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Controlling Robots with the Mind
loucura! writes "Scientific American has a fairly technical article on the real-time control of robotic limbs using recorded neuron patterns. The researcher's macaque has simultaneously controlled two robotic arms in addition to its own arm motion. The amazing thing? One of the arms was 600 miles away. So, they transmitted and translated the "commands" into motion in less than 300 milliseconds!" It's still a long ways off from helping the disabled or making a Dr. Octopus suit, but the potential uses are pretty cool.
To me, the most amazing part of the article is on page 5:
If visual and tactile sensations mimic the information that usually flows between Aurora's own arm and brain, long-term interaction with a BMI could possibly stimulate her brain to incorporate the robot into its representations of her body--schema known to exist in most brain regions. In other words, Aurora's brain might represent this artificial device as another part of her body. Neuronal tissue in her brain might even dedicate itself to operating the robot arm and interpreting its feedback.
So, not only could you teach your brain to replace a damaged limb with a prosthetic one, but you could potentially teach your brain to operate a totally *new* limb! How cool would that be??
And the whole idea of remotely controlling limbs makes me think that the concept of Hector from Saturn 3 [www.imdb.com] probably seemed far-fetched at the time, but starts to be less and less so...
Have EVDO, will travel.
The data is not as clean as the article implies (typical of Scientific American and science p.r. pulp magazines) and the technology right now will detect only gross patterns, some identical patterns are generated by other intensions and attensions so we have big problems of false positives and of course some give no distinguishing patterns at all. There is the big question whether brain patterns will correlate 100% or even good enough with mental patterns (specificity issues), the literature isn't very good in this regard. I seriously doubt 100% correlation for logical, empirical and ontological reasons, but good enough maybe all that's required.
Apes are certainly physiologically equipped to build their own society. They have the digits to construct things, they have the basic insights into using tools and they have very rudimentary language capabilities.
They're just too stupid.
The ability to adapt in impressive ways is just the way the brain is wired up and says little about their intelligence. Even rats often come up with impressive tricks to shortcut their way to a reward that the experimenters hadn't thought of. It doesn't make the rats sentient or smarter than the scientist, it just means they are very efficient at picking up correlations in the environment in the same way a computer might if it were designed to do so.
What sets us apart is our language and sentience. It is not a mundane detail, nor is it something that can be taught to apes at a better than 4 year old level.
Now, you can argue that it's wrong to experiment on them, I'm not defending or proposing animal experimentation, I'm just stating a fact, on the scale of humans, with or without language, apes are just plain stupid.
Remove humans from earth and fast forward 5 million years and chimps could very likely evolve into a human-like species (again), but they're nowhere close yet.
And yes, it's legitimate to compare brain volume. Brain volume allows manual coordination, executive decision making, memory, image processing. Discounting brain volume puts you dangerously close to separating mind from brain, and if you want to go down that road, I surrender.
(Especially if they ever get those other appendages to work, too...)
The amazing thing? One of the arms was 600 miles away. So, they transmitted and translated the "commands" into motion in less than 300 milliseconds!"
That sounds very similar to moving a character around in an online game. 300 milliseconds is nothing as far as transmission speed goes. A 300 ping in an online game is awful (even with a 56k modem!) Somehow, I doubt that most of that 300 milliseconds was taken up by transmissing the data 600 miles. More likely, most of that time was actually taken up by computations.
Even better than that -- they implanted very fine wires into the brain to lie alongside a small number of individual neurons. Then they measured the electrical activity of those neurons. We're not talking about reading from the axons in the spinal column, this is straight from the motor cortex.
The most amazing thing is that a usable signal can be read from so few neurons. Recording from 100 random neurons in the right part of the brain gave a 70%-complete signal, with diminishing returns as more are added. Wiring up brain using no more than a few hundred connections is reasonable enough to be useful!
I wonder if this technology could be adapted, so that as a person thinks of a letter, the sensors could translate the neuron pattern into an ASCII code. Imagine typing without the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome.