Greatest News Story Heading Ever?

A mathematician I am not. I am however, the proud author of one vital formula that I know to hold true without exception:

Monkey = Funny

It's no secret that ads with dancing monkeys in the commercial make any product appealing. While conspicuously absent from the Oscar ballot annually, it's also common sense that movies with monkeys on snowboards and playing for basketball franchises are destined to be a hilarious and moving cinematic experience.

With that in mind, brace yourself for what may be the perfect news heading from today's NY Times... "Monkeys Control A Robot Arm With Their Thoughts". Pure gold. And not surprisingly, the subject matter and article are actually fascinating. There's even a video complete with monkey feeding itself through will and mechanical appendage! Long time readers of this blog (I think I'm the only one) will know of my fascination with robots also. A greater combination of entities there could not be.

The macaque monkeys have little transmitter grids placed on their motor cortex, and they learn pretty quickly how to feed themselves using the corresponding robot. This is an extraordinary breakthrough for the development of prosthetics.

On this blog though, we talk about collaboration, and most often in a meeting setting. So, if I were to let my mind wander, I could contrive of a few uses in meetings for a robotic arm that's controlled by people's brains:

1. In an Open Space Technology format, people are using flipcharts to record ideas. If this could be done anonymously by transmitting your signal to an unidentified robot arm to record, then what would be written could be more candid.
2. Creating gestures - possibly even elaborate gestures outside of the scope of what is possible for any human's range of motion - could be made by presenters to better visually describe concepts.
3. Building three dimensional tactile models and prototypes can be very useful in forming a discernible shared vision of a concept or mental construct. People could do this remotely or could do it on a much larger scale with enhanced versions of this technology.
4. You could get a monkey to feed itself in front of the participants with a robotic arm... you know, for laughs.