After all those years of warnings about sinister African killer bees inexorably heading toward the U.S., DARPA decided to draft bees into military service. In 2002, projects examining the performance of honeybees trained to detect explosives and locate other "odors of interest" were launched. Since then, DARPA has been creating insect databases while increasing efforts to "understand how to use endemic insects as collectors of environmental information." DARPA says it has already tested "this endemic insect system in key operational demonstrations here and abroad." How long until they start thinking about weaponizing insects as well? Instead of your plain old, garden variety Stinger missiles, you could have a swarm of missile stingers.It gets better. Part of the story originated in The Times 15 months ago. Nick Turse synopsis:
Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the use of non-traditional air power -- like unmanned aerial vehicles and cyborg insects -- in the years ahead. "There's no doubt their things will become weaponized," he explained, "so the question [is]: should they [be] given targeting authority?" Brooks went on to assert, according to The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law to take the future weaponization of such "devices" into account.Sometimes a wasp isn't just a W.A.S.P. Nick Turse goes on to ask:
Why does the U.S. government foster unfettered, blue-skies creativity only in the context of lethal technologies (or those that, indirectly, enhance lethality by aiding the functioning of the armed forces)?I have a question also. Does this mean the world is about to witness a cybernetics arms race? You know Putin loves bugs just as much as we do (oh, different kind of bug, sort of). Russia is going to want murderous robot bugs too. Exterminators unite and conquer!
Hmm, Super Soldiers may be harder to deal with.
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