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Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

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'

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).

>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?

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