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[the trippy trip]
CNN
‘Plan Bee’ is a personal robotic bee designed to mimic how bees pollinate flowers and crops
cnn.it/2lQKbuY
[jaküb]
instead of saving the environment and helping actual bees let’s spend billions on robots that do what bees would do for free
don’t you just love capitalism…
[pts-m-d]
Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die
[curlicuecal]
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing the the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t 't glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
- -advances in robotics
- -advances in miniature robotics
- -advances in flight technology
- -advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
- -ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
- -ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
- -less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
- -ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
- -fucking robot bees, my friend
- -hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
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Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
[downtroddendeity]
@curlicuecal
I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
[stirringwind]
Can I mention that reverse engineering shit from nature and in the process learning how it works is also a way we’ve developed technologies that have far wider application too?
[teacupthesauceror-blog]
Also have we not learned from sociology that “water is wet” studies are actually hugely important as both proof against water deniers and getting clear on what water and wetness are
That is a whole lot of text to justify building the Torment Nexus.
And it’s really making some idiotic points. Bees are cosmopolitan because of humans already, and when we grow flowering crops where they aren’t abundant we literally put them on a truck and bring them to the crops. Unless something to replace them is self-replicating, biodegradable, integrates with natural flowering plants, etc. etc. etc. it seems super conceited in the face of doing anything to actually stop neonicotinoids or bolster native pollinators.
So based on the responses, I’m seeing 2 different readings applied here:
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the robot bees are being used to replace bees
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the robot bees are being used to study bees and/or go where bees can’t
these are not mutually exclusive.
The doomers are reading it as #1, and the “I Fucking Love Science” crowd would be well reminded that other technological pursuits get co-opted and used for detrimental projects.
The IFL Science crowd are reading it as #2, and the doomers are well-reminded that progress doesn’t come without change
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Yeah, yeah, sure, scientific advances and stuff, but now dance, monkey, dance and turn this into a weapon or find a way to use it to fleece the population.
Exactly. Two things can be simultaneously true. Yes, scientific merit, AND also at this point in history we know very well that if the research can be made profitable and the developed tech is bad, then RUN HUMAN RUN.
It’s insulting to call our sane response “doomer”
The points on crop density and monoculture are a bit backwards. We actually want to reduce monoculture because it saps the land and increases the demand for fertiliser, etc. If we increase crop diversity then this would in turn improve insect biodiversity and not require artificial fertilisation.
Also, fertilisation is fucking moot if Monsanto is involved.
Both viewpoints might have some validity, but I will say that the snarky commenters were just reacting reflexively, assuming nothing positive whatsoever could be true and that’s really sad and worrying because it’s really common on the Internet. When I read those comments I found myself agreeing, then I read the pro science responses and felt like a chump
A lot of people on Lemmy need to understand this, because all too often they are ready and eager to pounce on any positive news with dismissive arguments along these same lines i.e ‘why are we wasting money on X when we should be spending it on Y. We’re all doomed’. It’s becoming a tired trope on this platform already.
The problem is this is corporate marketing disguised as scientific progress. Of course you don’t want to save insects but bees pollinating flowers isn’t the only activities of bees.
It’s pretty much the same anywhere as a lot of people think that way, it might be pretty annoying but I personally think people who rely too much on technological progress instead of trying to actually fix things we can fix(i.e. people who say stuff like carbon capture will help us with climate change instead of actually having companies be accountable for the stuff they do)
I mean, I don’t disagree per say, but I do think people tend to approach the use of technology in too a binary way. To take your example regarding carbon capture vs holding companies accountable - we can do both, and I’d prefer we deploy every option, idea and ‘1 in a million chance’ as we’re long past having the luxury of waiting. At least that way we can say we tried everything we could.
people tend to approach the
use of technologyeverything in too a binary wayFtfy
