194
MIT builds swarms of tiny robotic insect drones that can fly 100 times longer than previous designs
(www.livescience.com)
We all know where this is gonna end...
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
194 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
80634 readers
5843 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Surveillance drones everywhere.
Surveillance is the "nice" version of it.
Anal probes everywhere.
Exactly! Flying, they are flying everywheeeaaahhhh!
DilDrone™
Yeah I was gonna say like why are we even workshopping the name with a winner like that. Get this employee a bonus check!
Neat a dildo and 4 rotating nipple toys
load more comments
(1 replies)
I've low-key started to think the only reason we haven't seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody's willing to break the seal, and I'm scared for what happens when somebody finally does.
My dear stranger, those already exist, and have been used in war to terminate key individuals.
We are living the dream.
key individuals
Such as Palestinian children
Point me towards systems that don't have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I'll agree. Scary as the former are, there's a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.
Oh, that's what you mean... yeah, there are humans behind, but potato potato, swap one brain for another... anyway it is a killing machine that can get you anywhere in the planet.
The humans are using ai to pick the targets they kill anyway. They theoretically are supposed to parse out the bad targets, but we know from examples listed in the above, that for genocidal states like Israel, that review is intentionally ignored or minimized.
Horizon Zero Dawn looking more eminent any day now.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Anal
#BugsArentReal
And it sucks, when you think inside Star Wars, such small drones are used only in medical or expensive surveillance and military applications.
But in real life it can really be a swarm of things worse than scarabs in The Mummy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
In the latest video about this by veritasium, he asked the researcher about ethics concern. the researcher insist that they dont care as humanity can decide for itself.
Meanwhile:
The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/16/mit-israel-military-funding-research-gaza/
That researcher is a real life Dr. Hoenikker. Vonnegut is probably shrugging in his grave
-…his mother was completely consumed by robotic bees. So it goes.
“We are willing to ignore and downplay the ethical concerns as long as the money keeping coming in”
MIT also (indirectly) killed Aaron Swartz.
MIT also (indirectly) killed Aaron Swartz.
I'd rather just have bees.
But how can techbros get rich from bees? Bees just make themselves for free then serve the greater good, the little buzzing communists.
I’d rather not have robot bees. I’ve seen hated in the nation (black mirror episode).
The MIT engineers agree. They said something to the effect of "If you could make a robotic bee, it wouldn't replace bees. It would be a terrible idea to try to use them for pollination... Just put that same amount of finding into conservation and researching bees, you would have a much better result."
The new technology could increase crop yields dramatically without harming the environment.
That's a surprisingly benign use case, I was expecting far worse.
Plot twist: The crop is human misery.
Well then fucking harvest me and get it over with
The public use case.
Without a doubt they will have those other use cases in mind too. Mentioning them is just not good for marketing in public.
I guess I'm the only one thinking about how it's inevitable that birds and other animals will mistake them for real insects and die from ingesting these things, god knows what kind of toxic materials they're made of but I'm willing to bet it's not safe to eat them
Dear technology under capitalism... We just want healthcare, housing, etc... We don't fucking need swarms of robot insects.
Nope, I’m out
It wont be long now before the nanobots exist and the Borg can finally take over. Resistance is futile.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Looks like they hovered for 1000 seconds. It was previously stress limited such that the joints would break after just a few seconds. I think they might still be tethered for a power source, I haven't seen any of these micro flapping bots include a battery yet, and they didn't mention that they did.
How's this for an obscure reference? This reminded me of an episode of Max Headroom in which the wunderkind Bryce invented a robotic fly with a spycam that could be used to literally bug a room. They send it on a mission to uncover an evil plot and everyone is excitedly crowded around the screen and heaping praise on it. Then it manages to sneak into the evil lair where it promptly gets swatted, leaving Bryce shocked and devastated.
They also did this in Spy Kids
Bradbury called it in Farahenheit 451.
view more: next ›