Maybe. I support brain-computer interface research, but I don&#x27;t think you should be so certain that it&#x27;s the future.<p>Imagine you could stimulate the brain directly, what would that look like? If it&#x27;s visual input, it&#x27;s going to look a lot like stimulating the visual cortex, right? So you&#x27;re suggesting we will invent some sort of biomedical device that can project an image onto some region of cortex. That would be neat!<p>But isn&#x27;t there already a device that can project an image onto a region of cortext? There is! It&#x27;s called the eye! What is really gained by stimuating the visual cortext directly, vs just having, say, an eyebrow piercing that just does the same thing by coming in through the eyeball?<p>Well, ok, maybe you&#x27;d like to get a little more bandwidth than the eye can provide? But I&#x27;m not sure that really makes sense. The eye takes in a LOT of bandwidth, and most of the time, unless we are fighting a bear or trying to run a football through a bunch of bodies, we&#x27;re not even using all of the bandwidth.<p>Maybe you want to be able to look at the world and get input subconsciously without messing up your beautiful view. But you can just dedicate a some small number of &quot;pixels&quot; of your visual field to non-visual data. If your brain can&#x27;t integrate that data with the visual field, it will just become a blind spot, and it will be as invisible to you as your current blind spots are.<p>Really, our perceptual system <i>could</i> be much more powerful, but beyond a certain point there&#x27;s no reason to have more bandwidth because the existing stuff is all a brain of our size can really synthesize in realtime. You could add additional inputs to your brain, but your brain will just grow around them, dulling your connection with other parts of your body. That&#x27;s not necessarily bad, but, again, why not just use those parts of your body for the input?<p>The planet Earth has spent about a billion years trying to design the perfect input&#x2F;output interface for the human brain and it&#x27;s done a pretty good job. I&#x27;m not saying we can&#x27;t improve on it, I&#x27;m just saying it&#x27;s going to be hard to do any optimizations at the hardware level. And we don&#x27;t really need new hardware to plug in to computers, because our brain is already happy to remap itself to virtual inputs! Pretty much all of the things people imagine doing with a BCI can be done more efficiently, and less obtrusively with augmented reality.