Monkey controls robot hand through brain implants

If you can do stuff like that, why not speed up your nervous system by directly connecting the brain to your arm and hands, skipping the slow neural network altogether?

This is not new technology. A company called cyberkinetics commercialized this 12 years ago and made it work in humans. See their coverage in wired from 2003.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html

Of course it's not new, the article (as brief as it is) states that this work builds upon the electrode based efforts that you referenced from 2003.

I am sorry but that doing experiments like this on a living, breathing primate is sick. Surely there is somebody working on a way to develop mind-computer interfaces that doesn't rely on inflicting this kind of suffering on intelligent social animals?

They'll be working in call centres next year.

This has been done before at Nicolelis Lab at Duke. I did a rotation there during grad school:

http://touchlab.mit.edu/news/documents/ScinetificAmerican_20...

http://www.thinkartificial.org/machine-interfaces/monkey-bra...

Also other US universities have been working on this stuff for 5-10 years.