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Chinese Develop Remote Controlled Pigeons
Many readers sent us links to the story about Chinese scientists developing pigeons whose flight can be controlled remotely. The best coverage may be Wired's, both because they link to the English language version of the original Peoples Daily Online release, and because of the (disturbing) photos. The birds can be commanded to fly left, right, up, or down. Reader KDan writes, "A number of obvious uses jump out to me... the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549."
Packet storm!
Routing to the max.
If you set the evilbit can you make your pigeon crap on specified targets?
liqbase
I want simple controls:-
:-)
left, right, forward and of course.... fire!
get them to eat berries first for a full on multicolour pebble dashing.
and wait until my neighbour is washing his car.
(of course a small head mounted camera with crosshairs target scope would be good as well
ah, delight.
Now,Communist Party of China can control Google remotely!
Am I the only one who immediately thought of the Homing Pigeon bomb from Worms Armaggedon?
Anyone who has played Worms is well aware of the weaponization potential of the homing pigeon. The future battlefield will be a bed of feathers...
Each pigeon would cost 2 million dollars and cities with many statues would be labelled as an imminent threats.
Am i the only one that can see a potential weapon rather than an rfc? A fantasy writer called Philip Reeve already imagined such creatures in uses such as scouts or units of attack( imagine an army of pidgeon coming towards you ) Surveilance, and bioweapon delivery could also be a use for this enslaved beings
We'll have to get the best of help! Somebody call Dick Dastardly and Muttley!
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
What happens on up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right?
Will we see a Pokemon-genre game where you breed pigeons?
A shame we will never know what this feels like for the pigeon. Is it really being forced to turn left against its will, or does the pigeon experience it as a sudden desire to turn left?
In the TNG canon, did the Borg originate with pigeons?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
RFC 2549 combined with this routing upgrade should finally get me an Internet connection that is faster and more reliable than Comcast Cable! Granted that this isn't exactly a very high standard, but it's a start!
So, when will I be able to sign up for IPOP in my area (IP Over Pidgeon)?
This sounds horrible. I find the idea of overriding another animal's free will very disturbing. The words "won't someone please think of the pidgeons!" come to mind, but we humans are animals after all. I would definitely not want this kind of mind control implemented with humans, and I don't want it implemented on any self-aware being.
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
To the point:
The primary sensory and locomotor areas of the brain are very well mapped (and have been so for 20+ years now). It is trivial to implant electrodes into a sensory area which will cause you extreme pain perceived to be in a specific area. From there on you just hook the unit to a set of simple inertial sensors and deliver pain until the target turns right, left or wherever the command is. Approximate complexity of this when using sensors like the ones in the IBM and apple notebooks is at the high school student project level. From there on it is only a matter of calibrating the pain feedback loops so that the target does not pass out. In fact you do not even need to implant electrodes into specific left/right locomotor areas. Just pain/pleasure in general will be enough to get the job done (and there is nothing the test animal can do about it). Also, once the target is trained the actual commands can be delivered with minimal stimulation levels.
All I can say - this is Dr. Evil at his best and there is nothing cool, scientific, revolutionary or extremely funny in this. In fact it gives me shivers just to think about it. Vivisection at its very worst.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
My first thought when I heard this on BBC yesterday was, Oh great...A way to control the masses...
An Army of remotely controlled (or coerced) soldiers that can't defect or even take a piss without the right control signal...
Has anyone else here read "Single Combat" by Dean Ing?
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
pigeons control YOU.
This might be the ultimate spying device: hook up a tiny camera or mike to a pigeon and command it to fly to the window of an embassy, the Pentagon, etc.
Of course, political assassinations via C4 bombs delivered by pigeons might be a possibility, too. Or, biological/chemical agent delivery to otherwise protected areas...
I am having some tiny chills running down my spine.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It is not at that level.
It is just pain feedback (optionally with pleasure via thalamic stimulation) along with some trivial conditioning. I am fairly sure about this being so because we do not understand how a bird flies aerodynamically and do not have good enough mapping of second and higher level functions of the mammal brain to control it any better.
This means that if this is applied to soldiers they can still do things their masters do not like, just get punished more and more if they do. Nearly impossible for an animal to override such conditioning, but achieveable for a human. Dune and the Bene Gesserit test comes to mind along with many "manhood" tests performed by South (using fire ants) and North American Indians.
None the less, the only question I am interested is the longitude, latitude and altitude of this chap lab.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Nazi KZ Doctors???
Pigeons are not people....
Repeat that a couple of times, please, perhaps it will sink in.
A lot of this un-ethical kind of stuff is going on in your backyard university lab probably, it's just not in the news. Russians tried to do the same with dolphins and other animals, Israelis do this with monkeys (see hear ). You should go tour your local pig farm and see how those animals are treated.
Just because these are Chinese scientists, i.e. foreigners (and of course, probably commie terrorists, right?) that we are all appalled.
...Hitchcock-style!
Does it run on a penguin?
It is another step.
Ugly and non-ethical, yes, but most details on animal experiments are like this one.
Always wanted brain implant? - well, some research must be done.
Like it? No? Me either, but at the end people will forget all ugly parts and will use direct brian computer interface.
Now Google will finetune PigeonRank to perfection!
Great. Not only are they torturing these creatures in order to do their evil bidding. But now people are going to go around slaughtering pigeons to prevent being spied on.
How about we put chips in the heads of those so-called scientist to control their movement against their will, and see how they like it. They'd probably change their minds about this being such a great idea. Oh wait, they can't change their minds because we've taken away their free will by putting a damn chip in their brain!
"Science" gets less ethical every day.
a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these.
Don't worry, the pigeons have all signed informed consent forms - see the peck-marks? Our lawyers also told them that eating the birdseed we provided implied their agreement to the experiment. And they ate it.
The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. NO big deal and nothing really scientific.
Right, I mean, I read your articles about how the pigeon brain works. This was a totally unneccesary experiment, since we had that knowledge already. Why do we need more "proof"?
If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once
I wouldn't be so fast to cut the funding of a group who can control animals remotely. Have you never seen the movie "The Birds"? Maybe one morning you'll be pecked to death by 2000 angry pigeons...
not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps
Umm, sticking electrodes into the brains of birds, with proper aseptic and anaesthetic techniques (after all, you want a functional bird at the end of it in order to get useful data), is not quite the same as dunking people in ice water just to see how long the average survival time is...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Don't underestimate the value of a bird that can be commanded to go down at will...
"We can keep doing this all day if you lot don't stop being so half-arsed about it."
I know, adding a symetrical cheek to make it a full-arsed Universe is a GoodIdea(TM), but I don't think we can streach the budget enough to afford such a radical change. For a start, just think of how many god years it will take to test the whole Universe for the absence of ethical values. And who's going to do the documnets, sacred texts don't write themselves you know.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
1. Make a judgement that someone is unethical based on one's own perception.
2. Reinforce the perception with extreme or individual incidents that are in line with that judgement.
3. Dismiss evidences that contradict the judgement or undermine the credibility of it.
4. When the position is not defendable in a debate, use unsubstantiated claim or cite anecdotal evidence.
5. Repeat 2-4 as necessary.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
That's ridiculous. The point of free will is not how you arrive at a decision or how you rationalise it, but rather that you can make the decisions at all. It doesn't matter how your brain goes about it.
What matters is that there is a process in the brain that makes decisions, and they're messing with it.
And free will and consciousness being illusions are just catchphrases. In order to be subject to an illusion, you need consciousness in the first place, and I don't think that consciousness could exist without the capacity of controlling your thoughts (free-will style).
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
5 01_020501_roborats.html/. Except the target animal was mice instead of pigeon. People were not torching that lab and they will not torch this one.
The exact same of research has been done in the State University of New York. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0
Football Odds
The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
This is presumably how come State University of New York no longer has a biology lab. Wait. I missed that news. Perhaps it didn't happen.
Well, you need 10 kg of plutonium for critical mass. I'm not sure what would be harder, having them live long enough to reach the target, or getting them all to crash into each other at the same time.
Remote controlled pigeons are fine, but they have one drawback -- they cannot carry beer.
I'm still waiting on my remote-controlled beer fetching attack monkey. Keep at it, scientists!
You know, there might be something to the conspiracy theories on this one. Have you ever been to Shanghai? It's a really big city. 20+ million. Almost no pigeons. Can you think of any major western city without pigeons? It's not coincidence. The survival rate of a nice pump, juicy pigeon isn't that good in China. I'm a local, I know. The point being is that this has absolutely no practical use internally whatsoever. No sane mad scientist would every build a Franken-pigeon for use in China. Half would be eaten before completing their first mission. Therefore, it must have been designed for deployment outside China.