Cockroach stories are very resilient and can survive almost anything.

I came in to say this exact same thing. I've heard this story so many times over my lifetime, the idea that this is the "future" feels like Tesla's Full Self Driving Robotaxi fleet, just a few years away every year!

It’s not a dead end per se because cockroaches are used as a model organism in neuroscience experiments. They’re just not very useful outside of academic research for the same reason that they’re useful in the lab: their brains are very simple.

I think this application would only work if they were released as a swarm, using basic triangulation of the mesh network to get them to spread out throughout the rubble, exploiting their natural ability to crawl all over the place in great numbers.

Agree, though I guess it's only one step further on from fattening them up on chemically enhanced food before killing them and eating them. Which I put up with in order to eat my share of meat.

The same kind of animal you would mass-murder with chemicals if one had too many children in your house. And then sigh in relief when they are all dead.

Yes, it's just you.

A cockroach seems about as sentient as ChatGPT is.

Four people were recovered from the rubble alive (one later died) in Surfside, so that wasn’t the conclusion at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

In the US at least, there's typically a presumption of survivors. One benefit to this is it provides "real-world" training (even if everyone's dead) - collapsed buildings are especially difficult/expensive to simulate. Rescuer safety is the major variable in deciding how much time and effort to put in.

So you'll see searches continue for an "unreasonable" period of time, both because people seem to survive in unreasonable circumstances and also because you've already got everyone out there - but once the weather turns bad, they'll usually start scaling it back or call it off (unless there's high confidence that something specific needs to happen in a specific area).

USAR teams have a variety of listening equipment to attempt to localize victims in a collapsed building, and while that ability could definitely be improved, I'm very skeptical that sending in a bunch of cockroaches to crawl all over people pinned in rubble is the best we can come up with.

To be coldly analytical in response: Surfside is a bad example. You're right that it wouldn't matter there, but that's not the use case.

On the national level, because there are few dire incidents in an affluent peaceful nation, there may not be much use for this in, say, the USA. You can solve most of its emergency problems with raw manpower and there aren't many resource constraints.

It's real use case is international, especially in times and places of war.

I can pick two out of the news right now - Ukraine, Palestine - and say it would be helpful there. But even if those wars ended, we can be certain new ones will crop up with similar conditions, where it could also be used. There will always be places, internationally, where buildings are collapsing and resources for rescue are scant to nonexistent.

Tech has caught up though. A cockroch robot or a swarm of them could enter small passages that are otherwise dificult and time consuming with other means. They could map the area in various ways, look for signs of life, etc. Oh, and they don’t have to look exactly like roaches. I know many are put off by the likeness to something we find not so pleasant

Then we get a weapons race where 1. organised crime invests in high end pest control, 2. Cops start using robotic equivalent, 3. Organised crime invests in jamming systems / robotic defence / faraday cages

inb4 Cockroaches aren't real

(Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insectothopter)