GENOMICON

Sorry. Once I’d thought of that title I couldn’t not use it, even though it’s crap… but go on, say it out loud. I dare you. You know I’m right.

I’m talking about this:

Which is a pollution-monitoring fish. It “watches”. See? See what I did there?

I found this interesting because they’ve developed a new type of muscle - current->movement, though I’m not sure how fast or efficient it is. Quiet, fast, strong robotic muscles are a missing link.

There’s going to come a point not to far off, where the bulk of the traffic whizzing round the internet isn’t porn, or one massive idiot-driven flame war… but is actually machine generated. And most of it (alas) probably won’t be anything useful like environmental-monitoring, but will be people looking at themselves (or other people) for the most banal reasons. London double-decker buses now have about 20 CCTV cameras… on the downstairs floor alone (I know, because I counted them when I was in one last year). Who watches this stuff?

Robots, that’s who.

But back to the fishbots… why stop at monitoring? Why not get them to eat the stuff? I mean do you know how much of it there is?

There’s a plastic-slick twice the size of Texas in the Northern Pacific.

Really, the only way to tackle this is with something that breeds… something who’s numbers increase exponentially, and that’s a way off… but in the meantime, it would be cool to have a competition or something… like Robot Wars, to invent robo-fish that can eat the stuff.

And then at some point (I suppose) they’d learn to eat each other… force to really, as the oceanic pollution diminishes… big fish, eat smaller fish and so on.

And then one day, an aircraft carrier disappears.