I'm not disagreeing with that. As I said, "even more hyperbolic what-if". Call it the same kind of science fiction that people were writing about smartphones in

I'm not disagreeing with that. As I said, "even more hyperbolic what-if". Call it the same kind of science fiction that people were writing about smartphones in the 60's: a kind of general direction that far overshoots reality in many ways but which is hopefully not entirely wrong. As for intentionality, your brain already handles that for you. I mean, I'm almost certain that you can imagine walking out the front door of your home without actually doing it. Same thing applies. I don't know the exact details of the mechanisms, but I have an overview. One technique is to have the user associate some rare signal, like thinking the word "chair" repeatedly, with an action, and let the user learn to use that signal quickly in the same way that you've learned to use command-tab. This is mostly done by tracking changes in blood oxygenation using infrared sensors or fMRI. Another technique is to tap into the user's motor cortex completely blindly, show the user the output, and let neuroplasticity[1] take care of the rest; this works astonishingly well, with monkeys being able to "quickly learn to voluntarily control the firing rates of individual and multiple neurons" and directly control robotic arms [2]. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface#Early_work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface#Early_...