[ExI] The robot bees are coming

[Mike Dougherty]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 4:41 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 'Green Brain' Project to Create an Autonomous Flying Robot With a
> Honey Bee Brain
>
> ScienceDaily (Oct. 1, 2012) — Scientists at the Universities of
> Sheffield and Sussex are embarking on an ambitious project to produce
> the first accurate computer models of a honey bee brain in a bid to
> advance our understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how
> animals think.
>
> <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001111405.htm>
>
>  "Because the honey bee brain is smaller and more accessible than any
> vertebrate brain, we hope to eventually be able to produce an accurate
> and complete model that we can test within a flying robot," said Dr
> Marshall.
> "Not only will this pave the way for many future advances in
> autonomous flying robots, but we also believe the computer modelling
> techniques we will be using will be widely useful to other brain
> modelling and computational neuroscience projects," added Dr Nowotny.
> -----------
>
> They seem to be mainly interested in the AI project.
> The technical problems of designing and powering a bee-sized robot are
> for the future.

Great, that strongly suggests eventual human uploading will be to a
hive mind none of us had considered.

bee-sized robots will soon be more expensive than repurposing the
biological models that have done so well thus far.  All we need is to
equip them with tiny iPhone equivalent and they'll download the
mind-control apps themselves.  Or maybe bees ARE smarter than people?