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Give That Monkey Brain A Robotic Arm!
jeffsenter writes: "The NYTimes (free reg. req.) has a short story about the craziest science since the story on decoding a cat's vision. A monkey at Duke has had its brain wired up to control a robot. However, the robot is at MIT and the signal goes over the Internet. The research offers some hope to paralyzed people."
hell, why not the Moon or Mars?
I'll tell you exactly why. Latency. Noone ever seems to stop and think about the latency in these kinds of systems.
It takes radio waves travelling at the speed of light (the speed limit of the univese) several minutes (can't remember exactly) to get from Earth to Mars and back. Now every time you do any action, your poor brain has to wait several minutes for feedback on that. You try putting your foot down to take a step, but don't feel the pressure of the ground on the sole of your foot until a few minutes later. I'm sorry, but that's just not going to work, no matter how much you want it to.
You know those fun things they have at science expos, where you speak into the microphone and it plays it back to you with a 1 second or so delay? Those things are really hard to use, because your brain is used to near-instantaneous feedback. With practice, you can train it to ignore the feedback and just speak.
But this is just speech, you don't really need that feedback (eg. deaf people can speak, particularly if they weren't born deaf). For anything requiring a vague level of dexterity, such as walking, looking, playing sport, music, and doing just about anything with your hands and fingers, I suspect that even 500ms of latency is too much for your brain to handle. Thus it might just work for halfway-round-the-world comms (landline only, no satellites)... maybe.
Telepresence is a nice idea, but should be thought of more as an extension to videoconferencing than as the elaborate setup you're envisaging.
Since you are 'here', communicating with 'there' takes some unavoidable time... The only way to beat that is to go there.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Whats so importaint about the distance? Do they hope to allow amputies the ablity to control their removed arms thosands of miles away? Sounds like a scary movie idea to me.
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Similar to the whole "brain surgeon touches part of a patient's brain, his leg moves" kind of thing.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Given an infinite number of monkey brains and an infinite number of robotic arms, could GM finally build a decent automobile?
People find it acceptable to cut the helpless animal open, attach wires to it, study it, and then likely euthanised it.
Actually, they probably will monitor it for a long time to monitor the long-term effects of the electrodes on the monkey's brain.
As for using monkeys instead of humans, there are laws against using humans for high-risk experiments such as this which imply manslaughter to Murder-1. Monkeys, no matter how unfortunate it seems, are not proteced by laws regarding manslaughter. Since primate physiology is the most similar to humans, it makes sence to use a monkey to test the system first. This way they can prove it's relative safety to the Feds before practicing on a human and avoid being attacked for murder by the AMA and FBI.
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If this was being done to a dog, or a *gasp* human...
Are you volunteering? Step up to the plate. If you're going to condemn the scientific community for not being willing to use human subjects, then you had better be willing to be a subject!
This happened once, by the way. There was a doctor by the name of Erich Hippke in the early 1940's, working in a little Bavarian village by the name of Dachau-- perhaps you've heard of it? Jews and political prisoners became the unwilling human subjects of a curious surgeon who wanted to know just how much strain the human body could take before dying.
He exposed his "lab animals" (to use your term) to extreme cold, vacuums, severe impacts, etc., all in the name of science, and for the benefit of the Third Reich. Twins were of special usefulness, because if one died, he would have a second subject who was nearly identical for a control group.
And the most convenient part was, there was no need to euthanize the subjects, because his experiments killed every one sooner or later....
There's a lot to think about before you begin advocating human test subjects!
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"Every man, without exception, is full of it." -- Athanasius
Finally, instead of having their filthy trained monkeys get their grubby hands all over the food the eat and throwing their feces all over the place, they can get nice, hygenic trained monkey brains-in-jars with clean robotic arms to do their chores.
... Mmm, I can't wait to eat that monkey!"
In the immortal words of Abe Simpson, "Oh son! This monkey's gonna to change my life!
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Here is a link talking about the keyboard and the thought controlled cursor, but I don't know if it is exactly the case you're talking about. The stuff about the thought controlled cursor is about a third of the way down the page.
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