Blurring the line

This may be a break through, but it is a little bit scary, too:

It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.

The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

They hope their research into neural computation will help them develop sophisticated hybrid computers, with a thinking biological component.

It scary for a couple of reasons. First, it really starts to blur the line between life and machine. Second, this technology, in its infancy stages, is not all that threatening, but one suggested use is to operate war planes in places too dangerous for humans. If that is already an imagined application, how long until somebody creates infantry soldiers with this thinking technology? And how long after that before the technology can make the leap to thinking on its own without human inputs?