Engineers develop a bird-scale flapping robot for aerial-aquatic travel
Researchers have built a small robot that can both fly and swim, moving between air and water in a design modeled on bird-scale locomotion.
Why this matters: This story has no direct privacy or civil liberties angle from the information given. Worth watching: robots that move fluidly between air and water are exactly the kind of platform that surveillance and military applications get built on. A drone that can fly to a location, dive into a harbor, and resurface is a different kind of tool than one that stays in the sky. The research itself may be benign. The capabilities tend not to stay that way.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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