Robot Bat Flexible Lense Insurgent
By Ryan Oakley. Filed in robots |
One of the science fiction methods used to be hard work. You had to find weird notions and combine them into some sort of working, though fictional, contraption. Then you think about the societal implications. As ridiculous as it might be, the whole thing had to be plausible.
Creating this stuff involved extensive reading, a solid memory and some imagination. But now, thanks to the internet, you can just surf for weird stories then combine. It’s quite easy. The ingredients are all laid out.
For example, here’s a story about a flying robot bat with metal muscles. Weighing only six grams, it’s supposed to fly by flapping its wings. Unsurprisingly, the army is interested.
To this, add a new tech from MIT – a flexible, lenseless camera made of light detecting fibers– and you suddenly have a robot bat that sees in every direction. It could be covered in a camera. It could see you from any angle.
But where would you get these things and who would control them? Just the army? Well, if John Robb is right, things will continue to open-source and manufacturing will be local. This means that just about anyone who wants one will be able to make one, hack it and send it out into the world. It is, after all, a mere six grams. Make your robot camera bat at home. Attach it to your twitter.
And what sort of world does that leave us with? Well, it’s obvious:
pic nicked from here
Although Ryan Oakley began his career as a simple rake (drunk) he has since become Toronto’s most renowned flaneur (no car) and notorious dandy (overdresses). A misanthropic composer of psycho-geographical fictions (bad science fiction), he is also a server of food, a tender of bar and a washer of dishes. While performing all these functions with efficiency and elegance (disdain and malice), he somehow finds the time to publicly criticize friends, strangers and cultural crap. He's a bit of a dick.
