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Spy Fly
opencity writes "CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."
Once they perfect the fly, next it's ants, cockroaches etc.
Ants completely immune to insecticide, crawling into people's houses, looking and listening to everything happening in every room.
Ants crawling into keyboards and sensing keystrokes; into monitors and recording displays;
Insects in cars, flying around the sky, networking and collecting data.
Once the prototypes are worked out, and production is tooled up, it'll be viable to implement 100% surveillance of a entire resident populations.
Or, with extreme micromechanical advances, it'll be devices smaller than a human cell, resistant to human antibodies, that can enter via the nasal passages, travel through the bloodstream, sneak past the blood-brain barrier, and embed into various centres around the brain, including the speech centre. Thus such devices will have the ability to read a portion of human thought (the verbal compenent at least), encode verbal thoughts into a data stream, and use the brain's electricity to power a transmitter, sending the encoded thoughts out to external surveillance insects for collection into government databases.
George Orwell's coined word 'thoughtcrime' will take on a much more literal meaning.
This is one of the most frightening developments I've ever seen. The only thing that might hold it in check is an underground movement of people developing technological counter-measures.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
A long time ago they had a series of kid's science fiction books about a kid inventor named Danny Dunn, and one book, Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy was about a robotic dragonfly that could fly around and spy on people. He flew it with a helmet and gloves that foretold of modern virtual reality, because he could feel in his gloves whatever the dragonfly landed on. He ended up destroying it in fears the technology would land in the wrong hands and be used for sinister (Orwellian?) purposes. Anybody else remember reading this one?
> due to the fact that humanity cannot use them responsibly.
:)
Humanity can't handle the technology fire responsible. Neither cars, AC, household equipment, food...
> Too much money is spend on stupid shit like this and not enough money is spent on educating the masses.
This money is spend for education. Well, not for the masses, but still.
>What good is spending 350-400 billion a year on [...]
Agreed. But know consider it the other way around. Do you really want well educated masses?
Able to criticise the current goverment?
> What the hell? If Nano Technology weapons start to appear, I have absolutely no faith that humanity will be able to handle it.
Neither have I faith that humanity will be able to handle nuclear or biological weapons. Still we managed it somehow. Quite on the verge of destruction, but still...
But why should intelligent enlightened people create technologies which dumbass hawks in government will use irresponsibly, to spy on people, harrass, control, and kill people with?
Spying on, harassing, controlling, and killing people is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on who it's been done to e.g. Al Quaeda, Nazis.
Oh and lets not forget it will eventually spread to people like bin laden, and the next hitler.
Unfortunately it probably will eventually regardless of what the U.S. does. After all there are other countries in the world capable of developing new technologies.
Look, geeks in slashdot may be intelligent enough to handle these technologies, but the average idiot, would destroy the world with it.
Care to be more condescending and elitist. Somehow the world has survived through 50+ years of the Cold War and associated nuclear arms race despite the non-existence of Slashdot and the fact that most leaders were not geek-types.
Governments invest hundreds of billions in weapons, but next to nothing in education, the US government spends less than japan in educating the masses yet spends 350-400 billion on its military.
Gee, where to start with this.
First of all the U.S. is a very wealthy nation - we can afford guns, butter, AND a health plan for the elderly. The U.S. spends a lot on defense and a lot on education. In fact I believe the per pupil expenditure in the U.S. is greater than most western countries. It's also not clear that education spending beyond a certain level even correlates with better educational achievement. Here in the U.S. it's generally true that the school districts that spend the most per student typically have the worst academic performance.
Secondly, choosing to spend more on defense is not as irrational as you make it sound. After all the consequences of having a deficient military defense include the deaths of millions of fellow citizens and the destruction of your country. Compared to this, the price of having a less than perfect educational system seems very minor.
Furthermore, U.S. defense spending also has beneficial effects for the world at large. For instance the U.S. military pretty much guarantees the Freedom of the Seas for the rest of the world and keeps piracy to a minimum. Global trade could not exist without this quiet protection. It also has a dampening effect on regional rivalries and allows other countries (such as Japan) to get by with minimal defense spending since they're under the U.S. protection umbrella.
Terrorism is caused by ignorance, Hate is caused by ignorance, and both of these are usually results of poor education, lack of knowledge, low intelligence, etc.
Wrong. Terrorism (and hate) may have several causes, but it's doubtful that ignorance and lack of education is among them. After all most of the senior leadership of Al Queda is well educated and familiar with western society. Bin Laden himself actually lived in Europe for a while, and several of the 9/11 hijackers had advanced degrees and had lived in the U.S. and Europe for years. They may hate the U.S. (and western society in general) but it's certainly not because they're ignorant of it or uneducated in general. Sometimes it's intimate familiarity that breeds the most murdurous kind of hate - e.g. Hutus/Tutsis in Rwanda, Serbs/Croats/Bosnians in Yugoslavia.
Knowledge and education are great things, but they're no panacea for all human woes.
The USA responed to the Soviet attempt to outflank Nato through control of areas that were not part of the NATO alliance. Failure to respond to the threat of Soviet Imperlism would have been as suicidal as The UK and France's attempts at appeasing Hitler almost turned out to be.
Standing Idly by while a hostile state that has made it's intentions to amass enough power to overcome you clear is an incredible act of foolishness.
The USSR's policies started the Cold War. It's insistance on attempts to export it's form of government made ending it impossible.
The "end the Cold War" nonsense in the west was seldom anything other than a attempt to end any attempt to foil Soviet Imperalism without even pretending to ask for anything in return from the Soviet Union, and ammounted to a call for an abject surrender to an Expansionist Power.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est