vast armies of robot servants, here I come!
In my last post, I mentioned a website by some folks who are into brain-computer interfaces. Gosh and golly, today Slashdot has a story about a company filing for FDA permission to start human trials of a brain implant that reads neural activity, allowing the user to control a mouse or play video games.
The potential uses for this kind of technology are staggering. For starters, a person with spinal cord injuries could have sort of a secondary spinal cord… wires running from a brain implant, under the skin, either connecting to the spinal cord below the injury or talking directly to other parts of the nervous system. Voila, no more need for wheelchairs, just some training and physical therapy, at least for some types of paralysis.
Of course, the brain is an amazing machine, and neurons can learn to do things other than what we’re used to. I saw a TV show once (on PBS, I think) about some researcher who strapped a pair of goggles to his head, that delivered all images to his eyes upside-down. After a few weeks, he saw everything right-side up again… his brain had learned how to process the signal so that he could see normally. He had to go through the same adjustment after he took the goggles off, but he was none the worse for wear.
There’s no reason to think that you couldn’t, with sufficient effort, train some neurons to do almost anything… typing, for example, or controlling a robotic arm like in the original research I mentioned, or completely controlling a fully mobile, wireless robot, like one of these for example. You could fly a teeny remote spy plane (if you could adjust to the latency), or, hell, even a full-sized jumbo jet-liner. From there to vast armies of robot servants is a tiny step. :)
