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I find this article very satisfying because every time I see a story about robotics research where the main objective doesn't seem to be building robots but developing algorithms, I wonder why they wasted time and money building robots. Like, for instance, that research that made rounds in popular science articles a couple of years ago about robots that evolved the ability to lie. Why bother building and programming little robots to physically carry out the task of gathering "food", when the whole thing obviously could have been simulated?

http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/10/12/googles-autonomous-car-takes-to-the-streets/

"She still doesn't look any more realistic than a blowup doll:

http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/01/09/ces2010-roxxxy-truecompanion-worlds-first-sex-robot-preview-nsfw"

Ewww ... that underbite, is English-bulldog-sexy.

Bow, freakin' yuck!

She still doesn't look any more realistic than a blowup doll:

http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/01/09/ces2010-roxxxy-truecompanion-worlds-first-sex-robot-preview-nsfw/

They're obviously going for the niche pre-op tranny market. That's ballsy.

They implanted a module with six neural electrodes into the beetles when they were still in the pupae stage, and so the beetles mature, they have the electronics already embedded into their bodies. At that point, a battery pack and receiver are added, and by sending radio signals, the beetle can be made to take off, land, fly forwards and backwards, and steer left and right.

Source

Alot of /. articles are so-so, some are amazing, and every once in a great while there's one that ... well, kinda scares the shit out of me.

This is one of those articles. Does this article kind of creep you out? ... Are you a little creeped out because you believe beetles may have some form of free will and even if it's "just a beetle" they shouldn't be flown about like some kind of "machine"? What if we managed to create a machine with the intelligence of a Beetle? Not at all an unreasonable prospect... What if instead of reading about a biological breakthrough, you were instead reading about that little thing flying about... if violating the physical, biological beetle's freewill is appalling, should it not be appalling to do the same to the (theoretical) machine we just created? What happens when this gets to human level intelligences?

Rudy Rucker has a few interesting ideas of how this will all turn out, but in the end I believe most of those scenarios are a little too idealistic (but it's ok, because it's just (really good) sci-fi).

I really question if we're ready for this as a species.