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DragonflEye Project Wants To Turn Insects Into Cyborg Drones
New submitter robotopia writes: Scientists at a research and development company called Draper are using genetic engineering and optoelectronics to turn dragonflies into cybernetic insects, reports IEEE Spectrum. To control the dragonflies, Draper engineers are genetically modifying the nervous system of the insects so they can respond to pulses of light. The goal of the project, called DragonflEye, is enabling insects to carry scientific payloads or conduct surveillance.
Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. The bees are next.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
This is not at all creepy. It's not remotely creepy. It is in no way awfully, shockingly, horrifyingly creepy; and there's no way this can be abused or go wrong.
Nope.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Some time ago I was thinking that the increased use drones could lead to the military killing all birds and larger flying animals from their target areas in case they were used by their enemies. Now it seems that there are reasons for all life to be made a target. An army might find that a literal scorched earth approach - exterminate everything, animal and plant, in the soil and above - is needed to get them victory. As with the use of nuclear bombs on cities, apologists will find ways of justifying this.
This is obviously a ploy for funding. This is junk science at it's peak.
Draper engineers are genetically modifying the nervous system of the insects so they can respond to pulses of light.
Or is it not much of a stretch?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Wait till Musk gets a wind of this. We will have the Lexx before 2020!
Scientists are working out a way to make bugs that are... bugs?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I await the day this can be scaled to humans. Humans would be much more tolerable if their minds were all controlled by pulses of light... or is that what we call television?
Remember Iran taking the cyber-squirrels, upgraded version of "Acoustic kitty" from the 60's. Do you really think we stopped that when squirrels are a bigger threat to our infrastructure than hackers? (https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/01/21/039256/are-squirrels-a-bigger-threat-to-our-critical-infrastructure)
Birds and insects have been on a "wishlist" for a very long time. There are darpa grants to indicate this. In our current hyper-surveillance age, you don't think the massively funded military industrial complex stopped work on these, or that they haven't made any progress, did you?
If the squirrels were deployed in Iran their capture was inevitable, meaning we likely had secondary trackers that scoped out their response and reverse engineering procedures, and possibly engineered it to have holes to our second line of attack. There would be nothing in them that revealed our current leading/bleeding capabilities.
Some folks say that current publicly known technology is 50 to 75 years behind what is available but decently classified. Think about that.
Soon the secret service will shoot down every pidgin, every fly entering the air space of the white house. Drones are banned already.
for every single "bug-sized robots are coming" I've read over the years, I'd probably be able to make one myself now. It's a great idea but it's been in the pipeline far too long. Calling it now, in the next 3 months we're going to see another "bug-sized robots are here" story. That's about all one can say with certainty about this invention. As long as science exists, there will always be a researcher looking for funding so they can design a bug-sized robot, only to fail at the last second when they realize they can't put a practical battery on these things.
I love where this is going.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
then where's my flying car?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Draper Labs has been around for nearly a century; it's a nonprofit R&D institution that does defense-related research, often classified. Referring to it as "a company called Draper" means the poster hasn't done their homework. And they aren't using "optoelectronics", they are using "optogenetics".
This project is an academic research project, like literally thousands of others at universities and non-profits funded by the US government. This is no Weyland-Yutani or Tyrell corporation.
We've been here before - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Invisible_Boy
Go read Azimov's The Dead Past if you haven't yet. He makes a great point - the ultimate endgame of this type of surveillance technology isn't the government or corporations spying on everything we do. It's regular people using it to spy on each other.
The voyeurs are going to have a field day with this. You'll never know anymore if your bedroom, your shower stall, the inside of your car as you drive to work, your work office are truly private. Even if you lined a room with metal to create a faraday cage, an insect could be programmed to enter, loiter while a camera records for a few hours, then exit so it can upload the recorded video. You thought companies tracking your web browsing habits with cookies was invasive? You ain't seen nothing yet.
#surveillanceculture
http://ferdyonfilms.com/Lexx%2...
Not quite exactly the same, but kind of...
One of my favorite Danny Dunn stories as a kid..
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.