Seems like you can't open a newspaper without hearing a story about a monkey these days. "Monkey Saves Child." "Monkey Runs for President." "Monkey Discovers Cure for Monkey Cancer."
This afternoon I stumbled on these two gems:
Monkey Birthday Party Goes Terribly Awry
Scientists Train Monkey to Control Robotic Arm Merely With Monkey Mind
Gentle reader, I ask you this: which is a bigger example of human foolishness? Isn't it only a matter of time before we arm (so to speak) our monkey friends and send them to do our bidding, only to have the whole scheme backfire, with their cybernetic awesomeness destroying us all in an apocalyptic, supersonic poo-flinging monkeygeddon?
I'm not the first one who's thought of this, either:
Lives of the Monster Dogs
On a slightly more serious note, the way the scientists got the monkeys to work their robotic arms was a creative combination of conditioning, bio-feedback, and (what I'm sure is an inaccurate use of the word) black-box programming. Basically, they couldn't hope to track every single neuron and map those impulses to the corresponding moving part in the robotic arm, so they a) trained the monkeys to reach for food, b) cut off the monkeys' arms with a laser, c) attached the sensors, and then d) allowed the monkeys to repetitively reach for the food with their new robot arms, recording the stimulus and movement until the monkeys got it right.
Just kidding about the armless monkeys part. They restrained their arms instead.
What this implies is a less rules-based, less slavish way of programming the behavior: instead of trying to map every little bit of the biological half to the mechanical half, put a black box in between, which records stimulus and result, and adjusts accordingly when goals are reached.
What this also probably implies is that we won't (for the time being, anyway) have replacement arms that will just work when you attach them to an amputee. There will be a training period, where operator and artificial limb will get to know each other. Kind of like learning to drive someone else's stick-shift car. Or how infants learn how to move their limbs in the first place. This probably means robotic artificial limbs won't be interchangeable, either. Until they figure out how to save out the movement logic and load that that into some translator module, so that your movement preferences are mapped into some abstracted framework...
