Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels

With earlier video link that was the highlight for me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E

I like your future. In mine, we use CRISPR to reduce aggression in select animals, resulting in people riding zebras to work.

Training rats as suicide bombers to crash cars against cats seem a more probable result.

A good test would be to have them drive in Austin.

Ehh, it's not clear to me that humans should be particularly good a driving. It's not like we evolved for it, we can just understand spoken instructions. I'm not convinced that an octopus, a dolphin, a raven, or a cheetah would necessarily be worse at the task than a human (given training in the proper format) -- it's perfectly concievable to me that a cheetah might have evolved to handle object avoidance at higher speeds than humans have, for example.

> Yes, driving is a good de-stressor, probably because it gives you more agency when you feel powerless.

Until you approach that intersection where there's a 90 second red light that you can't control which you always seem to get stuck at.

And when you're 4 cars back from that light, there's a 10 second delay to move when it turns green because everyone in front of you is on their cell phone and now the light turns red again just before it's your turn to go but you can't gun it through the red light at the last second because there's traffic cameras at every angle.

That's just in typical suburban areas of the US. You're pretty much at the whim of the organization who controls the lights, the government for having traffic cams and every human being in front of you. It's a very non-controllable situation unless you're open to making decisions that will get your license revoked and maybe get put in prison.

Not for me. Congestion - no agency. No congestion - restricted to following the demarcated path. And cars are clumsy - three point turn. Don't like them.

I recently setup a racing sim rig and love to just cruise around after work as I don't have a real car. Absolutely de-stresses me.

No reason no believe rats are sensitive to currents measured in single microamps, which is what’s most likely used to trigger microcontroller inputs. Whatever the schematic, I can guarantee that the rat isn’t used to directly connect the motor to the battery :)

Rat-guided cars? B.F. Skinner will give you a small food reward if you hold his beer. http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1940-project-pigeon-1948-pr...

Actually, come to think of it Project Pigeon/Orcon is also of philosophical importance: it joins Russell's chickens as an example of the hazards of inductive reasoning and greedy algorithms.