Monkey's brain controls robot arm

"Monkeys have been able to control robotic limbs using only their thoughts, scientists report.

The animals were able to feed themselves using prosthetic arms, which were controlled by brain activity.

Small probes, the width of a human hair, were inserted into the monkeys' primary motor cortex - the region of the brain that controls movement."

BBC News - Wednesday, 28 May 2008

The story cited above talks about the scientists using this technology to assist people with paralysis and amputees.

I suggest that people should think about the computer interface aspects of this technology. Those familiar with the cyberpunk genre of science fiction will know immediately the huge implications of such a technology. Others who have not read the books may have seen the movie Johnny Mnemonic

The ability to wire a human brain to a computer control system is the beginning of the next stage of human evolution. I know that there are many who will potentially mock me or dismiss me for pointing to this technology as the harbinger of something really big for humanity...

But it is.

Feel free to read articles discussing the work of UK defense department think tanks, The University of Florida News, Professors with implants, University of California researchers developing the "Artificial Hippocampus".

I will leave the last word to Bill Joy (William Nelson Joy (born Feb 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vaughan Pratt, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. - wikipedia)

"Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, was cochair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor ofThe Java Language Specification. His work on theJini pervasive computing technology was featured inWired 6.08."

"From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious."

"Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own." - Bill Joy, Wired Magazine