The Technological Singularity

by Murray Shanahan

A fine example of apparently spontaneous innovation was reported in 2002 by a team of scientists from Oxford led by animal cognition researcher Alex Kacelnik.4 They were studying tool use in captive New Caledonian crows (an especially clever species), using an experimental apparatus comprising a small bucket containing food and a tall tube. To challenge the birds, the bucket was lowered into the tube, so that the handle was just out of reach. The birds were provided with pieces of bent wire, which they soon learned to use as hooks to lift the food-bucket out. However, on one occasion, when no hooks were available to the birds, only a piece of straight wire was left in their enclosure. Without ever having been trained to do so, one of the birds, Betty, jammed one end of the wire into a hole in the apparatus and bent it into a hook, which she then used to retrieve the food.