Scientists have made yet another breakthrough - robot insects.
Using micro-controllers powered by "invisible laser beams" they managed to create fly sized robots that can take off and land (for now). They used to power them with batteries and wires but the added weight made them unusable. I'm guessing pulsed magnetic fields could be the way to go to power these robots. If they hadn't taken all of Tesla's work on wireless transmission of energy, we would have projects like these for half a century now.
The obvious question we should ask is how will they be used? While we can imagine these types of bots used in agriculture for increasing crop yields with artificial pollination, possibly pest control, we can be most certain that they will be used for sinister purposes as well. Especially since we need AI if we want to control swarms of these creatures and we would definitely need swarms in agriculture.
Marvel's Ant-man presented many concepts that would be terrifying if applied to the real world. Surveillance, industrial sabotage even assassination. The main problem would be detection and tracking since robots of this size would be virtually undetectable (depending on methods used to power and control them).
If electric or magnetic fields are to be used to power them their effective range would be very limited and there are simple instruments to measure these fields. Of course, nanowire batteries could make this part undetectable as well. If they have bluetooth or wifi controllers even SIM-cards it would be easy to monitor those frequencies for anomalies. But what about AI?
Thankfully scientists are still some time away before making these commercially available and I'm sure that whatever methods used for power and control, the military has already figured out and used them. I would be surprised if these become commercially available and you could get them without going through some very serious paperwork. If they do get out as commercial products, companies could install safeguards to prevent unlawful usage. Still, if you can jailbreak an iphone and patch any app on android, hack in any OS out there with a couple of scripts - I doubt a bug would pose any serious challenge. Kids will hack them just to make them do tricks.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
And if you're scared of what the future holds, you can always buy a drone-stopping gun:
Tiny insect robot takes to the air, powered by laser beam (VIDEO, PHOTO):
https://www.rt.com/news/426911-robot-insect-laser-brain/