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Engineer builds AI laser defense system that wiped out every mosquito in his home
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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I remember seeing a presentation by no other than Bill Gates on such an idea. A long time ago. It had merit, it was the feasibility, safety, and cost that kept it from being a thing.
A related side note - I returned a gift once that was a ceiling star projector. Was pretty cool, but I quickly realized that to get the proper spread on the ceiling it had to be low, which meant anyone looking at it in passing would get hit by the LED light. I questioned if that on a regular basis was safe, since the same type tech in scanner has warnings not to look at the emitter. In the return I left a comment on that point, especially such a device would be attractive to get for kids. The connection - friendly fire from a laser that's strong enough to fry a mosquito at distance is probably not a great thing to have in the house if you're home.
This is brought up in the article with the programming detecting other things around and stopping the firing if seeing something. But knowing how well vision can and can't work, and the creep of AI to such things, I'd rather not try it out.
Versions of this I've seen prototyped had a laser between two mirror strips so it zigzagged back and forth left and right as it went from about 10' up to the ground. The span between the mirrors was about 50'. It had a low-power always-on laser and the detector would correlate the signal with the frequency of a mosquito buzz. So if there was a mosquito anywhere on the laser path it would detect that, and then turn of a powerful laser pulse on the same path that would fry the mosquito. By putting a few of these in a line, a mosquito wall was made and it significantly reduced the mosquito population. This was in Ghana where they don't actually have that many mosquitos - nothing like northern Ontario, just the occasional one. But they carry malaria there so it is very beneficial to kill them.
This is how skynet gets everyone that isn't polite to AI.
Yeah I can imagine it messing up just once and burning the back of your neck would be enough to never want to turn it on.