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Cyborg Cockroach Sparks Ethics Debate
sciencehabit writes "A do-it-yourself neuroscience experiment that allows students to create their own 'cyborg' insects is sparking controversy amongst scienitsts and ethicists. RoboRoach #12 is a real cockroach that a company called BackyardBrains ships to school students. The students fit the insect with a tiny backpack, which contains electrodes that feed into its antennae and receive signals by remote control — via the Bluetooth signals emitted by smartphones. A simple swipe of an iPhone can turn the insect left or right. Though some scientists say the small cyborg is a good educational tool, others say it's turning kids into psychopaths."
Fitting the backpack requires poking a hole in the roach's thorax and clipping its antennae to insert electrodes.
People who have never killed a roach in their life are free to throw the first stone.
Anyone?
Anyone?
If anyone is worried about these slight actions turning kids into psychopaths, they would be AGHAST at what kids normally do with insects when they catch or find them...
Fire, pliers, rocks, etc. All are involved.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you live anywhere cockroaches run rampant, you know the score. Kill them, or be infested.
I completely agree. It's completely unacceptable to force innocent students to used something as restricted and crippled as iOS. For once could someone actually think of the children.
IPhones have been turning humans into mindless drones for years, now its the insects turn.
A beowulf cluster of those!
I tried the app, but it was too buggy.
We do something similar to horses, They're called "reins".
I understand the value of doing experiments, and I understand the value of replicating experiments. But this doesn't sound like either. It just seems like something that you install on a roach and watch it go. What is to be learned from going through the motions? That it works? We already know that. Are the students practicing some valuable skill when they clip the antennae and attach the backpack? If so, then doing this might have some value. But if this is being done "just because" then yeah, they probably shouldn't be doing it.
... stabbed me earlier today and fitted me with bluetooth. A couple of hours practice, however, and I am spoofing his to keyboard connection.
Pwned by Roach 2.0...
Bwwahahaha!!!!
So cyborg cockroaches are smart enough to start up an ethics debate? These suckers are advanced!
Happy people make bad consumers.
FYI: If you've ever doubted the ability of Japanese manga artists to make anything cute, take a look at Gokiburi Gijinka, which features the adventures of adorable little Gokicha-chan and her misunderstood struggle to make friends with humans -- who for some inexplicable reason she can't understand -- keep trying to squash her.
Well, with the exception of the big indoor mall water park, since the ultra-rich owners of the mall greased things to get the palm trees in without inspections . . . which meant that nobody checked for cockroaches. So the only cockroaches in all of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada are in the West Edmonton Mall waterpark.
Best part, by the time the owners finally admitted they needed to do something about them, it was too late, because you know what exterminators use to kill cockroaches? Yup, you guessed it, chlorine-based insecticides. So at this point after so many generations living around chlorinated water and then a few attempts at extermination these are basically unkillable cockroaches. With the exception that the winters here are cold enough that they've never gotten out of the mall.
In retrospect, thank god the LRT (ie. subway or "underground", basically, although it is mostly above ground) never ended up going to WEM.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
It's not ethical to force an animal to move left and right by attaching electrodes to its head. Not at all. The ethical way is to put a metal bar in its mouth and pull on THAT to force it to move left and right.
Killing a pig or a cow to eat is very different from killing a pig or cow for pleasure -- and very different from mutilating them while they're alive for our amusement.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I have a totally ethically consistent 'only torture delicious animals' policy in place!
Please tell me they have a version that uses a rotating dish instead of a backpack.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
...and reading all the faux outrage (because it is) over the poor cockroaches...
I'm gonna go boil up some lobsters - just to piss you guys off - and I will savor every butter-dipped bite.
--
BMO
First, because it should be obvious - doing something to an animal without killing it is not the same as killing it. For example, shooting a rabbit and thus killing it is not the same as breaking its legs kicking it around a football field. Thus, it could be argued that punching a hole in a cockroach thorax and clipping the antennae is not the same as stomping on the roach. So we should probably write off the "if you've ever killed or would ever kill a cockroach, then you have must accept this as ethical" arguments.
Second, just because kids burn ants with a magnifying glass doesn't mean we should be encouraging kids to burn ants with a magnifying glass. As artor3 posted in a previous comment:
When I was a little kid and pulled the legs off a daddy longlegs, my scoutmaster told me not to do that, that it was cruel. Now we're encouraging kids to inflict pain on animals for their own amusement. Can you really not see a problem with that?
That isn't to say that installing this on a cockroach is equivalent to burning ants; simply that just because children do do something doesn't mean they should be encouraged to do it.
Even if people do conclude this is ethical - and I'm not saying it is or is not - then the subsequent question is how you ensure children understand that while cutting half off the antennae of a cockroach is ethically acceptable, cutting half off the ears of a mouse is not. That is, assuming we consider that unethical.
There is also the question of when it becomes unethical, in terms of animals used. It wouldn't be too challenging to build a kit to allow mid-teenagers to install a similar device in a mouse (assuming they had a steady hand), including sterile implements and gloves, adhesive, etc. Would that be ethically acceptable?
There does seem to be a difference here between eating animals, using them as labour or performing experiments on them. Those are examples of us sacrificing animals to serve our own ends. That is one type of ethical debate which our society is generally decided upon. This is an example of needlessly harming and terrorizing an animal. We do not allow cockfighting or recreational animal torture. This seems, at least to me, to be an example of that sort of relationship with animals. The fact that we are teaching children that such treatment of animals is acceptable (as opposed to slapping their wrists for engaging in it) is just a bonus problem.
It's simple: animals don't have rights. Forcing animals to do something and forcing humans to do something are two fundamentally different things. If you disagree, fine. Howevere, it is strange that you draw a line at implanting animals with technology for purposes of education, rather than, you know, slaughtering them by the billions each year, or using them as slave labor etc.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Because when a cat is "playing" with something smaller than itself, it's typically a bird, mouse, lizard, or small bug, etc. When a human adult is torturing something smaller than himself, it's often another human.
The leap from cockroach vivisection to psychopathy is a bit of a leap, but there kids out there that already lean that direction. It isn't a matter of whether we are going to encourage the average child to be a psychopath (a ridiculous notion), or be a bit more callous (perhaps worth discussing). But could this be a tiny step toward psychopathy for someone already headed in that direction? Probably.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
They should stop experiment on cockroaches, and start experimenting on lower life forms instead....
Members of Congress come to mind as a possibility...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It really is kind of scary how common it has become for people to equate humans with other lower animals. There was a time when the crazy cat lady was considered...well... crazy. Today, she is considered normal.
I agree that this is psychopathic. I can see how this is very harmful for children to be involved in this. One of the warning signs of psychopathy is to abuse animals in a grotesque manner. That we would actually teach children to do this and to adopt red-flag behaviours of a psychopath is nuts. This is not swatting a roach on the floor, which kills it instantly and as quickly as possible, which we have all done. This is torturing and messing with a living thing for long periods of time. They are not the same thing.
In med school they dissect humans. Granted, none of those are living material, but I fail see the problem with shoving electrodes into a live human's brain and remote controlling him as a learning tool.
The "granted, none of it was living material" is a quite relevant part.
And no, I'm not comparing humans to cockroaches - I'm just pointing out the absurdity of ignoring the difference between a corpse and a living creature when it comes to how it's acceptable to treat it.
May we live long and die out