From New Scientist:
GOVERNMENT spooks want cyborg insects to snoop on their enemies. Biologists want to tap into the nervous systems of insects to understand how they fly. A probe that can be implanted into moths to control their flight could help satisfy both parties. One day, it could even help rehabilitate people who have had strokes.
Amid all the hub-bub about drones, this is actually more where my head is.
Seems like, since the start of The Grumpy Owl, I’ve been writing about these remote controlled, cyborg insects. As well as remote controlled sharks, pigeons and rats, cricket communication techs and reports of cyborg dragon flies at anti-war demonstrations. And the beetles.
And every year, we get closer to the weaponization of nature.
This is one of the worst ideas humans have ever had. A world where pigeons are CCTV, bugs are recording your words and crickets are relaying information strikes me as a form of real-time, real-life insanity where people will have to function as paranoid schizophrenics.
In the long term, it could lead to an ubiquitous global intelligence –an actual realization of Gaia– but I’m doubtful that a species that has to incorporate that much paranoia into its worldview and mix it with technological might has much of a long term.
It seems the short-term would be deliberate xenocide against animals, who would now be combatants and not even subject to the tenuous morality we offer different races of humans; madness as the ability to divide between paranoia and sense dissolves; and biological warfare as a most efficient form of weaponry.
On the other hand, I might just end up saying to some great grandkid, after my stroke: “Remote control? I remember when we had to chase girls with worms we picked up ourselves.”
To which, he’d doubtless reply: “What are girls?”
And that’s when I’d jump out the airlock.
