From the 1950s, José Delgado was creating remote-controlled animals including monkeys and cats. Concurrently, Robert G. Heath was studying brain implants in humans. After front page coverage by The New York Times in 1965, and a book published in 1969 as part of the World Perspectives series about the mind, as well as being featured in a 1985 CNN special, José Delgado has still remained relatively unknown to the world despite his breakthrough research into Physical Control of the Mind now a part Cybernetic Anthropology courses at various colleges and universities.
After the University of Tokyo announced their robo-roaches in 1997, the motion picture The Fifth Element released later that year featured one.
The possible uses of remote-controlled animals range from novelty items:
…to rescue personnel:
…to military applications:
We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Professor Kevin Warwick notes that “if cyborgs are created with superhuman capabilities from a normal human start point, then it certainly brings about a threat to humanity itself. Perhaps the development of direct, military-style cyborgs might be possible to avoid. After all, when cyborgs exhibiting an intelligence that far surpasses that of humans are brought about, it will surely be the cyborgs themselves that make any decisions about how they treat humans.” – Professor Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg (London: Century, 2002), p. 239.
“Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on 20 March 1904 in the small railroading town of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania,” writes Raymond E. Fancher in Pioneers of Psychology.” 1 Thomas H. Metos notes in The Human Mind that “Skinner and others developed the learning theory known as operant (or instrumental) conditioning, in which the stimulus follows the behavior, as opposed to classical conditioning, in which the stimulus always precedes the behavior.” 2
Charles S. Carver & Michael F. Scheier explain in Perspectives on Personality:
Classical conditioning is a passive process. When a reflex occurs, conditioning apparently doesn’t require you to do anything.… Instrumental conditioning, in contrast, is an active process (cf. Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts). The events that define it begin with a behavior on your part (even if the “behavior” is the chosen act of remaining still).3
“Skinner used two other tools in his operant conditioning to learning,” writes Metos:
One was the procedure called shaping, that is, using reward to guide the subjects natural behavior toward the desired behavior gradually. The other tool was changing the emphasis from rewards to reinforcers.
There are two kinds of reinforcers.… For humans, a positive reinforcer is approval, attention, money, or promotion, for example. A negative reinforcer for a rat is an electric shock that is stopped, thus becoming a reward. In humans, withdrawal of approval by parents may make a child study harder and get better grades. The basis of reinforcement is that whether a positive or a negative reinforcement is used, it strengthens the behavior of the laboratory animal or human.4
Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
www.arischindler.com
Harvey Mindess relates in Makers of Psychology how “during World War II, Skinner conducted a series of experiments in which he trained sets of pigeons to navigate bombs dropped from aircraft so they would hit their targets accurately. The pigeons were to be harnessed inside the nose cones of the bombs.” 5
A web page that appears to have been removed from an all things vector website described the process:
The pigeons were trained with slides of aerial photographs of the target, and if they kept the crosshairs on the target, they were rewarded by a grain deposited in a tray in front of them. Skinner later found that the pigeons were less easily disturbed under confusing circumstances if they were fed hemp (marijuana) seeds rather than grains.6
Charles & Ray Eames provide in A Computer Perspective:
Skinner’s control system used a lens in the nose of the bomb to throw an image of the approaching target on a ground-glass screen.… If the target’s image moved off center, the pigeon’s pecking tilted the screen, which moved the bomb’s tail surfaces, which corrected the bomb’s course. To improve accuracy, Skinner used three pigeons to control the bomb’s direction by majority rule [Charles Eames and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 131].7
“These birds would have been the equivalent of modern guidance computers,” notes Robert I. Watson, Sr. and Rand B. Evans in The Great Psychologists.8 Mindess explains:
Bizarre as it sounds, the experiment apparently worked, and Skinner was eventually able to interest the army brass in observing a demonstration. The operation became known as “Project Pigeon” [compare "Project OrCon" i] and was classified until [1958 ii] It was never used, however, partly because the officers who considered it found it ludicrous, but also because by this time the U.S. was preparing to launch the atom bomb.9
“Skinner went home with 24 trained pigeons, which he kept in a dovecote in his garden,” according to the vector website on another removed page.10
ii Cited in lecture notes by James H. Capshew, “Engineering Behavior: Project Pigeon, World War II, and the Conditioning of B.F. Skinner,” Technology and Culture, 34, 1993, at University of Dayton, OH, http://www.udayton.edu/~psych/DJP/histsys/pdfhs/hsbehavior2.pdf (retrieved: circa 2000).
Related links
1 Raymond E. Fancher, Pioneers of Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), p. 304.
2 Thomas H. Metos, The Human Mind: How We Think and Learn (New York, NY: Franklin Watts, 1990), p. 99.
3 Charles S. Carver & Michael F. Scheier, Perspectives on Personality, 3rd ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996), p. 339.
4 Metos, The Human Mind, pp. 99, 102.
5 Harvey Mindess, Makers of Psychology: The Personal Factor (New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc., 1988), p. 96.
8 Robert I. Watson, Sr., and Rand B. Evans, The Great Psychologists: A History of Psychological Thought, 5th ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publ., Inc., 1991), p. 491.
9 Mindess, Makers of Psychology, pp. 96-97.
10 vectorsite.net, http://www.vectorsite.net/twbomb3.html (retrieved: circa 2001) at “A Pigeon-Based Guidance System,” University of Utah, 10 October 2001, at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/research/pelican.html (retrieved: 28 April 2013).
“The Pentagon’s defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions”, writes BBC news. “The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later.”
Amid all the controversy over genetically-modified (GM) crops and their pesticides and herbicides decimating bee populations all around the world, biotechnology behemoth Monsanto has decided to buy out one of the major international firms devoted to studying and protecting bees. According to a company announcement, Beeologics handed over the reins to Monsanto back on September 28, 2011, which means the gene-manipulating giant will now be able to control the flow of information and products coming from Beeologics for colony collapse disorder (CCD).
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