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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised blood alone (perhaps heated to body temperature) doesn't attract them.

I expect in the next decade or so, sensors and microrobotics will become good and cheap enough that mechanical pest control will outcompete chemical: finding and squashing the bugs with inhuman reach, patience and thoroughness. Of course the tiny exterma-drones may be pretty creepy-looking, themselves.

I could picture one implementation being a skirt/kill-zone around a bed, such that any bug that feeds is definitively killed before it can return to nesting/breeding spots. So the customer is still the bait... but they quickly win a war of attrition against any local bug population, unless it's being replenished from elsewhere.

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Most living animals aren't usually bleeding because many predators are highly attuned to that smell, so kissing bugs, bed bugs, mosquitos and other parasites had to evolve other correlative signal receptors including IR, CO2, etc.

I'm surprised there haven't been kickstarters for little robotic bug killers yet. The processors and sensors are getting powerful enough, and within the right power band, that the premise of having a stabby little anti-bug device (a small roomba that kills) is within reach.

Of course, then we'll make them larger. And larger. And eventually it will spell our doom.

>Of course, then we'll make them larger. And larger. And eventually it will spell our doom. //

I thought that we'd make them smaller and smaller ... and that will spell our doom.

Perhaps the bug killing squads of nanobots mutate - either by a human introduced [computer] virus or for a more ironic twist from a source that would normally be a DNA mutator (cosmic ray radiation say). The bugs will then hunt out not pathogens but something useful like human nerve cells or white blood cells. Caught in an international crisis - war or famine, you choose - humanity will have it's eyes off the ball until too late.

There must be Sci-Fi of this.

Aside: is there a rule akin to Rule 34, perhaps Rule 0100011, that says no matter how outlandish a distopian future scenario is that it is nonetheless already a feature in the plot of a Sci-Fi work?

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