News From the New Millennium V

A scientist at the University of Arizona has created a robot controlled by the brain of a moth. Pretty neat, eh?

Now of course this has spawned a certain amount of humor about deadly animal-brained cyborg killing machines. Slightly nervous humor, maybe.

But what I find more interesting is that the mothbot demonstrates just how far computer science has yet to go. After all, we tend to think of moths as pretty simple creatures. They fly around, they run into lightbulbs, somewhere along the way they make more moths, and that's about it. Yet apparently a moth's brain is still much better at spatial navigation than the best electronics. A cruise missile, for instance, has a guidance system weighing several kilograms and dependent on inertial gyrocompasses and GPS satellite signals, and it manages to do what a moth does with a brain smaller than a grain of rice.

Computers are smart and getting smarter, but they've got miles to go before they're as good at basic real-world tasks as even the simplest animals. So there's no nead to be stocking your basement to survive a robot uprising just yet.

The moth cyborgs will get you first.