[Fern_Blossom]

With zero sarcasm, I truly want to know what your opinion is on the subject. Generally, I find this kind of stuff as interesting with wonderful potential of abuse. Someone more in the know, boots on the ground if you will, is worth infinitely more metric fuck tonnes over anyone else's opinion... to me at least.

[AussieWog93]

My honest opinion: anyone reading this will be dead by the time technology advances to the stage where BCI ethics and abuse is a topic even worth considering.

These articles are designed to make it seem like the technology is developing rapidly, similar to the early CPU and memory chips. A more apt analogy is the progress of electrical systems in the 18th century: we can observe some odd effects but have no idea what it is we're actually looking at. This won't change until we gain a proper understanding of the human brain, just as electronics didn't take off until we understood the atom.

If you want my opinion on the current state of the art (as of 2018), as well as a quick introduction to some of the technology, here is an old draft of my research proposal (You can skip almost all of it except Appendix 1; that's by far the most important argument for why I think the current paradigm cannot deliver significant improvement): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pmgCpDLEfHlWDu6OoHuoTOQ4...

As you can probably tell, I gave up because I could identify gaping flaws with the current paradigm but wasn't able to formulate a new one out of nothing.

On a side note, I suspect this is why impostor syndrome is so prevalent amongst PhD students. You're not actually expected to contribute worthwhile knowledge to society, but instead expand the body of knowledge in your field. In a static field, unless you are a hyper-genius capable of spinning a whole new paradigm, this means churning out papers which you know are bullshit but are supported well enough by the existing body of research to appear reasonable. In short, grad students feel like impostors because they are.

[typon]

Exact same reason why I got out of academia, and my field was a lot more "realistic" than yours. (Post-Silicon Semiconductor physics)

[jarenmf]

I don't think it's fair to expect to revolutionize the field as a PhD student. The goal of a PhD is to prepare a good researcher, probably more important than producing new knowledge. Most papers are maybe boring and have little new things in them but I still think they are worthwhile

[abrookewood]

Clearly it's not ready for commercialisation (needs weekly recalibration; only a single individual tested etc), but it's still amazing - we're decoding signals from the brain! Isn't that worthy of discussion?

[cjbassi]

So then what's your take on Neuralink? Are they going to hit a plateau within the current paradigm? And what do you think that plateau will look like technologically? Maybe we could still get pretty far within the current paradigm.