Cockroaches made to follow directions via wireless nerve stimulation | Hacker News Reader

Cockroaches made to follow directions via wireless nerve stimulation

phys.org

25 pointslelf16 comments

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. :/

Disappointing headline.

But then you wouldn't have clicked the link, would you? ;)

That's pretty much the basis of my complaint, yes.

How is that news?

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

So there was a DARPA initiative to do stuff like this back in the 90's/early 2000's:

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.

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?

There aren't pain receptors in the brain, so stimulation like this is unlikely to be painful.

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. "

Wrong abstract.

http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/105/201413...

Very dangerous experiment!

How so?

Third paragraph down:

"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?"

I would be more afraid of the day they put those things on humans.

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...

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.

This would be very disturbing if your name was Gregor Samsa.

All hail your new human overlords.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com