How can privacy be a thing anymore when robots look like insects, when they can be programmed to fly into any open window? And that’s not even considering actual insects being controlled remotely, being genetically modified to follow orders. The opening of a story at Harvard’s site about a robotic insect making its first controlled flight:

“Last summer, in a Harvard robotics laboratory, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paper clip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. — subject line: ‘Flight of the RoboBee.’

‘I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,’ recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science.”