Tiny Robotic Insect Takes Flight

[Agmen of Eladesor]

Basically these things sound like slightly (okay, incredibly) larger things than what Ryk E. Spoor had the protagonist using in Boundary and Threshold.

In those novels, the little nano-bugs were used for good purposes. Unfortunately, I agree with Mickk and r3vange that chances are, someone in our society will end up using them for purposes that aren't wonderful.

Heck, think about it simply from the perspective of what we as pathetic nerds would do - you can't tell me that you wouldn't take one of these with a camera mounted and fly it through the vent shafts in your local high school to see all those hot cheerleaders in the shower. (And that's just me remembering from back in my college days when we took a remote control helicopter with a camera mounted under it and spied on the women's dorm.)

Now carry that on to the next level - what would happen to government secrets if someone could fly in a micro-bug and listen in to the top secret conversations regarding national security? What would the results be if (just to pick a historical example and play with it a bit) if Britain had had a bug in the German chancellory in 1939 and found that Hitler was prepared to pull back from Poland if he'd run into trouble? Or if instead of having to listen to Bill Clinton say 'I did not have sex with that woman', if there had been a video of him getting a Lewinsky come out as proof that he DID have sex with that woman?

There was a science fiction story written ages ago, and I can't remember who wrote it now or what the title was, but the gist of it was, a scientist ended up inventing a remote viewing device. You were able to watch anywhere else on the planet - and any WHEN else, too, if it was in the past. The comment made by one of the generals in the book was, "With this device, we could scrap our early warning system - just aim of these at their control center and see when they're about to launch."

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Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.