Learning AI #36

Fishery observer Keith Davis was on the deck of the Panamanian tuna vessel Victoria, about 500 miles off the coast of Peru, watching a mid-ocean transfer of catch between two boats. He was seen at 2:50 p.m. By 3:00 p.m. he was gone. The captain waited almost four hours to start a search. After 72 hours covering hundreds of square miles, the search was called off. His survival suit and life jacket were still in his cabin.

Davis had 16 years of experience and a biology degree. He'd told colleagues he was worried about the violence he'd seen at sea, and about being trapped alone with people who didn't want him watching them.

A fishery observer's entire job is to be an unwanted witness. NOAA and similar agencies place trained biologists on commercial fishing boats to record what's actually caught, and confirm crews follow quota and gear rules. The observer's job is to write down the facts about what is caught, how much of it is kept, and if illegal “by-catch” (think dolphin) are returned to the sea.

That puts one person, often for weeks at a time, alone on a boat with a crew that has a financial reason to hate his guts, in international waters where no coast guard has jurisdiction, and with no independent way to call for help.

A nation has jurisdiction up to 12 miles off its coast and has economic exclusivity up to 200 miles, meaning other countries need permission to fish the waters or mine the seabed the for oil. After 200 miles, it is truly the wild west, or as it is known, the high seas.

The highs seas account for more than 40 percent of our oceans and there is effectively, no clean legal system to manage them. Pirates are real.

The Association for Professional Observers has documented roughly 25 observer deaths and disappearances over the last few decades, with several of the cases still unsolved.

Camera-based electronic monitoring has been legal to substitute for human observers on some Alaska boats since 2018, and it's spreading.

Reviewing that footage used to mean a person scrubbing through hours of tape by hand. Now machine-learning models scan it and tag fish species automatically, and The Nature Conservancy's open-source system reports species counts that, in its own testing, rival expert human reviewers, with results delivered within hours instead of weeks.

None of this replaces observers outright yet. Every program running today still has a person validating what the AI flags, and cameras can't collect the biological samples, that fisheries scientists actually need.

Crews haven't universally welcomed the swap either. A camera doesn't get tired, doesn't get intimidated, and doesn't disappear off the back of a boat, which is exactly why some fishermen resist having one installed.

The use of AI in this case replaces a human in a dangerous job with a camera and some back-end technology. It takes a person out of harm’s way, but how will the fishing industry, one of the oldest professions on Earth, react to Big Brother watching over them?

Things I think about

Bowhead whales can live more than 200 years. Scientists have found 19th-century harpoon fragments embedded in whales harvested in modern times, meaning the animal survived a hunt sometime around the Civil War and lived on for another century or more.