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Engineer builds AI laser defense system that wiped out every mosquito in his home
(www.techspot.com)
So the same thing people did 13 years ago without AI?
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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yeah but this one will actually not work as expected, shoot someone in the eye then gaslight you telling you it's your fault that you needed to buy more subscription credits for it to kinda work better
It's not that kind of AI.
The foundation of the system is its visual model, which Cheng trained on a custom mosquito dataset. To do that, he relied on a DSLR camera with a high-magnification zoom lens, capturing detailed images of mosquitoes for training data.
So, machine vision model. Cooler project, less clicky title.
vision models is what truly broke the barrier. neil degrasse tyson likes to teplace the word "ai" with the generic term "computing". he made the point that before "ai" every advamcement in computing was just called computing. now we give this mystical reverence to this new tech and call it "ai". whether you hype it or hate it, you give it yok much power.
when adobe could remove an onject from a photo we said "cool tech" now its "ai". there really are cool fun tools buy its hard yo find people online to have a down to earth conversation about them. there are people offline i talk to but it would be cool to coolaborayr more
Its unfortunate how big tech has hacked the word AI to mostly mean these LLM based chatbots or agents.
Even when LLMs are like tiny subset of AI technologies out there.
I see what you did there, you hacker.
I actually think DLSS5 isn't that terrible and part of the reason it was so hated was because of "AI". I see it similar to graphic mods or Ray reconstruction (DLSS 4.5), just another tech. Don't like it? Don't use it. Me, on the other hand, want to actually see this happen in real-time, one day. I imagine we could even see proper filters in the future (like this).
Gross
the one from 13 years was about killing flying mosquito and it was later turned out to be ~~fraud~~ (sorry original project wasn't a fraud but it never went into production see replies to this comment).
This uses equipment worth thousands of dollars to kill stationary mosquitos (standing on a white wall).
Maybe it works but it will not "wipe out" his mosquito problem. most mosquitos would be hanging out under your desk where your feet are.
[...] it was later turned out to be fraud.
Huh? That's news to me. Any source?
i double checked after I saw your comment:
The original project "Photonic Fence" is real and theoretically work however it never turned into a product because it requires very expensive components to identify and kill a mosquito in the fraction of a second it passes in front of the device not to mention the risk of that laser reflecting on something and blinding a passing person.
However other products with same concept are for sale currently and those are the fraud.
I apologize for the misinformation in my original comment
Thanks for checking
Yeah why do the mosquitos go for feet >:(
- Much harder for you to kill
- under your desk is a safe dark place.
- Mosquito could wait there for you to come the next day
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.
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.
This is how skynet gets everyone that isn't polite to AI.
"Tried to exterminate all mosquitoes"
is a way better origin story for the end of humankind than all the everything else going on.
Y'know, if we wiped ourselves out trying to wipe out the disease carrying mosquitoes, that's an ending I could accept. Fuck those little bloodsuckers.