Also, using a camera would require some impressive object id software. Electric field distortion mapping would be much easier for the initial detection than triangulating sound (I figure they probably use something of the sort in the article,) and it sounds like external parameters of the insect’s flight can be used to figure out the rest.
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If this is profitable, then it could have been funded by traditional investment, instead of taking resources that had supposedly been dedicated to charity. This was done with donations which gained them lots of positive PR and was probably tax deductible.
This is Intellectual Ventures we’re taking about – the default assumption should be that they’re doing something shady. That’s what they do. That’s their business model.
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So how much damage would this device hypothetically do to a human, when (inevitably) someone reprograms it remotely - perhaps combining it with one of those clever pupil-detecting algorithms?
(Don’t get me wrong - I not only want one, I’ve been saying for years that I wanted someone to invent a laser-based mosquito defense. But that also means I’ve had time to think of the drawbacks. )
Is it possible to limit the laser to an intensity that would not affect humans at all?
Was it a UV laser they used? Not really happy about that, if so - that way lies, at best, pranks where someone hijacks the thing and programs it to undetectably print cusswords on a sleeping person’s skin in sun-burn…
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Yeah, something tells me this isn’t really about mosquitoes. I can think of a certain boundary-obssessed president that would be nuts for a toy like this.
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While we’re at it, develop a small, AI-controlled battle tank that hunts cockroaches under the kitchen sink.
Bonus points for it shooting depleted uranium shells for advanced cockroach armor piercing.
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I’ll take two.
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Can I mount it on a shark?
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the links at the bottom? 
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When Intellectual Ventures co-founder and former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold came up with the idea of a bug-killing fence in 2010,
Lemme guess…he immediately filed for patents concerning every new and existing feature used on the device, and sued every other laser bug removal company out of business on shady patent lawsuits?
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It may need some serious debugging if it’s from a former MS jockey.
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I guess the Israelis have had this in place along the Gaza Strip for a decade now, with the first kill in 2008. Sounds like anyone killed by the system is automatically, retroactively deemed a terrorist.
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I haven’t seen much from the charitable angle (they seem to be set up as a for-profit corporation), but some googling indicates that Intellectual Ventures has a remarkably bad reputation as a patent troll.
Their business model seems. . . complicated. Like, I think they maybe do some genuinely good work, but mixed with some pretty terrible corporate behaviour. I don’t see anything wrong, so far, with the laser fence. But I can see how the company’s overall reputation could color a person’s view
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I love that Nathan Myhrvold thought up this idea for use in Sub-Saharan Africa to zap malarial mosquitoes, an area that does not have a great reputation for reliable electricity. This is a great example of technology solving a problem elegantly but being completely impractical for the purposes it was designed.
It’s a neat idea. Glad to see that it has some use.
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Wasn’t this what the German tourists were wearing as hats in Pirate Cinema?
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Hopefully the collateral bee damage is low.
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I see what you did there 
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