On Microbotics

So further to the inevitable, but entirely ill-advised drift into small weaponsied robots, is this

Which is a linux-based wifi finding and hacking machine grafted onto a “toy” parrot AR-Drone. About $600 all up.

I’ve been planning these for ages – won’t ever get it together mind, but this is how you fuck up institutions you want to fuck up – fly a wifi-hacker up onto the roof and transmit their dirty secrets to the world. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an aerial-hacking machine like this, but this is definitely the prettiest – and the Parrot drone is a pretty cool machine, because you can see through its eyes.

Still kindof big though – the trouble with tiny toy helicopters though, is that they’ve got about 5 mins worth of battery power. I’ve gone on about this before… anti-nuke though I am, I think we need some sort of pocket-nuke device to persue Moore’s law in various directions. The main reason I’m anti-nuke is because I’ve seen what a bunch of fucking corrupt old cunts holding the world over a barrel because they’ve cornered the energy supply did to the 20th C. What humans do when their lives are dependent on systems that are optimised for scarcity is worse than the inherent dangers of nuclear power itself. By a long way. This is the reason not to have a nuke industry… not because nuke power is dangerous (but sorry, it fucking is) but because the nuke industry is dangerous. Any industry is dangerous.

However – decentralised is cool, and this is that:

It’s a little nuke battery – from University of Missouri – not sure what the environmental impact of a couple of billion of these being thrown into landfills would be… but it does offer a way past the flying microbot power-supply bottleneck.

Not saying this is a good thing mind – it just is… (but I’m a technophile, so I’d say “yes”)

Of course if you want to shrink microcopters to the size of wasps, it might be simplest just to use… wasps. I have a feeling that nano-tech as-imagined-by-sci-fi will actually be a bio-mech hybrid. There’s just so much bio-systems can do without even thinking about it. Self replication for example.