The weather is warming up and that tends to mean the bugs get to be more of a nuisance. In the dark of the morning when it gets above 75 or so mosquitoes tend to come out. This afternoon I was sitting on the front porch. It was around 90, and the flies were starting to make my acquaintance. There must be something we can do about this. There must be something besides chemicals and pesticides.
One thought I had was drawn from the world of nature. I think we’ve all seen pictures of alligators with birds picking their teeth and other animals, which would normally feed on these birds, sitting there calmly, while the birds rid them of pests. Why could we not train birds to sit beside us and nail the mosquitoes as they came around? It seems doable. If you can train a dog to bring in the paper, why can’t you train a bird to eat what it normally eats only doing so at your convenience.
Or perhaps there might be some useful application of AI. What about having tiny little drones or robots, armed with low wattage lasers that would circle around us and zap anything that came close? It certainly seems possible, and if AI is a smart as they say it is, it could do the job. Of course that highlights the problem we would run into if the AI drones went rogue and decided that we were a pest to be eliminated. I understand it already happened when a group tried to turn off a robot and it didn’t want to be turned off. The Clickbait has it attacked the people trying to turn it off. I’m sure there’s more to it than that but it makes for a good story. If you add to that the fact that the green movement feels that human beings are a disease that infests the world and needs to be removed then perhaps the Sierra Club and whoever’s ahead in the AI race could get together and start dealing with the superfluous population under the guise of pest control. They might recruit Gaia also.
If you believe in evolution, then you might also believe that the mosquitoes would find a way to attack the robots. Maybe that’s a fantasy too far.
homo unius libri
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Opus 2025-298: Pest Control
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.