How can you say it's harmless, you're cutting into the creature's skull and antennae.
Insects like cockroaches basically regenerate limbs and appendages (like antennae) during their molting. The ground wire in their thorax is not sufficiently large to damage the roach's vital organs.
Whether or not insects like this "feel" pain is a matter of debate. There's conflicting experimental information on pain perception of crustaceans, but the general consensus is that for insects like this, "pain" is only a stimulus among others and they make no difference between pain-stimulus, smell-stimulus, antenna-touch stimulus or light stimulus from their eyes; they just react to it.
The fact that the cockroaches don't react to the implants (by being incapacitated or trying to get rid of the electrodes or the backpack) is in itself indicative that the roach's existence is not meaningfully inconvenienced by the experimentation. There can be some stress reaction from the ice water treatment, but really, it's a roach. Its prime directives are to survive, eat and mate. It has a VERY limited ability to do anything more complex than simple response to stimulus anyway; in this case we've just replaced natural stimulus with artificial type of stimulus.
It's still the roach moving itself, it just thinks it's supposed to react to the stimuli coming from its antennae - which just happen to be caused by electrodes than actual interaction with the world around the roach.
By contrast, a highly developed mammal would likely require heavy sedation or restraint to prevent it from ripping the wires off its head, and the presence of brain cortex also gives rise to consciousness of self - even if it's rudimentary - which basically causes the ability to suffer.
This type of thing has already been done for a long time
for research purposes, and research IS being done to gain similar control over complex animals like amphibians, lizards or mammals. But you have to understand that cockroaches are uniquely simple to control because basically all their sensory inputs come from their antennae; it's almost trivially easy to hook up electrodes to said sensors (two is sufficient) to change the sensory input that the roach experiences.
In many ways, this is not a cyborg - it's cockroach virtual reality.
Doing the same with complex animals is much, much more... complex. Because we tend to have much more developed sensory inputs and on multiple layers; figuring out a way to control ALL sensory inputs to create a complete false feedback system (that wouldn't be disrupted by real world interactions like touch) would be insanely complicated for any animal with a brain cortex. You'd literally have to sockpuppet the entire brain with artificial inputs replacing natural sensory inputs.
What this would essentially be is a Brain in a Jar, even though the brain would be sustained by the biological functions of the body it still lives in. But, at that point, it would theoretically be possible to just remove the body, leave the brain hooked to the sensory IO.sys, and provide circulation and sustenance artificially. At that point the brain would still think it's living in a normal reality with a normal body. Or we could hope so.
By contrast, actual cyborg type
control of an animal would require directly hooking to their motor cortex and stimulating that to cause desired type of movement, overriding the rest of the brain.
Rather than Brain in a Jar, this type of control would be more akin to a possession of some kind - the rest of the brain would be conscious of what is happening, but unable to control the actions of the body.
For what it's worth, I consider both these types of control deeply disturbing and I'd rather just get rid of the higher brain functions of said animal altogether. If you really need drones based on biological entities, better make sure they're empty husks rather than bother with the ethical issues of essentially creating slaves that still live through every moment of their lives but with no control over... anything.
If that's not enough nightmare fuel, though, you can go and look what certain parasitic single-cell organisms do to higher developed animals - such as ants, snails, or rodents - and then complain about how this relatively benevolent, non-permanent experimentation with cockroaches is "unethical". Because nature certainly isn't anything what you would call "ethical" in the first place.*
And yes, I am very opposed to the idea of creatures, of any kind, being there as nothing more than toys for our amusement.
Quite so, that's why I don't really see it appropriate to sell this product as an entertainment product.
I don't see a problem using it for research or educational purposes (and I suspect surveillance applications will at some point become relevant, considering where we seem to be going) but yes, I agree - messing with animals (even as simple as cockroaches) is not ethical if it's done just "for fun".
*yes, I know that we should behave in ethically sustainable manner even if nature does not. However that's because we are
social animals and as such we have evolved to have an instinctive social contract - which can vary between individuals and be influenced by our experiments, but we all have some kind of ethics structure from birth, aside from people suffering from certain types of mental disorders. This has actually been a significant research field - social skills of infant children, mirrored to the social skills of apes that also seem to be partially inherent and partially built by environmental factors.
Also, even the most disturbing demonic possessions that nature does, fulfill a purpose of some kind. It can be parasitic, only advantageous to the parasite species - or symbiotic, which means the arrangement improves both parties' quality of life even though one or both parties might not even be aware of the interaction - such would be the case of gut flora in our digestive tracts. We only become aware of it when it gets disrupted.
Even seemingly cruel things like cats playing with their food fulfills a purpose of hunting practice. But the purpose is not necessarily "fair" or something we would see as "ethical". The only party that benefits from the cat playing with its food is the cat. At best case scenario the cat isn't even hungry and the prey item scurries away incredibly stressed and probably injured. At worst case it gets eaten. The prey doesn't benefit... the cat benefits... and the parasitic organism possessing the prey item to be easily caught benefits as well.
So maybe it could be argued that if a human child "plays" seemingly sociopathic games with small animals, it "benefits" the child by providing amusement, enjoyment, stress relief...?
So it is an interesting argument. Why is it OK to kill roaches (often with nerve toxins or suffocation) but playing with them while killing them is generally not considered OK? Is it a case of "Fate Worse Than Death?"
Because I'm pretty sure there aren't many animals aside from humans that would choose death over life in any situation. Those species would become extinct pretty fast.
