No. Scratch that.
Things that make you OMFG and bang your head against the wall until you get a nosebleed.
Robot bug stories are amusing. As someone who is part of the SWAT team as far as bugs go, DARPA would have to make a bug, well, cuter than a bug if they didn't want to end up with a squashed spot of very expensive microelectronics. Yeah, I know bugs are a vital part of the ecosystem, but not in my vicinity, thank you.
However, I read a sober article in Asia Times that was unamusing. Totally.
The author was Nick Turse and it was a piece about urban warfare, reprinted from Tomdispatch.com.
Last month, in a hotel nestled behind a medical complex in Washington, DC, Schattle, Lasswell, and Hall, along with Pentagon power-brokers, active-duty and retired US military personnel, foreign coalition partners, representatives of big and small defense contractors, and academics who support their work gathered for a "Joint Urban Operations, 2007" conference. Some had served in Iraq or Afghanistan; others were involved in designing strategy, tactics, and concepts, or in creating new weaponry and equipment, for the urban wars in those countries.
So far, so sensible. As most of the population lives in cities, unfortunately that is where wars will take place.
What surprised me is that some of the more interesting equipment is already in use.
DARPA's Leheny also extolled hovering UAVs, specifically the positively green-sounding Organic Micro Air Vehicle which brings to mind the "spinners" in Blade Runner or, even earlier in blow-your-mind futuristic movie history, V.I.N.CENT from Disney's The Black Hole. This drone, Leheny noted, has "perch and stare" capabilities that allow it to lie in wait for hours before fixing on a target and guiding in extended-line-of-sight or beyond-line-of-sight weapons. He also described in detail another DARPA-pioneered unmanned aerial vehicle, the WASP - a tiny, silent drone that spies on the sly and can be carried in a soldier's pack. Leheny noted that there are now "a couple hundred of these flying in Iraq".
So perhaps the protesters who saw black dragonflies hovering around weren't smoking too much of the wacky tobbaccy.
Observation wasn't the only thing conference goers were discussing, they also spoke of control methods, both theoretical and practical, lamenting that chemical warfare is currently banned, but waxing enthusiastic about emerging technologies like microwave radiation, acoustic disrupters, and lasers carried by microlight machines.
Now comes the really horrific part, because it could affect all of us who might want to exercise our right of free speech in the future:
...back in 2004, marines deploying to Iraq brought the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) with them. A futuristic non-lethal weapon alluded to multiple times at the conference, it emits a powerful tone which can bring agonizing pain to those within earshot. Says Woody Norris, chairman of the American Technology Corporation, which manufactures the device: "It will knock [some people] on their knees." That very same year, the LRAD was deployed to the streets of the Big Apple (but apparently not used) by the New York Police Department as a backup for protests against the Republican National Convention. In 2005, it was shipped to "areas hit by Hurricane Katrina" for possible "crowd control" purposes and, by 2006, was in the hands of US Border Patrol agents. In that same year, it was also revealed that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had begun testing the use of remote-controlled surveillance UAVs - not unlike those now operating above Iraqi cities - over their own megalopolis.
So the short version is that both local and federal entities would have no compunction about using any of these shiny new toys on any of us that might be inconvenient or unattractive to them.
There's a fair bit more, but sooner than paraphrase or run into copyright infringement, I would say to go read the whole thing. Then you can bang your own head against the wall and I'll have company in misery.