Start the Countdown!

The world as we know it is on the glide slope to oblivion. Need proof? Read this and then try to convince me that things will ever be normal again! They won't. This is it. This is the big one. This is like the monkeys finding the obelisk and banging it with the femurs of their vanquished foes. This is the simian Great Leap Forward. 'Cept they aren't gonna screw it up the way Mao did. 'Cuz they can control robots with their jedi mind powers! Did Mao ever manage that? Don't think so! When millions of people starve, it will be because the monkey overlords willed it to be - not because some ham-handed socialist Chicago thug mismanaged the central planning. Of course ham-handed mismanagement of the economy by a Chicago socialist thug may be a minor contributing factor, but that's a topic best left to another post. For now, we must stay on-topic and concentrate on this monkey menace.

The worst part, is that we humans are enabling them. Does our innate self-destructiveness know any limits at all?

Electrodes implanted in the monkey's motor cortex, the brain's movement control centre, pick up pulses within individual neurones.

One can tell from the spelling that there are Brits involved. How utterly unsurprising.

The system is so quick that if the arm overshoots the monkey's intended target, it can rapidly correct the movement.

Abandon all hope of outmaneuvering the bionic monkey.

Regarding the use of tools, our turncoat monkey collaborator tells us:

We use them all the time. Imagine you're moving your arm to get that piece of food. Conveying that to a monkey is pretty difficult, yet the monkey learns it fairly rapidly.

Great. And this is just jedi monkey murderbot 1.0 - what will the future versions look like? The monkey will continue to learn, and our lovely Brit scientists will further miniaturize the system until the whole thing is monkey-portable. That's when we'll be in real trouble.

The monkey cannot feel the electrodes in its brain, and did not appear to be distressed by the wires leading from a socket on its head.

Unlike Bill Clinton, the jedi monkeys DO NOT FEEL OUR PAIN. Pain, distress, fatigue - these are alien concepts to the monkeys. They will not stop. They will not cry "uncle" when we pinch them. They will just keep coming. And coming.

Unless some of those wires are hooked to 480V/3ph and by flicking a switch I can turn his little monkey neck into a little furry spattercone à la Scanners. That'd be pretty cool. I could live with some robomonkeys that were strong enough to do manual labor yet feared for their life every time I raised my voice. But the article does not specify whether these monkeys have this vulnerability. Until I know with certainty that I can safely off 'em by flippin' a light switch, I will assume the worst.