Despite the above video, from a few years ago, an artificial arm that works like the real thing is still a dream:
“The human arm is amazing,” says Rahul Sarpeshkar, a bioengineer at MIT who pioneered the design of ultralow-power circuitry for bionic interfaces. “It does a lot of very intelligent local computation that the brain doesn’t even do. We don’t understand the coding schemes that biology employs. We don’t understand how its feedback loops work together.” In other words, the science hasn’t yet caught up with the fiction.
A true bionic limb—one that responded to mental commands with precision and fluidity, one that transmitted sensory information, one that its user could feel as it moved through space—would require a depth of understanding and technological complexity that is simply beyond today’s prosthetic experts. “It’s not that we’re not going to be able to do it,” Sarpeshkar says. “But it’s higher-hanging fruit than people think.” In other words, this is more than just an engineering problem. It’s a problem of basic science.
The Dish 