China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces

So farmers who raise pigs for slaughter worry about the cruelty of ear tags! The A.I. technology is used to prescribe excercise! Their coughs are monitored! And China is using this facial recognition technology to improve the “care” of pigs, which makes me think of guinea pigs. Not people. Definitely not. Even when Alibaba is involved. Mmmmm Hmmm. China is the place where thousands of dead pigs have been found in rivers in years past. If only they had been photographed and databases so each could have been identified and given a thoughtful burial. My personal favorite aspect of this article: the disease sweeping across China is African swine fever. Like “Africanized” killer bees, it comes from THERE, not here, and certainly not China. At first I thought this piece was humor.

While you're at it, take a picture of their tails too. A happy, healthy pig will have a corkscrew tail extending out from its body. Anytime you see a pig's tail hanging straight down, you know something's wrong with the animal. Seriously.

Factory farming is a cruel evil that must be abolished on moral and environmental grounds. Hog farms have destroyed waterways in the United States with all the pollution they create and not to mention flus and other diseases that have killed humans as well. Swine flu took out many young people in 2009, but it was believed to be incubated in a hog farm in Mexico that was a supplier to the American Food company Cargill. it is not a safe food supply on many levels.

Strategic Pork Reserve. I’ll be adding that to my Strategic Wine, Chocolate and Cheese Reserves. Be Prepared!

If this technology works, perhaps it can be used to identify fowl. Presently the vector for bird flu into humans is tremendously complex and, to my knowledge, no present technology can trace individual birds to producers to understand the possible origins of a mutation or breakout. This technology would have tremendous importance not just to food producers and shippers but public health officials. The value of having such a technology would be very great, and not just in China.

When the AI looks from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; is it already impossible to say which is which?

Hmm, isn't the more relevant bit of information that there is an outbreak of "African swine fever" sweeping through China's pig population... humans are carriers... no vaccine or cure... I mean, am I the only one who reads dystopian fiction here??

Most smaller producers already recognize their livestock as well as family resemblance. If African swine fever does in fact produce a fever, wouldn't that be a better screening method? Like in an airport. Pigs are highly intelligent, and "tech" enabling them to increase or decrease barn temperature (up and down snout-pressed buttons) has shown to save money on heating bills.

They're just beta testing face recognition technology for humans.

I suppose when the technology accidentally flags a photo of Xi Jinping, the effort will be discontinued.

The Chinese diet has too much meat in it. Even more than ours does.

Skip the pig facial recognition tech, go with the "Waking Ned Devine" advice and buy lots of fruity soaps. ... ... But seriously, I am in utter disbelief that I just typed the words "pig facial recognition tech."

Mildly eye catching title but after I read the article I had to ask myself a couple of questions, what have I learned and is this in any possible way a reasonably valuable use of my time. The answer to both questions was a resounding no. This in the end was not newsworthy in anything except possibly a veterinary journal. I've seen a lot of this kind of wasted space in the NYT over the last few years. It's beginning to be annoying. Perhaps it's time for the NYT editorial staff needs to revisit their notes from Journalism 101, what is the purpose of a newspaper.

It's time for a sanity check on 'pig facial recognition'. Fact: every farmer everywhere else in the world marks their livestock with a 'bovine ear tag', with an optional RFID tag for easy computer recognition. Fact: U.S. technology for police and surveillance equipment requires an export license. U.S. technology for pig farming does not require an export license. Fact: complex systems and software for 'pig facial recognition' can be adapted overnight to 'human facial recognition'.

Saying that they will revolutionize pig farming with blockchain and cloud computing is parody, right?

Just look at the barn. Pigs are smart creatures. How can a creature be happy in that barn? I had some of the best pork ever in Kauai where pigs roam pastures. Isn’t that a better solution?

"You can’t take a single picture of a pig,” said Mr. He, who is trying to add to his database of more than 200,000 pig images. -Multiply by 400 million pigs, then imagine the emissions from these data centers!