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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
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?
We'll have to get the best of help! Somebody call Dick Dastardly and Muttley!
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
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/
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!
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.
Something similar was devised during WWII, but using bats instead of pigeons (and without quite the same level of control). Check it out here.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
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.
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.