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This Week's Government Cyborg Animal

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-cyber-butterfly-effect dept.

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. "."

4 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Animals in combat by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Right... by flyingsquid · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I once got to listen to a scientist who studies insect biomechanics talk about his dealings with some of the Pentagon types. Apparently these guys had just seen "The Fifth Element", which featured a remote-controlled cockroach with a video camera installed, and they said that this was what they wanted. And he asked them, "What, so you want a machine with similar capabilities?" and they said no: they wanted a remote-controlled cockroach with audio and video feed.

    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.

  3. Ethical Questions by Lky1337 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:wait a minute.... by EtherealStrife · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.