It seems clear that we have only one hope against superintelligent fearless killer mice: Robots that carry out our telepathic commands!
Happily, Honda Motor Co. is preparing for the day:
In a video demonstration in Tokyo, brain signals detected by a magnetic resonance imaging scanner were relayed to a robotic hand. A person in the MRI machine made a fist, spread his fingers and then made a V-sign. Several seconds later, a robotic hand mimicked the movements.
I don't know about robotic hands pre-equipped to make a victory sign...
What Honda calls a "brain-machine interface" is an improvement over past approaches, such as those that required surgery to connect wires. Other methods still had to train people in ways to send brain signals or weren't very accurate in reading the signals, Kamitani said.
This is interesting in that computers are being used to capture the signs in brains that are not consciously produced, as opposed to methods of training people to make brain wave patterns that can be externally perceived with much cheaper and lighter equipment. It presupposes a future in which methods of scanning brains become much cheaper and ubiquitous. I suppose they might if there were reasons -- and maybe a multipurpose wear-anywhere brain scanner really would sell if they had lots of uses.
Like for voting on "American Idol"...
