What Will They Do Next?

There's a french film that got good reviews, maybe even an Oscar nomination, about a man locked inside his body by a stroke, except that he could blink his eye and so he wrote a book.

MIT's Technology Review has an update on work implanting chips in the brain so primates like us can communicate with external gadgets, like a mechanical arm, and feed themselves. Both fascinating and a little disturbing, until I read this paragraph:

After just two days of training, the monkeys learned to control the arm in three dimensions and to control the gripper placed at the end that functions as a hand. The animals even learned to use the arm in ways in which they hadn't been trained: an accompanying video shows an animal using the arm to push a piece of food into his mouth. In a second video, the monkey brings the gripper back to his mouth and licks it, ignoring another piece of food. "He gets so good at using the tool that he may think about it as part of his own body," says Schwartz. He likens the training process to learning to use a mouse to control a computer cursor. After a certain learning period, "you're not thinking about how you have to activate a muscle in an index finger to push the left mouse button," he says. "In that way, you've embodied the cursor on the screen."

And of course, I was moving my mouse as I read. But the dividing lines blur and blur.