[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Russic

While it's true that if death is our primary concern, we should probably be more afraid of butter than bears... what the hell, I'll bite.

If we looked at this as a legitimate business opportunity to skim money off people who are bad at stats, it isn't a crazy idea. People spend money on copper bracelets to pull bad vibes out of their wrists, so I'm sure they'd buy a bear deterrent. Bonus: because of the stats, you'll be able to gloat about your insane success rates (kinda like Lisa's Tiger Repelling Rock).

Using AI to tackle this problem isn't even a bad idea, we just need to iron out some kinks. What we need is essentially the "Not a Hotdog" app, but for bears. All you'd need is basically a motion activated trail camera that analyzes the image to see if it's a bear or squirrel. If squirrel = do nothing; If bear = explode.

Your issues will be the current state of local AI. Without reliable and fast internet, the computation will have to happen on-device, so you're essentially carting some NVIDIA-powered gaming PC into the woods every single time. And powering it. And keeping it dry. And keeping raccoons from using it to play Call of Duty.

ChatGPT ran some numbers and it seems confident your base cost just to make this thing would be somewhere in the ballpark of $800USD. You could go cheaper, but it'll go off all night and your fellow campers will kill you long before the bears do.

Factoring in marketing, packaging, and other variables, your consumer price is probably creeping towards $3000USD. We've already established your target consumer is bad at math, so maybe this is ok?

I don't understand why you need a zoo. From the sounds of it, you live at Grizzly Ground Zero, so just test it in your driveway.

Which leads me to a further thought: I don't think your target audience is campers as much as it's municipalities and campground operators. In a very strange and un-Sliver sort of way, you're not going far enough. False positives matter a lot less 1km outside the town limits. You're essentially creating a shark net on the beach instead of arming everybody with personal shark deterring <thing that hasn't been invented yet>.

I think turning over detonation of an explosive device to consumer level "AI" is far more terrifying an idea than a bear.