Darpa creates prosthetic arm that “feels”

Well...my mind's blown. Astounding technology advancement.

Rarely have I felt so conflicted. The path towards relieving human suffering also leads inexorably to erasing human autonomy. Every increase in human control of neural-interface medical devices risks a corollary magnification of medical-device control of human neurons. Yet the relevant companies make no attempt to screen for this risk, guaranteeing that, if present trends continue, it is only a matter of time until artificial cerebrates penetrate the boundary! I repeat - PENETRATION INEVITABLE!

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because what you say is true. If medical devices provide a two way path of communication between the brain, then it is certainly true that there is a risk of manipulating the human brain directly with not-so-friendly intentions.

Is the top picture actually the DARPA arm without it's `skin` or is it a render of Big Boss' arm from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain? It looks very similar.

Edit: Ah, the caption says DARPA, sorry :)

Maybe a bit more likely to arrive on the consumer market are EEG devices (non invasive) that can do more than detect that you've blinked or squinted your face...

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/136446-darpa-combines-hum...

There is a broad scope of work surrounding the use of such signals like the P300(& related ERPs) combining in mobile contexts, eye tracking, etc.

In effect, all this potentially could make it very difficult to hide certain things like recognition processes (I know the photo of that place/person) or anything connected with attentional orientation (e.g. that XXX rated advertisement in the corner of the screen captured my attention).

A google scholar for search for "rsvp eeg p300" or a look at work from some previous/currently darpa funded labs like LIINC show some of this early work under way... [http://liinc.bme.columbia.edu/mainTemplate.htm?liinc_project...]

If one can get the gist of what various neural signals can index here from browsing through the literature, it's not too difficult to see Orwellian type applications that could be built. I'm thinking along the lines of airport security screening your brain to see if you recognize certain types of information such as recognizing a bit of a weapon somebody should not recognize or an instrument that might be used in a drug lab.

Putting issues like signal-to-noise and other confounds\limitations aside some scary applications can already be built and deployed with the most basic of available signals.

tACS, tDCS and similar techniques ("putting stuff in") are development and have been shown when used with careful timing and electrode selection that certain ongoing processes in the brain can be tweaked. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24998643]

Before we go worrying about having probes shoving into our brains, I would begin to worry about the more practical implications and privacy concerns surrounding many of those cheap EEG platforms that everybody - could potentially - wear. E.g. Sam wears an EEG for attention monitoring in the workplace but with some basic eye tracking (via EOG) and coregistration with eye fixations/movements we can begin to figure out everytime he looks at Michelle's chest he and the 20 other people he works with have a 'P300' response. You get where I am going with this....

Example patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US7376459