Wired brings us this nice sum-up of the current developments in men-to-machine communication. There have been pieces of news for some while now, but it seems a commercial application is in reach now:

"Cyberkinetics already has trained monkeys to move a cursor using only thought, and has asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to test the device on humans. Tim Surgenor, the company's president and CEO, said he expects his researchers will be plugging five people into BrainGates by the end of 2004.

"It looks a lot like the Matrix," Surgenor said, referring to the sockets in the backs of the movie characters' heads that allowed them to log into the Matrix grid.

If BrainGate works and is safe, healthy people who simply want to increase their brain bandwidth might be an additional market. Darpa funded some of the original research with the goal of helping soldiers deal with high-volume brain demands.

While Cyberkinetics hopes to be the first to commercialize its system, researchers at Neural Signals -- a company headed by Dr. Philip Kennedy, a veteran in the field of brain-computer interfaces -- already have tested their product in five people. They saw impressive results: Patients were able to control a computer cursor, and the device appeared to be safe."

I would still be careful in investing into this early technology, but if this technology matures and can be applied to more complex processes (your remote, your basic mobile phone functionalities), it will soon be a feature of millions of consumer products. But yes this will take a decade at least....