RoboRoach: Control a cockroach with a smartphone. | Hacker News Reader

RoboRoach: Control a cockroach with a smartphone.

kickstarter.com

66 pointssabalaba73 comments

> This is the world's first commercially available cyborg!

No it's not, from the way it's presented, it's more like the world's first organism-enslavement-for-entertainment-kit. Not that I understand that much about cockroaches, but it's hard to deny the ethical issues in taking over control of an otherwise autonomous organism.

At first, I thought this might be some kind of joke or campaign to raise awareness of these ethical issues, but it seems that they are actually serious and claim these serve some kind of educational higher purpose: http://wiki.backyardbrains.com/Ethical_Issues_Regarding_Usin...

I worked with something similar to this when I was learning neuroscience in a university lab. It's extremely informative and along with a neuron culture can really help you understand what is happening. Other groups have actually done a lot of research into this, going so far as controlling a pigeon a few years ago and proving safety of long term 1+ year neural implants in monkeys and swine, although those were for prosthetic research and were not stimulators.

You're not actually taking over the cockroach, you're just sending it fake data in the form of electrical impulses. The cockroach can and does ignore you (habituation) and do its own thing (hence the cage). Other than the invasive surgery, there is little harm done to the cockroach. I agree it's an ethical issue but we need to do research like this and to use instruments like the RoboRoach to educate people. I just wish it was more accessible to students through teachers that could teach them the respect that animal life deserves, instead of out on Kickstarter for anyone to buy for a hoot and a holler.

Research. In a university. Not on the sidewalk with your iPhone.

Their ethical section on Kickstarter is a joke. People apparently said that this is a toy and you turn animals in a toy and the only response is basically:"Well, it's not a toy, because we could give it an extremely complicated title to make it sound like research."

Research has the goal of producing some sort of output. A paper, general knowledge, whatever. If people want to do some neuro science research, they should do it in a controlled environment and release a paper afterwards, but not buy a DIY cockroach-antenna-controller-toy for five bucks and call the toy "a research project".

Most of the stuff I did wasn't for research to publish a paper. I sacrificed those mice to get a better understanding of the natural world all for my own selfish reasons. I did this in an academic lab with a scientist by my side and I knew from the beginning that mice are not "expendable," they are alive.

I would have preferred a full holographic and interactive mouse multiphysics simulation I could manipulate to my heart's content, but those don't exist. These types of educational tools can inspire the future scientists and educating the young minds that will do tomorrow what we can't bring ourselves to do today is worth the sacrifice, as long as we take care to not waste life needlessly.

I don't know, Alex. It still smells like playing god. Research, formal or informal is at least ostensibly justifiable if it is performed with respect and in the name of furthering individual or collective knowledge. Do you really think that's what's going on here?

Doesn't it seem more like it's being marketed as an educational toy? Is it really appropriate to transform other life forms into our toys?

This isn't playing god, this is using tiny electrodes to change the voltage potential across neurons (it's not even a shock, it's not painful). We don't start playing god until we have a good grasp of the genetic code and can manipulate it.

Bramie, I don't necessarily approve of their presentation but their product is an effective teaching tool, especially if their iPhone is better than the crap neuroscientists usually have to deal with. I just hope the people who buy the roackes understand that.

Good point. Perhaps it's not so much the idea itself that upsets me as the way it is presented.

I'm all for promoting research and understanding and I could see a role for this in a classroom, but they way this is being sold is far too toy-like for me. If you can just order an "augmented" cockroach off the internet to mess around with, it becomes a commodity or product and there is not much left to learn from it.

I also think that, although you are not actually taking over the body or brain of the cockroach, you are definitely taking over (a good deal of) its perception of reality, however primitive that may be. The fact that cockroaches can learn to ignore the artificial impulses and "escape the Matrix", so to speak, makes me feel only slightly less uncomfortable about doing this on a large scale.

For some reason the control issue doesn't really phase me as much as the habituation of invasive procedures on animals. At least in school kids don't kill the frogs they dissect; it's no more than a desensitized piece of green beef to them.

It's probably because I don't view it as "escaping the matrix." The neural system of a cockroach is relatively simple but they're patching into a very small portion of it. We can't tell what the real side effects are but for all intents and purposes, you're sending it a signal that is equivalent to, say, someone touching your left or right ear. Except the cockroach's sensitivity is dialed up and the antenna are one of their primary navigation sensors so it's more like flashing a big wall to the left or right off your vision. Here you get into issues of complexity and intelligence and I'd rather avoid that. Let's just say that to generate an equivalent response in humans, you'd have to do a massive patchwork on the brain, far more invasive (imo) than what they're doing to the cockroaches.

The fact that the cockroach so easily habituates to such massive stimuli should actually tell you a lot about how unphased and how simple its nervous system is. Only in cases of total neuron death/disconnection (spine or neck break ripes the neurons in the spinal cord causing paralysis) can most pain and other "danger sign" signals be totally cut off in humans. For example, you will get acclimated to normal house smells pretty fast, but usually not to smells of sulfur/rotting eggs because of an evolutionary adaptations. The more complex a nervous system is, the more difficult it is to habituate specific stimuli artificially(generally speaking). In the cockroach the neurons connecting the antenna to the rest of the brain are very simple and can be habituated by just stimulating them to release neurotransmitters over and over again. After a while the cockroach just ignores the sense, like you would ignore sight if it was pitch black, instead focusing on sound.

Sorry, I strongly disagree. Cockroaches don't have the emotions or capabilities to suffer from pain. There is no ethics issue here, except that anyone doing this experiment with children (as co-experimentators, not as subjects, stupid!) should make this point about not hurting higher animals very very clearly and repeatedly.

One quick way of testing if a creature has "capabilities to suffer from pain" is to put a heat source on them. If they move away from it, they do. There really is an ethical issue here.

> a heat source

You're suggesting an experiment with a magnifying glass?

So does a moderately smartly designed robot... "suffering from pain" is way more complicated than avoiding heat sources.

A robot is simulating. Animals are not.

This article [1] says that cockroaches do experience pain, care for their offspring, form social hierarchies. They can suffer from stress and can die from it, even without injury.

Therefore, the ethics issue cannot be ignored.

[1]: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/insect-pain.html

I have a hard time considering cockroach control a major ethical issue when cockroaches are considered a major pest and are often killed on sight. I don't see how a few minutes of steering where it goes is substantially worse than stepping on it. I mean, letting a kid play with cockroaches brings about a greater understanding than just telling kids that they all need to be killed. In that way, I'd consider it a good experiment for children akin to catching a caterpillar and watching it make a cocoon.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Ethics is not just about the consequences of an action. Other factors such as motivations are also important.

I think it is sad but ethically acceptable to kill an ant colony in my house, yet I don't think it is OK for children to go in the forest and destroy ant colonies for fun. Or even to dismember one ant for fun, though I may be in a small minority here.

To take a more extreme example, a majority of people seem to find it ethical to have drone strikes in Pakistan despite the civilian casualties. They would certainly not approve of the same drone strikes if they were made for entertainment, even though the physical consequences on the targets would be the same.

Can I just point out that the examples you gave are invalid?

I won't advocate the destruction of ant colonies in forests because for ecological reasons, not because of individual ant suffering.

Video footage released from the drone/missile strikes are already being used for entertainment purposes. When I go onto reddit for videos titled "Hellfire missile blows up terrorist". I'm actually enjoying a video of a man being blown up by a Hellfire missile.

I don't think motivations factor into it at all. A death is a death. At the risk of invoking Freduian psycholoanalysis, it's your cognitive dissonance that making you feel one is more justified than the other.

> "I can't be the one killing animals, I'm a good person"

Of course my examples cannot fit the ethics of everybody, there is no absolute ethics. That does not make the examples invalid. They went meant to help the reader understand my point of view, not necessarily share it.

I won't advocate the destruction of ant colonies in forests because for ecological reasons, not because of individual ant suffering.

To me there are ecological and moral reasons why you should not destroy ant colonies. I am aware that not everybody agrees.

Regarding the drone strikes: whether videos of the strikes are also used for entertainment is irrelevant here, as long as it is not part of the motivation behind performing the strikes.

I don't think motivations factor into it at all. A death is a death.

I don't know what you are getting at here. Are you seriously suggesting that shooting people for fun is morally equivalent to shooting them for a good reason?

>Are you seriously suggesting that shooting people for fun is morally equivalent to shooting them for a good reason?

That's an over simplication. I don't quite see the problem with shooting condemned people for fun (provided they experience more or less the same amount of suffering).

But I would point out that your example is loaded since I can't seem to see a senario where extermination of the enemies of the United States would be done for fun. The only reason we kill those people is because they are enemies. If they weren't we won't kill them. Whether we enjoy killing them is a different matter.

The crux of my argument is that it doesn't matter if you enjoyed killing ant colonies/terrorists. You still achieved the same result (dead ants/terrorists).

You believe it is morally reprehensible to have enjoyed killing ants/terrorists. I disagree. Does it matter what the executioner feels when he decapitates his subjects?

All I'm saying is that from a moral point of view, it makes a difference whether you shoot someone for fun (i.e. they get shot because you wanted the fun) or for a better reason (e.g. the person was sentenced to death). This is quite obvious right? I'm just saying your motivations matter from a moral point of view. Whether you enjoy the killing is irrelevant here. Same for the ants: I think it is wrong to destroy an ant colony in order to have fun. I think it is OK to destroy it in order to clean your kitchen. Whether you end up having fun while cleaning your kitchen is irrelevant. What matters is the reason why the action was taken.

In some places in Australia kangaroos are such a nuisance that they're actively poisoned and hunted. That doesn't mean one would tolerate sticking electrodes into a living kangaroo's head, except in the most controlled circumstances (in the case of a kangaroo: sedated, sterilized, and fully locked into an apparatus for brain surgery). Hell, they're starting to give kangaroos the right to contraceptives instead of slaughter! [1]

A cockroach is an invertebrate but nevertheless part of the animal kingdom. We should strive to be a species that maintains order (population control for the sake of the overall biome) without acts of cruelty. Killing may be a last resort we have to often take, but this kind of stuff "offends the sensibilities," if you care for such things.

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060906-kanga...

I'm kind of suspiscious of that page and it's sources.

Did my own search, appears the role of opiates isn't fully understood in cockroaches and it isn't very conclusive on any front.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00319384879... <-- Reports changes with morphine and naloxone. Seems to increase how fast headless cockroaches learn to avoid shocks. (Yes, headless. great way to figure out what kind of receptors there are in the body)

http://link.springer.com/article/10.3103/S0096392508040032

Norwegian gold mine ahoy: http://english.vkm.no/dav/413af9502e.pdf

>This article [1] says that cockroaches do experience pain, care for their offspring, form social hierarchies. They can suffer from stress and can die from it, even without injury.

Oh, the poor cockroaches.

Of course people raising the ethics issue about stompable insects, have already done whatever they can to help actual PEOPLE and even ANIMALS with their unethical treatment, right?

I mean, they don't just idly bring up an extremely marginal and peripheral issue while ignoring orders of magnitude greater issues...

I am curious how you know that cockroaches do not feel pain?

You just CAN'T go there. Once you suppress the natural social norms, the child will easily make the leap to other animals (or worse).

Not only humans, wasps take advantage of these poor creatures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp

While i am a moderate supporter of animal rights, i wouldn't go so far as to claim this is 'enslavement'

>No it's not, from the way it's presented, it's more like the world's first organism-enslavement-for-entertainment-kit.

Still a cyborg.

>Not that I understand that much about cockroaches, but it's hard to deny the ethical issues in taking over control of an otherwise autonomous organism.

Ethical issues of taking over control of an "organism" we usually stomp upon without second thought, or spray with poisonous gas to get rid of?

Does PETA or the Animal Liberation Front care about cockroaches?

I ask this question half in jest, but I kind of have a sick feeling about a Kickstarter project for invasively implanting neurostimulators into an animal for people's entertainment[1]. I'm a religious supporter of animal testing for scientific progress and I've done much worse (mice instead of cockroaches) but always in an academic setting where everyone took the life of the animal seriously[2]. Is this just an irrational and emotional response to this being done outside of an academic setting? I know it's just cockroaches, but...

[1] I mean, how many people will see this and think "Oh I'll teach my kid neuroscience" instead of "OMG LOOK ITS A CYBORG ROACH"

Edit: [2] Clarification, everyone in the lab I was in respected the life of the test animals and went quite far sometimes to make sure they were "comfortable." Although there was usually a somber mood when we had to euthanize an animal.

I've read some of the comments and the project creators obviously aren't callous about it. They claim that it actually helps students get a respect for the cockroach beyond that of a pest. An interesting and great result if true.

I'm going to go ahead and back this despite my ethical concerns. The stuff coming up in biotech (even stuff that's already here and quite widely implemented, i.e. in vitro zygote selection) is much scarier from an ethics standpoint. If this Kickstarter gets more attention it could help drive a very fruitful discussion.

I don't know if it's just because I'm a biologist but I find this absolutely disgusting. Every living thing is valuable no matter how it looks or how "lowly" it is, even goddamn cockroaches.

I'm not saying these kinds of experiments don't happen in "real" science, of course they do! But to present it like its fun to enslave a creature like that just for entertainment purposes?

This is the worst possible way to educate people (and especially kids!) about the beauty of life and respect to nature.

My thoughts exactly. Turning a living creature into a plaything and masquerading it as educational is just sick. It degrades the creature, and it degrades the science.

I shall add it also degrades human beings when doing it "for fun is" disguised as "a science experiment".

I don't know if it's the case here and I am comfortable seeing this kind of things done in a classroom.

I hope there are more ways to interact with the electronics than an iphone app though.

The ethics of this is actually terrifying.

On the one hand, this is unbelievably cool, and a really interesting way of getting more people into this kind of technology.

On the other hand, we're controlling a living thing like it's a damned RC car.

I agree with you, both in your dismay and wonder, but also pose a question: At what decreasing level of complexity is something still "living", but no longer subject to the ethical concerns from this not-exactly-direct control? Insects are often neural networks of (relatively) straightforward response to stimuli. Ants for example [1], react to harmful stimuli, but feel no pain in the debilitating, emotional-trauma-inducing manner that we associate with the word "pain". And a huge chunk of what governs an ant's life is response to environment chemicals, particularly pheromones produced by other ants.

Would it be the same level of control thing if we released micro-doses of known ant hormones in front of them, to prod them into particular actions? Seems pretty similar, and you could even rig it up so that they release from a box that sat on the ant's back.

Going lower, protozoa and protophyta are even more obviously "bags of chemicals that respond to other chemicals in the environment". Would controlling them via chemical releases be equally an issue?

The real question, it seems, is where do we draw the line and say "Life on this side, we don't mess with you. Life on this other side, tough shit we're going to screw with you nine ways to sunday because it's fu--I mean because science!"

[1] I'm not discounting the complexity of an ant's nervous system here, just pointing it out in relative terms to larger insects and invertebrates.

We can put a safety net on the slippery slope by drawing the line at Animalia.

None of that matters. Its about motivation. Why one would do something.

Killing cockroaches in a domestic setting, where shock, fear, disgust, etc take over in an instant, is different from deciding to remote control one for fun.

Fair enough from a pure research POV, where ethics and welfare are discussed and addressed, and there is a reasonable research goal, but for some individual at home, for fun?

Showing this article on a board filled with hackers who value free speech and free will more than anything else is a bad idea. Doesn't matter if it is a cockroach, a rat, a rabbit or a human being.

I do not agree with giving 10 year-olds this "toy". That cockroach (no matter how disgusting it may be for some) is a living thing! The ethical aspects of this project should me taken more seriously and not just "OMG cool gadget buy it".

So far, all of the comments are against it on ethical grounds.

I don't have any ethical concerns about this toy, but I have killed and eaten animals, used their hides for clothing, and even kept them trapped in bowls and cages purely for my own amusement.

It would seem pretty ridiculous to be upset over this if you do any of those things.

Quote: "even kept them trapped in bowls and cages purely for my own amusement."

Well, I`m just not that kind of person :)

Later edit: the things you list are completely unrelated to making a living organism do something -without its consent-.

Ethically, what is the difference between controlling a cockroach through direct stimulation and controlling a dog through the usual combination of behavioral manipulation and physical restraints?

Because I believe you aren't completely in control of the dog. Just like you aren't completely control of another human when using conversational techniques to make them do something.

You wouldn't be able to manipulate a dog into taking its own life, but with this cockroach you would against its will.

It's pretty easy to make a whippet run into heavy traffic merely by throwing a ball.

Trust me, they'd run into traffic without the ball too.

I agree it is easy but are you the kind of person to kill a dog without any reason? This statement implies that it is ethical to do so.

The people behind this project say that it is for educational purposes, but really now.. how many people will use it that way?

I was answering the question whether or not it is possible to manipulate a dog to take it's own life. I think it is possible. I do not think it's ethical, though. However, it might be, if the dog was Cujo.

Great point. But there's a huge difference between throwing a ball that an animal chases and sending electrical impulses into its brain to physically make it run into the traffic.

I don't think there is that much of a difference, just as I think it's not very ethical of us to say that we can't eat dogs because it's unethical, but chickens are a-okay. They are just another species living on this planet. They may not be as smart, they also have no play in deciding what's the intelligence level they need to be at before humans can stop considering them food.

We, humans, decide what we can and cannot eat. And some of us still hunt animals just for sport or for their horns and fur, even if they are in that "higher intelligence" bracket.

But hopefully as our societies evolve, and technologies also evolve to at least give us a choice between having to eat a chicken, and having to eat manufactured/replicated meat, we'll learn to give up on these, too.

There really isn't a difference but we're all hypocrites the vast majority of the time, probably without even knowing it. Food is just too much of a part of us, we don't want to give it up!

I see it as inevitable that artificial meat replaces wholesale slaughter with actual animal rights. Let's just admit that most of the world (myself included) won't stop eating meat until that artificial stuff is here and focus on the easier topics first.

Is it more ethical to control a cockroach by holding it on your hand?

IMHO, I don't understand the comments about ethical stuff about cockroaches.

If it can help some students to get interested in Neuroscience, even only one student, it's worth it. Maybe this student will make a breakthrough later and improve lives of dozens. Maybe because of this stupid little project. Anyway when you still have "human" slavery in the world, you should feel ackward about thinking of the morality of torturing cockroaches.

Came in the comments to share my disgust. I'm glad I'm not the only one disturbed by this.

There is no ethical question. Cockroaches are neurologically incapable of suffering from pain, and human compassion can't deal with billions of the little critters.

That said, you can feel compassion towards roaches you keep as pet. For example I wouldn't use the species they are using in this video, I'd prefer bigger ones that also can't procreate in your household beyond their cage...

The roaches survive these experiments. It's less harm than being eaten by predators...

You either grant other living entities dignity, or you don't.

Says more about you than how those living things perceive the world around them.

>You either grant other living entities dignity, or you don't.

Who said it's a blanket grant? You grant SOME other entities dignity.

I'm surprised to see that so many people are concerned about ethics of controlling a cockroach. I would like to hear what your opinions are on animal farming and killing in the food industry. Or even killing a cockroach vs controlling it.

Sure, this is a good question. But are really we talking about the same thing ? An iPhone app to control a cockroach and animal farming to produce food ? Why an iPhone app, BTW ?

I realize that its not the same thing but I'm raising the other issue because both of them concern the subject of animal treatments.

And why not an iPhone app? Hackers don't need a reason do something new. A simple reason I can think of is to demonstrate that this is possible and also get people interested in the field so that more research is done. I would very much like to see computers directly connected to human brain and I/O being done on it in the future.

Sure, this is a good question. But are we really talking about the same thing ? An iPhone app to control a cockroach and animal farming to produce food ? Why an iPhone app, BTW ?

Can these be customised for recording Bilderberg meetings and the like?

I know this works on Cockroaches, but can I connect it to my landlady? There should be fewer ethical issues as well, as she has no soul and can't feel any pain.

Sounds like it only works for a brief while anyway:

Learning and Memory: After a few minutes the cockroach will stop responding to the RoboRaoch microstimulation. Why? The brain learns and adapts. That is what brains are designed to do. You can measure the time to adaptation for various stimulation frequencies.

TBH, I'd squash a cockroach in a second if I saw one in my kitchen, but this just feels...wrong.

By reading this I can't stop myself to confuse the app user as the cockroach himself. Consider it seen from Apple perspective: who is controlling who ?

The other question I ask myself is if this is just another one of those "business" or is this really a contribution to the progress of humanity or science ?

I think this has a place in research, but commercially?

Also, I wouldn't have kids play with this for a number of reasons.

I would love to see the project other way around: extend the cockroaches capabilities by placing it as a pilot controlling a larger robot/vehicle. Make artificial antennas/sensors in the vehicle and connect the stimulus to cockroaches antennas.

Copy right infringement? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboroach Japanese Robo-Roach from 1997: http://www.wireheading.com/roboroach/ Paper behind a pay wall: http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-4471-15...

  "After a few minutes the cockroach will stop 
  responding to the RoboRaoch microstimulation."

Ethically dubious and a waste of money

This sounds, frankly, appalling. I would report them to the RSPCA in Australia. This sounds like it could make the cockroach suffer.

I am more afraid of a roach dying due to a faulty logic or becoming a "The Fly" and then flaying me! :)

Sometimes, I'm afraid of what can be posted on kickstarter :).

This is cruel treatment of a life form and the commercialization of a terrible and unethical experiment.

You can help report this cruelty to the Humane Society in Huron Valley now by calling (734)661-3512 or filing an online report: http://www.hshv.org/site/PageNavigator/cruelty/report.html#....

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