Preorder Your Cyborg Cockroach Now

BackyardBrains.com

Or you could just wait for them to start breeding and taking over the world. Whichever comes first.

The RoboRoach “backpack” weighs 4.4 grams with the battery, and each battery will last over a month! Following a brief surgery you perform on the cockroach to attach the silver electrodes to the antenna, you can attach the backpack to the roach and control its movement for a few minutes before the cockroach adapts. When you return the cockroach to its cage for ~20 minutes, he “forgets” and the stimulation works again. Once you receive your RoboRoach in the mail, follow our online surgery instructions and videos and you will soon be on your way to becoming an expert in neural interfaces. After about 2-7 days, the stimulation stops working altogether, so you can clip the wires and retire the cockroach to your breeder colony to spend the rest of its days making more cockroaches for you and eating your lettuce.

So I spend a hundred bucks, have to perform surgery on a cockroach – which presumably I must catch, since sending live roaches in the mail is probably illegal – and in return I get to remote control it for a few minutes with my phone?

I can pay a stripper that much to do more. Is it insufficiently nerdy of me to think like that? Fine, how about this: if Robocop really was an allegory of the Jesus story, is Robo-Roach going to be the savior of the insects?

Source: Vice.