Upload a Honey Bee’s brain into a flying Insectobot?

[2020 Profile]

Yeah! but what about the real ones that nature already provided??.......More shit!

New project aims to upload a honey bee’s brain into a flying insectobot by 2015



Every once in a while, there's news which reminds us that we're living in the age of accelerating change. This is one of those times: A new project has been announced in which scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are hoping to create the first accurate computer simulation of a honey bee brain — and then upload it into an autonomous flying robot.

This is obviously a huge win for science — but it could also save the world. The researchers hope a robotic insect could supplement or replace the shrinking population of honey bees that pollinate essential plant life.

Powerful and affordable

Now, while this might sound like some kind of outlandish futurist joke, there are some serious players — and money — involved. Called the "Green Brain Project," it was recently given £1 million (USD $1,614,700) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as well as hardware donations from the NVIDIA corporation.



Specifically, NVIDIA will provide them with high-performance graphical processing units called GPU accelerators. This will allow the researchers to simulate aspects of a honey bee's brain by using massively paralleled desktop PCs. While this will certainly work to promote the NVIDIA brand, it will also allow the researchers to conduct their project inexpensively (supercomputer clusters aren't cheap).

And indeed, the researchers are going to need all the computational power they can get; it may appear that insects have simple minds — but their brains can be extremely complex.

In fact, the artificial honey bee may be the first of many robots we introduce into the environment to make up for the current era of widespread extinctions.

Oh by the way watch out for the stings.

Anyway you can read the rest about this crime against nature here: http://io9.com/5948202/new-project-aims-to-upload-a-honey-bees-brain-into-a-flying-insectobot-by-2015?tag=futurism