I notice I wanted to put ‘dexterous motor control’ on both lists, so I’m somehow confused; it seems like we already have prostheses that perform pretty well based on external nerve sites (like reading off what you wanted to do with your missing hand from nerves in your arm) but I somehow don’t expect us to have the spatial precision or filtering capacity to do that in the brain.
We’ve had prostheses that let people control computer cursors via a connection directly to the brain at least since 2001. Would you not count that as dexterous motor control?
Length of the control vector seems important; there’s lots of ways to use gross signals to control small vectors that don’t scale to controlling large vectors. Basically, you could imagine that question as something like “could you dance with it?” (doable in 2014) or “could you play a piano with it?” (doable in 2018), both of which naively seem more complicated than an (x,y) pair (at least, when you don’t have visual feedback).
We’ve had prostheses that let people control computer cursors via a connection directly to the brain at least since 2001. Would you not count that as dexterous motor control?
Length of the control vector seems important; there’s lots of ways to use gross signals to control small vectors that don’t scale to controlling large vectors. Basically, you could imagine that question as something like “could you dance with it?” (doable in 2014) or “could you play a piano with it?” (doable in 2018), both of which naively seem more complicated than an (x,y) pair (at least, when you don’t have visual feedback).