Bah, the connection from researchers' computers to the cockroaches' control chips was wireless - I thought this was about stimulating the cockroaches nervous systems without the need for a physical wire. :/
"Such studies straddle ethical boundaries, some have noted, if humans create cyborgs to crawl into misbehaving nuclear reactors or skittle around in debris looking for survivors after earthquakes, for them, does that cross a moral line? What if the technology moves to dogs, cats or even monkeys?"
Sure, and those experiments will be dangerous. This is like saying that banging two rocks together to make sparks is a dangerous experiment because one day we'll be able to create hydrogen bombs.
Either the bot in charge of grabbing the abstract messed up, or they are playing god with cockroaches: "We find evidence that broad supernatural punishment drives political complexity, whereas MHGs(moralizing high gods) follow political complexity. "
Is there any indication that the roaches are having their motor control stimuli hijacked instead of simply being electrocuted and attempting to steer away from the source of the pain?
Turns out it's easy in controlled environments, and doesn't work at all outside. Once the animal sees something it wants to eat/mate with, it's just going to leave.
The claimed contribution of this work is direct ganglial stimulation as opposed to the antennal stimulation which was used previously. But I'm not seeing anything new in terms of capability/new science, and their data collection methods seem hinky:
The controllability of a roach, in terms of success rate, was subjectively rated based on user observation. If the user was able to successfully have the cockroach turn in a desired direction, then a run was deemed successful.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadDisappointing headline.
"Such studies straddle ethical boundaries, some have noted, if humans create cyborgs to crawl into misbehaving nuclear reactors or skittle around in debris looking for survivors after earthquakes, for them, does that cross a moral line? What if the technology moves to dogs, cats or even monkeys?"
Oh this implant can be used to reduce violent behaviour of humans lets put it into prisoners.
Oh this python script exploits a zero day vulnerability in the implant making the prisoners go ham.
msf> use exploit/generic/implants/human/prisoner_implant_hijacker...
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/105/201413...
This kind of stuff has been done since the 70s or even earlier.
You can buy commercial cockroach control kits, including iOS and Android Apps for remote control; https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach
http://archive.darpa.mil/darpatech99/Presentations/dsopdf/ds...
Turns out it's easy in controlled environments, and doesn't work at all outside. Once the animal sees something it wants to eat/mate with, it's just going to leave.
The claimed contribution of this work is direct ganglial stimulation as opposed to the antennal stimulation which was used previously. But I'm not seeing anything new in terms of capability/new science, and their data collection methods seem hinky:
The controllability of a roach, in terms of success rate, was subjectively rated based on user observation. If the user was able to successfully have the cockroach turn in a desired direction, then a run was deemed successful.