I can't imagine we'll get anywhere close to creating fidelity backups of human memories or consciousness within our lifetimes, let alone any sort of realtime brain-computer interface like what you see in the Matrix.
The problem is that the biology of the brain is incredibly complicated. Dynamic instability of microtubules, contribution of extracellular factors, neuron biochemistry, etc etc... Sure, we've extracted signal to reconstruct primitive visual features from the basal ganglia of mammals, but that's a long way off from what we'd need for humans. (I can't easily cite atm, but I'll be happy to come back and put in references if desired.)
The other big issue is that it's quite invasive to get data out of this system. I imagine we'll be making progress on human cloning and artificial organs long before we crack this nut simply because of how disruptive and insufficient current techniques are.
All that said, I'm pretty sure we're all going to die without any archival backup of our brain-encoded memories. Progress will be made, but not in time for us.
The problem is that the biology of the brain is incredibly complicated. Dynamic instability of microtubules, contribution of extracellular factors, neuron biochemistry, etc etc... Sure, we've extracted signal to reconstruct primitive visual features from the basal ganglia of mammals, but that's a long way off from what we'd need for humans. (I can't easily cite atm, but I'll be happy to come back and put in references if desired.)
The other big issue is that it's quite invasive to get data out of this system. I imagine we'll be making progress on human cloning and artificial organs long before we crack this nut simply because of how disruptive and insufficient current techniques are.
All that said, I'm pretty sure we're all going to die without any archival backup of our brain-encoded memories. Progress will be made, but not in time for us.