[extropy-chat] BrainGates being commerciallized

[Adrian Tymes]

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,61889,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

Aw, YEAH!  And they do explicitly say they'll be
marketing it as an upgrade for healthy humans as well
as for the disabled.

Okay, granted, it'll take a few years to fully roll
out to where any rich person can purchase one and the
surgery to install, and probably many more before it's
common.  And there's the issue of bandwidth: merely
the equivalent of a joystick and a few buttons isn't
that much, most likely nowhere near the rate needed to
download information faster than one can process
speech (though I could be wrong, and perhaps one could
get multiple units).  And the external computer needed
to process the signals is far too bulky to be
implanted (yet - remember Moore's Law, and it doesn't
look like the computer was optimized for
miniaturization as it is).  And, of course, there's
the rather large, but apparently solvable, problem of
writing software to generate meaningful high-level
interaction between organic and silicon computers.

Even so, this itself is a significant step forwards.
^_^