Do you really need a venomous robotic bod being controlled by the encephalon of a skunk ? Scientists at University of Reading do . They ’ve connected a biological " brain " made of rat nerve cell to a golem , with a two - direction link .
It gets more disturbed : the robot is controlled via a Bluetooth connection — which means anybody with a cellphone can probably hack on its piffling rat lens cortex — and the mind is kept inside a chime jar , just like Sylvia Plath ’s . The rat neuron can send instructions to the robot consistence , but they can also get signals back . And it has a personality , say research worker :
consort to Kevin Warwick , one of the researchers , “ It ’s quite funny – you get differences between the brains . This one is a bit boisterous and participating , while we know another is not going to do what we want it to . ” Warwick later speculates that much of the difference between rat and human encephalon lies in the number of neurons and not the neurons themselves . Picking on that particular affirmation , since I think it ’s a pretty sheer claim , you have to question about animal like whales and elephants who have one to two time the number of neurons we do . If he ’s right and it ’s the identification number of nerve cell that makes the difference , we are literally kill sentient being . Of course , to the people who are wipe out blue whales and elephants , that does n’t matter one second .
[ Mendicant germ , thanks Chris ! ]
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