This robot tuna could become a swimming surveillance system

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/20/this-robot-tuna-could-become-a.html

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Tuna kick ass.
I saw tuna swimming while snorkeling.
They are so fast.
Penguins are fast too, but not as fast as tuna.

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So now you really can tune a fish not just tune a piano!?

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In my moment of properly parsing the headline and picture I thought it was going to detect people thrashing around in distress and how to differentiate between those water nations and people swimming normally or just goofing around.

I wonder what its mercury content is.

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Had to double-check if this was from a Wesley Willis song. Bravo

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Pretty likely to end up like this, unless they size up their robot:

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Anytime I think about surveillance of any kind, I can’t believe it’s not totally ubiquitous.

By which I mean, take how surveilled you currently feel, which if you’re me is a lot, right? Then orders of magnitude above that is what we should probably be expecting, given things that leak into the news, like how every few weeks someone finds a $20 wireless ultra-high-res toilet camera in Starbucks—which must be, like, 0.1% of the toilet cams out there. Then orders of magnitude above THAT is what would be plausible just given what we know we can do with the technology at hand.

Imagine a bug about the size of a horsefly, except it’s a drone. It’s got microphones, and cameras with resolution that wouldn’t look out of place on your high-end TV. It flies or crawls like a bug would, semi-autonomously navigating itself to points that can be specified in real time. It can cling to surfaces like a bug, too. From what I can gather, the only questions about the technical feasibility of such a thing at this moment in time are (a) how much wireless range could it have and (b) how long could the battery last. And those specs obviously would start pretty high and go up from there.

There’s probably some reason that actual militaries and police forces use less James Bond-ish surveillance. But if this isn’t on store shelves in ten years, and I mean in a way that’s 1,024x better than the versions that exist now, I’ll be very surprised.

The only thing that surprises me about robot tuna trawling for submarines is that it hasn’t been done before now.

Robot tunafish spell bad news for the navies of the world, particularly the submarines.

Imagine schools of autonomous or nearly autonomous tuna cruising around with packets of HE on their noses. How many would it take, spread through the ocean, to locate a relatively large, slow submarine, gather around it and then detonate against its hull.

Even at a cost of $10k per tuna, it would price most nuclear subs out of the oceans. Make them out of plastic and they become effectively invisible as well.

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Tuna used as surveillance?

That’s a throwback to WW2

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digital sushi, delicious raw data loaded with fiber

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The William Gibson dystopia we deserve.

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Does it have good taste?

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No, but it tastes bad.

Are they ill-tempered tuna?

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Fixed That For Ya

image

And Welcome to BoingBoing!

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