the Weird & wonderful

Greetings once again,
I had the weirdest revelation yesterday. Was watching this documentary on Discovery about robots...how robots are going to change everything.
Asibo, the latest bipedal robot developed by Honda actually begun its development way back in the 1980s!! Talk about planning for the future (who knws what are they up to now?). Then theres this new concept...'swarmbots' which are small simple robots that are able to communicate with each other to work together as a colony...much like ants and bees do. Simple minds which can come together to solve complex problems. To the militaries in question, this is definitely a weapon of deadly potential.
They are even developing (or actually they have developed) robots that possess not just facial expressions, but the ability to emulate human emotions. Infact, it seems that humans are pretty easily fooled into interpreting 'synthetic' emotions as 'real' emotions and react accordingly to them. While one does worry about a future of robots (think Matrix), acceptance is going to be comfortably gradual. Because, with the age of cybernetics, body parts that fail us will be replaced by man-made ones.
Most glaring to me however, as i sat there in my comfy chair thinking i've seen it all, was this experiment. They made this 'robot'. They call it the 'ratbot'. Its actually a rat...with wires and stuff dangling from it skull to a reciever strapped to its back. The rat appears healthy, not burdened nor in pain, happily running around. Yes its running around...rats run around....but this one...was remote controlled like a toycar.
The ingenuity or breakthrough was as simple as this: get a rat, look for a part of the brain that interprets pleasure, use an electrode to stimulate it whenever it follows the certain direction you want it to walk.
The researchers boasts that rather than having a totally synthetic robot that, by current standards can only run for about an hour, their 'ratbot' can remain operational for 12 hours. Are easy to produce (breed) and much..much more agile (figures...we're just riding on all those millions of years of evolution in agility). As far as the rat is concerned, its having pleasure. Ethic issues anyone?
I realised that, while ethical issues in genetic engineering (all that mix and match *poof* magic) seemed dire enough...its all coming to be rather futile. The very cogitation of identity in all and everything that we know has never before been so starkly displayed as naive. Lack of philosophical wisdom in identity? All too true.
Once again it pains me (whoever i am) the most, that a vast majority of the public are very much ignorant or apathetic or even both (i dont knw and i dont care) about this. Infectious idea? You bet. And our sacred education in all its glory isn't helping at all. Sure, you wont die if you not know...but whats the point in living without knowing what it means to live?

"curiouser and curiouser" - Alice