Robotics are becoming a major trend and with the addition of AI and nanotechnology, it will define the first half of the twenty-first century just as much as the last decade of the twentieth century was reshaped due to the advent of the Internet. According to the AFP by way of Yahoo! News, there is the possibility of having robots which not live on people, but will live inside people and their bloodstream.
Scientists have created an army of microscopic four-legged robots too small to see with the naked eye that walk when stimulated by a laser and could be injected into the body through hypodermic needles, a study said Wednesday.
Microscopic robotics are seen as having an array of potential uses, particularly in medicine, and US researchers said the new robots offer “the potential to explore biological environments”.
One of the main challenges in the development of these cell-sized robots has been combining control circuitry and moving parts in such a small structure.
The robots described in the journal Nature are less than 0.1 millimetre wide — around the width of a human hair — and have four legs that are powered by on-board solar cells.
By shooting laser light into these solar cells, researchers were able to trigger the legs to move, causing the robot to walk around.
The study’s co-author Marc Miskin, of the University of Pennsylvania, told AFP that a key innovation of the research was that the legs — its actuators — could be controlled using silicon electronics.
“Fifty years of shrinking down electronics has led to some remarkably tiny technologies: you can build sensors, computers, memory, all in very small spaces,” he said. “But, if you want a robot, you need actuators, parts that move.”
The researchers acknowledged that their creations are currently slower than other microbots that “swim”, less easy to control than those guided by magnets, and do not sense their environment.
The robots are prototypes that demonstrate the possibility of integrating electronics with the parts that help the device move around, Miskin said, adding they expect the technology to develop quickly.
“The next step is to build sophisticated circuitry: can we build robots that sense their environment and respond? How about tiny programmable machines? Can we make them able to run without human intervention?” (source)
The idea of having robots living inside a person as well as working with them is from a eugenic point of view, an interesting look into the future.
There is an argument that one of the conflicts for the future will be over the nature of man and ultimately his dehumanization. In other words, a sort of forced “evolution” that will be made to reflect a neo-Hindu divide between an elite- and likely technologically modified ruling class -and the “unevolved” rest of the human race.
It is said that any of the tools that man makes can eventually be used to enslave him, and the more powerful the tool, the more dangerous its potential. Given the power of computers and robotics, this becomes all the more dangerous in that it promises a false hope to men that ultimately leads to a quest for a false divinity, and to the same destructive end as Eden.