This should win an Ignoble prize this year: scientists create AI powered laser turret that kills cockroaches [vice.com]. Ignoble prizes are about things that “make people laugh, and then make them think.” I am laughing, but I am also thinking. I’m thinking someone needs to make this a reality quickly…
I need to defend my kitchen from ants. Cockroaches, not so much, but I am locked in an eternal battle with ants. I live on the ground floor or a building in the tropics and no matter how many times I win a battle with the ants they come back in a few days. They are endless, they are relentless.
I want this AI bug zapper to be a reality fast. Lasers would be awesome, I mean, who doesn’t like lasers [pastebin.com] (the original of that was a user bio on StackOverflow, but it’s long gone)? How cool would it be to walk into the kitchen and see little laser blasts taking our ants? Pew pew! (They should totally ad Hollywood blaster sound effects.) But without fog I guess you wouldn’t see the lasers. Add a fog machine too.
But, lasers require a lot of power… and you’ll shoot your eye out. How about we have an unholy union of Bug-a-salt [bugasalt.com] and this AI powered bug slayer (still need the sound effects). I want to play tower defense with salt powered AI turrets in my kitchen.
I could start with them on counters and move them closer to the doors and windows, pushing back the frontline until all the territory in my kitchen is reclaimed from the ants. And then, the turrets will guard my borderlands. Creating a Maginot Line (scratch that, it failed), a DMZ around my kitchen.
Maybe we could build these on top of a robot vacuum chassis so we can have mobile salt gun bug killers, MSGBKs. Slap a camera on that and stream the video to the internet. I already have a robot vacuum and a robot mop, a robot bug zapper patrolling my house would be cool.
On the other hand, if you give an AI the ability to kill bugs, removing the human from the decision chain, are you setting the stage for the robot apocalypse? Is this how Skynet starts? Not with the military mounting machine guns on robo-dogs [theverge.com] and allowing them to kill, but with a crusade against ants and cockroaches?