Frankenstein's Cat by Emily Anthes

Author:Emily Anthes [Anthes, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780742168
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

7. Robo Revolution

In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long grey-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable – they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do – and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The programme was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, ‘Our final examination of trained cats . . . convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs’. (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

Operation Acoustic Kitty, misadventure though it was, was a visionary idea just fifty years before its time; once again, the US intelligence community is looking to animal-machine hybrids to safeguard the nation and its citizens. In 2006, for example, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency zeroed in on insects, asking America’s scientists to submit ‘innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs’.

It was not your everyday government request, but it was an utterly serious one. For years, the US military has been hoping to develop ‘micro air vehicles’ – ultrasmall flying robots capable of performing surveillance in dangerous territory. Building these machines is not easy. The dynamics of flight change at very small sizes, and the vehicles need to be lightweight enough to fly, yet strong enough to carry cameras and other equipment. Most formidably, they need a source of power, and batteries light enough for microfliers just don’t have enough juice to keep the crafts aloft for very long. Consider two of the tiny, completely synthetic drones that engineers have managed to create: The Nano Hummingbird, a flying robot modelled after the bird, with a 16.5-centimetre wingspan, maxes out at an eleven-minute flight, while the DelFly Micro, which measures less than ten centimetres from wingtip to wingtip, can stay airborne for just three minutes.

DARPA officials knew there had to be something better out there. ‘Proof-of-existence of small-scale flying machines . . . is abundant in nature in the form of insects’, Amit Lal, a DARPA programme manager and Cornell engineer, wrote in a pamphlet the agency issued to the prospective researchers. So far, nature’s creations far outshine our own.

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