Wow that was a hell of a thing to read, thank you! Ya I'm definitely way outside my realm with anything medical. My knee-jerk suggestions must sound quaint.

Wow that was a hell of a thing to read, thank you! Ya I'm definitely way outside my realm with anything medical. My knee-jerk suggestions must sound quaint. After reading what you wrote, I'm thinking that the nerve implant problem is probably not going to be solved for a while. But it reminded me of this, where they did surgery to have nerves control a muscle and then read the muscle with regular electrodes: http://science.howstuffworks.com/prosthetic-limb5.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/prosthetic-limb5.htm I wonder if eventually "they" can shrink this down to the point where individual nerves are controlling another type of cell, like bioluminescent, and then the flashes could be picked up by a photodiode. I guess the reverse would be if they figured out how to get implanted light sensing/retina cells to react to diodes the other direction. I'm glad that people are working on that stuff. I guess what I was trying to get at is that a lot of the problems that seem hard, like say self driving cars or voice recognition, are getting to the point where they are well understood and error rates are comparable to what humans achieve. So maybe some of that expertise could be open sourced and used to solve problems that seem intractable like mind-machine interfaces. I would dearly love to work on real problems like that, but there is such a separation between grants and tinkerers like me that I can honestly say hackers are 90% underutilized. I wish there was a kickstarter for such things. I graduated college in 1999 and have only spent about 2 years out of the last 15 doing what I would consider "real work". The rest of the time I've been scurrying about trying to make ends meet, constantly choosing between the pain of being under someone's beck and call or hunger. I can totally relate to researchers constantly fretting about money. Sometimes I think we could use a Walk for Breakthroughs, the same way that people have fundraisers for AIDS or cancer.