Cybernetic Sharks, steered by remote control
Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Health / Science / Biologist tries to steer a shark, nose first:
Funded by - who else - DARPA, Jelle Atema is working on creating a cyborg shark.
...Yeah, and maybe just eat a few US enemies, illegal aliens, whatever. I see an updated version of Jaws in the making...
Funded by - who else - DARPA, Jelle Atema is working on creating a cyborg shark.
"Jelle Atema wants to understand a shark's brain well enough to take it over -- to get it to obey commands to smell and sense what's going on in the water around it.
'I want to sit here in my office, call up Charlie Shark out in Hawaii, and say, "Go follow that wake,"' said Atema, who splits his time between Boston University and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Ultimately, he said, a shark could help the military by surveying hard-to-reach areas for dangerous chemicals or other hazards."
...Yeah, and maybe just eat a few US enemies, illegal aliens, whatever. I see an updated version of Jaws in the making...
posted by Allison Muri at 1:37 PM
4 Comments:
There is actually a horror flick called Deep Blue Sea that has a premise almost identical to this... in the film they give the sharks brains that have human intelligence, and (of course) the sharks turn on their creators. Sounds like DARPA could stand to learn a bit from LL COOL J, the films lone survivor.
Jelle Atema should not be working on sharks, he should be working on dolphins (aren't they suppose to be smarter anyway?):
Terrorist: "Lets attack the USA from the Pacific."
USA: "Send out the cyberdolphins. We got some terrorists in sector 7G"
Terrorist: "Ohh look at the friendly american dolphin [reaches down to pet it]...ahh my hand!
Somebody phone those guys from "The Fast and the Furious", I sense a block-buster script in the making.
But, with a human-driven brain, sharks would probably be smart enough to disguise themselves as dolphins. Problem solved!
A fine idea; alas, William Gibson beat you to it in "Johnny Mnemonic," which features a rather heroic, and apparently sentient, cybernetic dolphin wired to the Net.
That dolphin in "Johnny Mnemonic" was an ex-military operative if I remember correctly. It had become a junkie, probably from post-traumatic stress disorder. In a side note, Gibson has these epidermal drug patches in some of his stories that work a lot like nicotine patches. I think the first reference to them came out in '85 or '86... which was the same time the first patent for this delivery system had been applied for. Gibson's brain must be floating way out ahead, on the bleeding edge.
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