Bionic arm brings back sense of touch
I think this sort of work is actually making more practical progress in understanding the functioning of the brain and its control of the body than more theoretical and traditional biochemicall studies have been making. I am consistently fascinated by each of these successes and see them as offering great hopes for medicine.
At the same time, I think they pose enormous dangers to humanity as the ability to directly control the brain is granted to humans. I do not think we have any real public sense of the enormous ethical and philosophical dilemnas coming up in the next few hundred years and, as such, the issues may be decided not by an elite, but simply by the random individuals who first decide to play with the issues.