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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.
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.
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.