With precision is too vague. The chimpanzee actually chooses what to see: scrolls, watches chimp videos, swipes off boring snake videos, etc. It's said they are roughly as intelligent as a toddler, and it certainly looks that way. Awesome.
This sounds like a good demonstration of how mindless the activity of scrolling through Instagram truly is. (Even a monkey can do it).
It's similar to watching TV or mindlessly browsing the web for non-intellectual activities. Perhaps we should be concerned about the impact of these technologies on our evolution as a species. There does seem to be supporting research for this (sorry for not providing links/ref).
I used to play with an idea to build kiosks for wild chimps with video phone recording software. With an interface tuned for them, I wonder if you could build social software that actually provided utility to the chimpanzees. I can imagine something like TikTok being able to send news or otherwise connect them in a meaningful way.
Impressive, but I would be more impressed if it started posting and generating followers, then monetizing the followers into a media empire. Isn't that the whole point of instagram?
There's already a monkey selfie created by a wildlife photographer who set up a camera that monkeys could activate to try to get a picture of them. It's embroiled in a copyright dispute over whether the photographer or the monkey owns the photo:
> The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright
> In April 2018, the appeals court affirmed that animals can not legally hold copyrights and expressed concern that PETA's motivations had been to promote their own interests rather than to protect the legal rights of animals.
Back in the old days there was slot of talk about how hard computers were to use, and how much work remained to be done to make user interfaces usable.
If this is the video I'm thinking of (can't open it at work), the elephant is chained to a post while painting. These types of "sanctuaries" are nothing of the sort, they exploit animals for tourist $.
There are tourist-friendly elephant sanctuaries that are built on respecting the animals' personal space; Elephant Nature Park in Thailand is one. Tourists are basically only allowed to observe the elephants in a forest/jungle habitat. At other places, tourists are allowed to hug and play with baby elephants, and the animals are trained to put up with it, while the mothers are chained and kept apart from the babies during "tourist time".
FWIW, I don't see any chains in the video, but it does seem more likely that they were trained abusively (like circus elephants) to get them to do this.
Not entirely: the standard behaviour of navigation on iOS is to allow swiping from only the left edge to go back. It seems that Instagram added the ability to swipe left from anywhere on the screen, not just the edge.
