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This Week's Government Cyborg Animal
Security writes "The BBC writes "The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later. "."
Anyone catch this in the sidebar?
Dolphins trained to tear off diving gear of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation. Later, syringes placed on dolphin flippers to inject carbon dioxide into divers, who explode. About 40 divers thought to have been killed
Sounds like an idea that could be incorporated into Grand Theft Auto's next version.
From TFA:
The "insect-cyborg" must also "be able to transmit data from relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc." (emphasis added)
Right. I'm off to flyscreen my entire yard. And stock up on Mortein. Given the current trends (at least in the U.S), carrying insect repellant could soon be considered a suspicious act...
And that kids is how I met your mother.
The moral of the story being, the guys who run these programs are not necessarily all that bright, nor do they have that much background in science and engineering. Sometimes they don't even seem able to tell the difference between Hollywood and real engineering. What they do have is millions and millions of dollars to throw at any fantasy you can pitch them. Not that this is really news, if you've paid attention to the development of Star Wars and it's slightly less impossible successor, National Missile Defense.
The Ethical Implications of this plan are just sickeing. We all know it will only be a few years (decades?) before this technology is advanced enough to control every movement that an infected animal makes. Why spend billions of dollars to develope an ASIMO type stand-alone robot for physical labor when you can just jamb $200 neurocontroller into the brain of a fetal monkey and have a basicaly free slave creature? And don't even get me started on the privacy ramificiations. We need to get some international laws established to govern the abuse of tehnologys like this. Training dolphins and dogs for warefare is one thing, but forcing them to act with microchips inside thier brains is another entirely.
Wrong. The episode you mentioned has nicotine-addicted tobacco beetles laying their eggs in the tobacco, so second hand smokers who breath in the fumes (and don't have a steady stream of cigarettes) are eaten alive by the hatching beetles. Nicotine in the lung cells and all that.
For those of you who dislike messing with PDFs, here's the google cache in HTML Format
Well, they already had RC roaches back in 2001: 1, 2.
The equipment on both of those looks off-the-shelf and testing-mode rather than optimised for size. Granted, those are big roaches, but you can betcha that 5 years on things have got a lot smaller; and if it goes towards use, then it'll be better funded and use smaller components.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
It could be useful. I.E. development of interfaces between biological materials (insect eyes and the like) and electronics. I don't think the particular incarnation that they are talking about (nobody suspects the butterfly, but seriously). This direction of research could be particularly useful in the development of implants.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.