Why researchers are starting to pay closer attention to animals’ interactions with tech

Right under our noses, animals have developed their own relationship with human technology. Dogs are microchipped, monitored by home security robots, and trained not to bark with “autonomous” shock collars. The agriculture industry uses Fitbit devices to track livestock health. A few Big Ag firms have even deployed facial recognition-esque technology to identify individual cows. Wildlife in several major cities, including New York, are now regularly tracked with cameras, as well as temperature and motion sensors.

The BBC has an entire series, called Spy in the Wild, about how different animals, including sloths, dolphins, and monkeys, relate to robotic counterparts. (One arguably cruel plot point involved confusing a family of meerkats with an animatronic cobra complete with a slithering tongue and relatively convincing hiss).

Those myriad interactions underscore that while humans are developing complicated, and in many ways harmful, relationships to inventions like computers, the internet, and artificial intelligence, the same is happening for animals. While animals certainly don’t use technology the way humans do, their lives could still be drastically transformed by it, in ways ranging from amusing to liberating to potentially dystopian.

This is where the researchers behind a relatively new field called animal-computer interaction come in.

“The field as a whole is trying to understand what these natural user interfaces for animals look like,” says David Roberts, a North Carolina State University computer science professor who studies animal-computer interaction. “Because the asymmetries and differences in the communication abilities that we have—as human animals versus nonhuman animals—make onboarding and training for animals to use computers a pretty hard challenge.”

The community of people focused on animal-computer interaction is still small. The main conference devoted to this area just celebrated its 10th anniversary—and only a handful of research institutes scattered across the world, including in places like Haifa, Israel, and in Indiana, study the topic. Still, the breadth of challenges raised by animal use of technology may mean the field deserves far more focus than it receives. Consider that tech isn’t showing up just in our homes but also in zoos, in agricultural settings, in cities with large animal populations, and in the wild.

Much of the field’s current research focuses on designing new technology that might help animals. One recent study evaluated the benefit of installing a microphone into a dog’s collar to create a “bite detection algorithm” that may help evaluate when dogs are stressed. Similarly, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab have proposed a modified artificial incubator called TamagoPhone that’s designed to transmit sound between a bird and its eggs—with the hope of increasing both the survival rate of chicks and facilitating a more natural relationship. (Artificial incubators, rather than nests, are often used in farming.)

Another major focus is on designing technological systems to help animals and humans interact. There’s a particular focus on building technologies to help improve communication between guide dogs and their human companions.

But a major concern is that while technology might help animals, it could hurt them too. Take drones. While pets might appear to find the devices fun—YouTube is full of videos of dogs taking down consumer drones—the technology has the potential to stress or even injure the animals, as a study by the University of Haifa’s Tech4Animals lab revealed in 2016.

Sadly, technology designed to make animals’ lives better could also be used to neglect them. Robotic feeders and autonomous litter boxes might improve convenience but also help humans justify paying less attention to their pets. And surveillance technologies that keep better track of cows and monitor their welfare could also be used to monitor animals’ reproductive cycles—with an eye on boosting a dairy farm or slaughterhouse’s profits, some leading researchers in animal-computer interaction warned in a paper last year.

Technology, the scholars argued, cannot be designed for animals without considering the ways in which animals are already used—and abused—in contemporary society. At the same time, emerging technologies could further complicate animal-computer interactions. Take two examples: iRobot, the now Amazon-owned company behind Roomba, famously had to retrain its home robot AI to not run over and smear pet poop on the floor; and Waymo once attempted to train its self-driving car software to recognize horses.

A good amount of research in the nascent field is devoted to better understanding what, exactly, animals comprehend and feel about technology. Most of us are not experts in animal behavior, even if we think we really know our pets. And humans have the capacity to make profoundly incorrect guesses about what certain animal behaviors mean.

For example, a research study conducted by Anna Zamansky and her colleagues at the University of Haifa analyzed what dogs think of digital versions of games like fetch, based on ostensibly funny videos owners had uploaded to the internet. Analyzing the animals’ behavior while playing the game, Zamansky said, revealed that dogs weren’t having fun, even if their pet parents thought they were. Instead, the dogs were left unbelievably frustrated when presented with a game they couldn’t ever really win.

“How do we even ask the question: What is the animal’s experience?” Zamansky mused to Fast Company. “One of the most interesting questions” to ponder, Zamansky said, is whether we humans can know what animals need “when they have no way to communicate their needs.”

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