Dogluk LaunchPad

Vision and Mission :

Dogluk gazes towards the blue sky of an expansion-upliftment of the canine consciousness that is embodied in new ways of relating as partners in shared health and understanding. Dogluk will embark on this voyage by creating interfaces that augment the ability for dogs to detect disease by transforming their olfactory perceptual abilities into digital and multidimensional signatures.

Values — Meeting the Canine Gaze

The core value of Dogluk is one of canid comradeship — a paradigm that sees dogs as equals holding our mutual connectivity, shared responsibility, and interdependent well-being above all.* Canine consent and welfare will be non-negotiable priors and striving towards the flourishing of all dogs will remain an unwavering priority.

Dognosis — Canine Black Box

Dogs are capable of detecting, in real-time and with a high degree of accuracy, at least 16 different types of diseases in humans, animals, and plants, with a 2021 study finding covid-sniffing dogs to be more accurate than gold-standard PCR. However, large-scale deployment of disease detecting dogs — dognosis — is forestalled by its black-box nature that disallows standardization, replication, and regulatory assurance.

DogBytes — Bridging Umwelts

Dogluk aims to light up this black box by two streams of photons. Insight from 4E cognitive science, canine science, and evolutionary neuroscience will be synthesized to develop theoretical models for Dogluk to ground and orient. Advances in neurotechnology, biometrics, and machine learning will be leveraged to build novel canine smart suits - DogBytes - that transform traditional analog-binary barks to digital-multidimensional neuro-behavioral signatures of brain-waves, sniff-patterns, heart-beats, motion-postures and vocalizations.

Theory and tools will be put into practice by working with professional human-dog dyads on disease detection paradigms to produce data that allows algorithms to map digital signatures to specific disease odour volatilomes. The ultimate goal is to predict with a high degree of fidelity what a dog is smelling from her digital olfactory signature. With enough data it may even be possible to map and decode smells from untrained dogs but this feasibility remains unknown.

Science and technology will build off each other in feedforward loops that constantly refine each other. In the process, Dogluk’s efforts should shed light on outstanding unanswered questions in cognition such as cracking the olfactory code as well as providing solutions to on-the-ground problems in achieving practical and economical deployment of dognosis.

Even if Dognosis hits an unscalable wall, DogBytes will further our understanding of the canine mind and body and better allow us to communicate, collaborate and heal collectively.

Organization — DoglukDAO

Dogluk aspires to be an organization rich in affordances for all those who feel called by her vision. To achieve this, Dogluk will be structured as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that builds on blockchain technology to realize horizontal action and collective ownership. DoglukDAO will act as the custodian for patents, data, code, papers, and other IP generated by consenting contributing members who will be entrusted governance responsibilities in accordance with the share of value created. DoglukDAO will intentionally be positioned in a flexible manner for constant adaptation and evolution in actualizing Dogluk’s mission and vision.

Staircase — Mass Dognosis and DogBits

Successful progress of Dogluk will create several short-to-medium-term novel applications with profound potential to benefit humans and animals. Three such exciting applications are -

• Existing infrastructure at airports can be augmented to create a canine pandemic task force that increases and complements measures to increase state’s biosecurity.

• Mobile canine public health teams could increase detection and prevention of communicable diseases like malaria, bovine viral diarrhea and parasitic worm infections in underserved areas in humans and animals.

• Widespread adoption of Dogluk technology could enable continuous at-home health monitoring of both guardians and fellow dogs increasing odds for early diagnosis of chronic diseases like cancer as well as tracking health parameters of the dog-wearer herself.

Horizons — DogVerse, Smell Maps and Poiesis Tech

Sustained progress of Dogluk can engender revolutionary shifts in the way we think about our world. Three such potential shifts are -

• Future DogByte suits could re-enchant the Metaverse by creating the possibility of fleshed out bio-avatars of dogs in augmented and programmed realities.

• The wide-scale digitalisation of olfaction will create an entirely new modality of data to understand reality.

• Dogluk success will reveal the doors to other Umwelt-bridging Poiesis technology* with species such as corvids, elephantidae, and cetaceans.

Closing Barks — Dogged Perseverance

The ideas presented here are bold, ambitious, and untested to a degree that warrants close scrutiny and healthy skepticism. The dash of whimsical levity likely does little to assuage friendly doubters and can only aggravate incredulous disbelievers.

Not much will be said beyond the frank acknowledgement of the enormity of the paradigm-shift necessary, the remarkable nature and unplumbed depth of the human-canine bond, and the willingness of humans and canines to doggedly persevere through great challenges and odds to realize a brighter future.

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Foundations

Uncannis Familiaris, Final Essay : Expanding A Science of Consciousness - UC Berkeley, Akash Kulgod, 2021 [Uncannis, Kulgod, 2021]

Towards a 4E Approach to Canine Olfaction, Cognitive Science Honors Thesis - UC Berkeley, Akash Kulgod, 2022 [4E Canine, Kulgod, 2022]

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References

 ”mutual connectivity, shared responsibility, and interdependent well-being” is taken from David Delgado Shorter’s 2016 ‘Spirituality’ in the The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History

Poiesis as a mode of technology is from Martin Heidgger’s The question concerning technology.

Cite As

[Dogluk LaunchPad, 2022]

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