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this has been done, with a tongue-electrode delivering sonar sense to the brain - it's smart enough to map the signals into spatial knowledge pretty quickly. i first read about it as a military technology, but here is a page on variations on the same theme: http://www.artificialvision.com/sensub.htm

I'm getting a bit tired of MIT getting press for research that has already been done years ago. In this case in particular, see the Dobelle Institute: here , here , and here , for instance.

Seriously. Don't exacerbate the inflated delusions of these guys by pretending that their research is unique or "cutting-edge". Expect more of them.

The capacity for thought we have is an intensely complex combination of the neural processes of survival and reproduction, with all those billions of years behind it, plus the geologically recent development of a whole lot of extra cognitive juice in the frontal lobe department, plus a couple of million years of tweaking this wetware system in the context of social, tool-using behavior, plus several tens of thousands years of social behavior combined with the meta-social instruction of language, art, text and such...

Nevertheless, the processing speed of the human nervous system is effectively fixed. CPU processing speed is increasing exponentially. The lines on the graph will cross sooner than you think. As to what happens next, Vernor Vinge said it best: "Will there ever be a computer as smart as a human?" I think the correct answer is, "Well, yes. . . very briefly."

So where in hell do we get an estimate like "Strong AI by...?"

By estimating the processing power of the human nervous system, and extrapolating from trends in computer hardware. No matter where you estimate the first, it is effectively fixed, while the second is growing exponentially.

As far as I'm concerned science has barely framed the question of what that would mean... and only in qualitative terms at that.

I take it you don't accept repeatedly passing the Turing Test as a valid, objective indicator if intelligence?

extrapolate based on some law of technological development with far less than a century of statistical evidence

The trend underlying Moore's Law has remained constant for well over a century. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing's relay-based "Robinson" machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code ...

ANd how do you get from there to the process of downloading consciousness, despite the fact that there is not even an inkling of a glimmer of the slightest valid theory about how an active and continuously shifting neourochemical proccess of personality and intellectual template, stored memory and present cognition (not to even touch the primal, the emotional, the glandular, the spiritual) gets translated to something that can be interpreted by a machine or stored in a meaningful sense or caused to be active outside of a biological framework?

What evidence do you have for the claim that only biological systems can support consciousness in principle? We have cochlear implants and bionic eyes that let the deaf hear and the blind see.

The technology to interface with the nervous system is here today. Where exactly do you think the ever-accelerating trend of replacing biological components with nonbiological ones will stop, and why?

From the news section on their website;

One patient, who was 20 years old when he lost his vision in a WW II mortar explosion, saw good phosphenes 57 years later. One of our earlier patients (1) lost his sight at age five and was implanted at age 68. He never saw anything and this may be related to the fact that he was blinded in childhood before the visual cortex fully developed.

So, the short answer is no. If you were blind at birth you seem to be shafted.

--

Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless

Here's the Dobelle Group's Website....
www.artificialvision.com
There's a bunch of cool videos on here too.

RP and many other diseases of the retina are very good reasons to keep an eye (no pun intended) on this and similar projects. Here are a few good resources for other types of low-vision coping technology:

autofocus eyewear [lowvision.org]
the Jordy [enhancedvision.com] (yes, trek-inspired!)
wire a camera to your brain [artificialvision.com]
artificial retina [mit.edu]