Recently read this and was completely amazed. Actually first I was amazed that they had a rhesus monkey playing a video game, but then the whole “moving the cursor in real time by pure thought” hit me.
ANd this isn’t the only development. I remember seeing a tv special a couple years ago about a blind subject who basically had video fed directly to the optical centers of his brain. Granted, they were grainy and wouldn’t qualify as decent vision, but it was more than he had before. I wish I had a cite… maybe later I can find one.
So… given these specific developments and the general idea that we’re apparently able to do such things at all, I gotta say I’m rediculously excited.
There’s no point to this post except to voice my excitement/mild anticipation, and that’s why its in MPSIMS.
I’ve had some interesting discussions about this stuff, back when the vision implants were in the news.
Notice how you talk about driving. You don’t say “I manipulated the steering wheel and the pedals so the car went around the corner.” You say “I turned the corner.” The car has become, in a sense, an extension of your self. The same thing happens with all sorts of other physical prosthetics; someone with an artificial hand comes to perceive it almost the same way you and I perceive a meat hand. We already have mental prosthetics like calculators and PIMs (scraps of paper have been around for years!), though they are still not nearly as close to home as the physical ones. Implants like the visual and motor ones mentioned in the OP cross that gap; their immediacy makes the difference.
Mental prosthetics could (and probably will) be developed for access to the Internet, which would soon be perceived as an extension of self. Since there would be multiple users, with their extended selves overlapping, we’d be moving toward a state of group consciousness, i.e. Borg.
Benefits and risks are both too obvious for me to go on any longer now, but maybe I’ll extend this later.
There’s a somewhat-related story mentioned on Slashdot today about Steve Mann, who has allegedly been living with computerized prosthetics for so long that he couldn’t cope when airport security stripped him. (One of the posters debunks that part; I don’t know.)
