve on machine vision algorithm as needed.
- When 98% accurate, proceed.
How To Go From Testing To Demining The Whole World
- I am offering to fund the first steps of any serious effort with up to $10,000USD and support further fundraising with additional capital and time/effort.
- Create a self-sustaining business model: use the above plan, but for truffles.
- Create a map of truffles in the Perigord region in early fall.
- Show proof that it’s real by finding one.
- Sell it to the highest bidding trufflieres.
- Fund large scale trials.
- If it’s effective, get OpenPhil and GiveWell involved.
- If it’s not effective enough, simply self-fund by finding commercial applications.
- Demine the whole world.