The Roach of Tomorrow: Better, Faster, Stronger

From Slashdot comes a story about biological cockroaches encountering, attempting to communicate with, and eventually accepting a robotic cockroach device as one of their own.

Let me clarify that: real cockroaches met a fake cockroach and it passed their Turing test.

What bothers me is the blurb from the article: "Apparently, cockroaches do not wear tinfoil hats, as they are not smart enough to be suspicious of box-shaped circuit boards with an antennae sticking out."

Yet.

It's so amazingly short-sighted for these researchers to underestimate all the little creepy crawlies we don't want in our homes and to be so confident that we can fool the beasties into eating our poison and sticking to our gluepaper. Remember, the robotic cockroach is statically programmed to behave in a certain way that currently fools some cockroaches. Cockroaches are alive, and if chaos mathematics has taught us anything it's that life is not static. It is dynamic. It will change and grow and, hell, let's just coin a term here, "evolve" to better fit new situations and adapt in new ways. If you haven't pieced this together by now, Jeff Goldblum's acting career was for nothing. Nothing!

I'm not saying that a robot is going to spontaneously make all cockroaches everywhere go Mimic on us. Quite the contrary. Cockroaches today are barely capable of differentiating anything more complex than "Kitchen light is off, all clear," and "Kitchen light is on, run!" Tomorrow's cockroach is another question. What happens when these silicon Pied Pipers have rid us of our roach problem? Surely cockroaches won't become extinct, so what next? Roaches will divide into two categories: those that develop better identification mechanisms and those that get dashed out of the gene pool.

So a robotic roach is merely a means to an end: it may help you keep your apartment clean in ten or twenty years, but ultimately the end result will be smarter roaches. If you thought the rats of NIMH were badass, wait until Mother Nature shows us what she can do.