Just 10 years ago they were saying it could never be done. But now it's reality.
Digital brains may replace ours in the future...
A super-rat with an artificial brain
The bionic six million dollar rat has a functioning computer chip directly plugged into its cerebellum. Ostensibly engineered to augment the motor functions in brain-damaged rats, this rat gets its sensory commands through a carefully spliced spinal cord.
Cyborg rat sports shiny new artificial brain. *
Boasting to New Scientist about the achievement, lead scientist Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University explained, “It’s proof of concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it in a way similar to the biological network, and return it to the brain.”
Professor Matti Mintz [Photo courtesy Tel Aviv University]
Other devices have been created that plug into the brain including the famous cochlear implant that national talk show host Rush Limbaugh had implanted several years ago after going deaf.
But this implant is revolutionary.
Beyond one-way signals from ear implants and artificial limbs, the bionic cerebrum accepts sensory information. It can then process the information, analyze it and send a command to another region of the brain.
The experimental rat was conditioned to respond with a blink when it heard the command tone the doctors sent it.
According to Mintz, without the bionic brain the rat could not process the stimuli of the tones and respond to them.
Are armies of bionic brain Nazis in our future?
Bionic brain army next?
As artificial brain technology advances at an increasingly dizzy rate, some science ethicists worry aloud about the mating of aggressive animals—like trained attack dogs—or even humans to artificial brains that can be programmed or directed by remote control. Such brains when networked to a central command nexus could conceivably create robotized armies of mindless automatons engineered to kill without emotion.
Bionic battle hounds will be the first to be deployed
Bionic brain assassins could be unleashed on a defenseless world and utilized by terrorists. Armies of cyborg soldiers could be allowed to run amok, directed by crazed tyrants.
Artificial brain research is being monitored closely by Western militaries, defense agencies, and intelligence services around the globe.
Rat cyborg gets digital cerebellum [New Scientist]
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Replies
I see technology as being the luxury of a few rather than many a hundred years from now.
I have talked with people about using portions of my nervous system to create brains which can fly spaceships, but those would be biological brains, and thus not artificial ones.