This article is more than 1 year old

DARPA to create brain-chipped cyborg moths

Looking to bug al-Qaeda

Famed US military mad-scientist bureau DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is engaged in an effort to grow/build cyborg moths for use as spies. No, really.

The program is called Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or HI-MEMS. In it, the arguably over-caffeined DARPA boffins aim to construct a tiny lepidopterine infiltration borg by growing a living moth around a "micro-mechanical system".

"Animal world has provided mankind with locomotion over millennia,"* says Dr Amit Lal, DARPA HI-MEMS program manager.

"For example we have used horses and elephants...olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles and horseshoes are needed for horse locomotion control."

Except that, rather than saddling up a moth and riding off, DARPA wants to implant a metallic core which will wear their bodies like a living cloak. Sound familiar? It does to us. If Dr Lal was using vast Austrian bodybuilders rather than moths, we'd be talking Terminator yet again (this happens rather a lot when one starts looking at the US defence establishment).

In a Times article today, Rod Brooks of MIT's computer science and artifical intelligence lab (CSAIL), was quoted on the insectoid cyber-infiltrator project.

"This is going to happen," said Mr Brooks. "It's not science like developing the nuclear bomb, which costs billions of dollars. It can be done relatively cheaply."

"A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and 'grown' inside it.

"Once the moth hatches, machine learning is used to control it."

The Times doesn't say, but we get a strong impression that Mr Brooks began waving his arms wildly around at this point.

"Biological engineering is coming," he went on, gathering pace.

"There are already more than 100,000 people with cochlear implants, which have a direct neural connection, and chips are being inserted in people's retinas to combat macular degeneration. By the 2012 Olympics, we're going to be dealing with systems which can aid the oxygen uptake of athletes.

"There's going to be more and more technology in our bodies...there's going to be a lot of moral debates."

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like