Well I have known kids who have had cochlear implants which have their own issues. One is that static electricity can short them out requiring surgery to repair. One kids was knocked out when they slid down one of those plastic Fisher Price slides.
And thats only hooked into ones ears. Imagine if it was hooked into your brain and a microwave oven or even a cell phone could zap it.
That’s still not a physical reason why we can’t have an interface. We have already worked out some basic interface, like the latest tech for controlling artificial limbs and the aforementioned coclear implant.
So we have input and output, so then all that’s required from there is to make using it habitual. Then you just think about checking online, and you do, the same way you just think about walking and walk, or just think about typing and type.
No need for a direct connection to engrams or anything, no matter where the information is stored. (Though, your mouse experiment could only mean that there is redundant data storage. And we know there is, or you wouldn’t be able to reconstruct memories you’ve forgotten. You take out enough of the brain, the rat still stops functioning altogether.)
I just re-read the novel Feed, set in a future where everyone has implanted “feeds.”
My kids had to read it in middle school soon after it came out. Back then, we all found it quite disturbing. Now, well, I’m not sure. Seems like much of it seems to be on the way to coming true. No implants yet, but the constant connectedness, the superficiality, dumbing down, and commercialization.
You need a temperature difference to use heat to power something, this is basic physics. That’s not going to happen. In real life the power supply for implants is a huge problem.
As for turning people into meat puppets, why bother? If you have a robot chip that can take over a person’s brain, why not implant the robot chip in a robot body? Or not in a body, the point of the robot brain is to accomplish certain tasks. We have robot dishwashers already, but they don’t look like a metal man holding a scrub brush, they look like a conveyor belt with sprayers. You’re never going to have a robot chauffeur who sits in the driver’s seat of your Rolls-Royce, instead the car will just drive itself. What’s the point of a robot with a spatula that flips burgers, when you can just build a grill that can flip burgers automatically? If you look at a mostly automated car assembly line you don’t see robots walking around holding screwdrivers, you don’t see anything resembling a human being.
As for the notion that it would be simple to interface directly with the brain, well, it turns out that in real life we have no way to do that. Yes, we can electrically stimulate your cochlea so you can “hear” sounds. But if you want to hear sounds you’re much better off with an earpiece that just makes sounds that your ear hears. And this is something you can remove, service, upgrade, refurbish. Implant it in your head and it’s a lot harder.
It’s not true that neural interfaces are 20 years in the future. It’s nowhere in the future, because there’s nothing at all like this in the experimental stage. We have no idea how memories are formed and accessed by the brain. Other than, well, it’s gotta be in there somewhere, people lose their memories due to brain trauma, or lose their ability to form memories, like the Memento guy. Knowing that is a huge difference from knowing how to fix it or change it. We still have absolutely no idea what the physical basis of memory is. I mean, we know a few things that it isn’t–like we know there isn’t a particular little spot in your brain that stores your memory of your 13th birthday party, and if we excise that little speck you lose that memory. We know via MRI scans that when people think about particular things large areas of their brains are active, not just a tiny speck.
Nobody is going to want to be strapped into a device that can introduce arbitrary inputs into your brain, because that means the end of your life as a human being with free will. Don’t like having your brain edited by the Overlords? Don’t worry, that’s the first thing they’ll edit out of your brain! You’ll love it after that!