Question: How far away is this technology?
Dr Cerf - The optical implants for example and the spinal implants, my view which is relatively uninformed, the person who could really give you their information is grand plot was working the technology that I would guess that optical implants and spinal implants are probably at the same stage of development now as the cochlear implant was 20 years ago in 1986 or 87 so we're looking at a decade or two of development work before those things could make sense.
I am confident however that these are feasible because we are not talking about trying to read your mind or to get electronics to elect interact with you at a cognitive level these devices are interacting with you at a sensory level; this at a century level these are things we understand a lot better we don’t understand how the brain thinks but we do understand how the body transduces signals to produce sounds and signals that are interpreted as sounds or signals by the brain.
In the case of my wife this is actually - let me make it less dramatic than it sounds - I could do what I was describing for sacred by having her speech process program to plug in into the Internet you could do is just as easily by sitting with a microphone and a headset in a laptop you could speak a question have that digitized, turned into packet, sent across the network a computer could interpret the sound which by the way does when you make a fine call to various user help lines for example self-service lines you're often talking to a computer who is understanding speech it sends the responses back and those digitized responses and packetized speech will sound like sound in your ear and so all I'm doing is replacing the headset with the cochlear ear implant.
It's just kind of cool that the whole process means that there's no sound ever being produced in the response it's all happening in your head but it's not a cognitive interface I don’t want to mislead anybody into thinking otherwise.