Welcome to my new series, Imagining Humanity's Future, where I come up with or take a new spin on ideas concerning the future of mankind.
These ideas can be for the good of mankind, or the bad. I want to have fun with this; some of my ideas will be silly and others will be serious. The first one I've come up with falls somewhere in between silly and serious.
I was reading about crows that were trained to pick up trash at a French theme-park here. Essentially, the crows fly around collecting bits of trash and put it in a special bin that gives them a treat each time. Crows are intelligent creatures and decided to start putting rocks and other small items in, rather than what they were trained to collect.
Photo by Aneth Charles on Unsplash
What stops the crows from collecting items right out of peoples' hands or stealing trash from other crows? Thinking about the problems that come with training crows to do tasks like this got me thinking, "Why are we even training crows to do this? Humans are fully capable of throwing their own trash away, but we don't, because we're awful."
Instead of training crows to pick up after humans, researchers should train them to bite off a human's finger every time one of us litters. Our streets will be so clean. Nobody would risk throwing a cigarette butt or a food wrapper on the ground with our watchful, dark trash guardians of the sky.
I don't think it would take long for people to figure out that littering isn't okay, especially after seeing the select few dim-wits that decided the rules didn't apply to them. I couldn't find any studies related to mass finger loss in a population and the effects it has on that population's economy, but I don't think too many people would keep littering after the first few lost fingers.
Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
Okay, say the crows get carried away and start eating fingers for fun or out of hunger. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as that will create a boom in the ergonomics and prosthetics industries. People will be needed to train others crows to attack the ones that eat fingers, more researchers and scientists will be needed for the ergonomics and prosthetic industries, factories will need to be built to manufacture the products, and people will need to manufacture them once the factories are built.
So worse case scenario, the crows like fingers too much and accidentally create an economic boom.