This article does have a point. Namely, nature is way better at building machines than humans are.
Compare this bee stinger to a needle or the wings of a butterfly to the iridescent materials we can create today.
Compare this bee stinger to a needle or the wings of a butterfly to the iridescent materials we can create today.
Or to borrow from Chomsky, why would we try to make a machine deadlift a box like a powerlifter when we can just make a fork-lift truck / front-end loader?
That said we already have drones. We can add a charging station, an artificial beak, a speaker and it can do bird stuff pretty well :)
What we suck at is building self-replicators.
Cats are considered better vermin hunters than simple machines, like rat traps, because they have a lot of extra benefits of being household pets. (Which rat traps don't do well. Also usually dogs are used to hunt vermin. [I wanted to find that video where dogs hunt on the field as a tractor plows it, but only found this about minks :o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB1I7UixASY ].)
Fish tank cleaning is also a very specific problem. It's basically a niche. If we look at it as an engineering challenge it's a hard problem. Small space, hard to reach spaces, mostly mechanical work is needed (as fish tank life is very sensitive to water quality), etc. And there's also cost. It's very possible that if we were to spend a few billion dollars on the problem we could come up with a fish tank cleaner, but ... snails are provided by evolution for free.
The picture is of a bee stinger compared to a sewing needle.
Someone in the comment section posted another comparison https://i.imgur.com/m2m6SV2.jpg
It's both nature, but "evolution" took millions of years to build the ant, and "humans" could probably do it I a fraction of the time.
Perhaps not economically at mass scale though.
But then again neither can bees.
On the other hand, the risk of ripping your entrails out while using a sewing needle is quite low.
Nature didn't anticipate the hairless apes to get so numerous and infiltrate every environment where bees exist.
In the sense that any natural development is intended, it's intended for the stinger to leave the bee. Compare wasps, which have reusable stingers.
Sticking it into the elastic material that covers mammals is not it's intended use case.
On swarm level it doesn't matter. But psychological effect on an attacker or even group of such is achieved after one event, sometimes even inherited.
So, we're a bit impatient but overall things are moving really quickly. I'm only 48 years old, I expect to see some amazing things in the next few decades.