My point was more about precision when making a bet, but yeah like I said I agree in sentiment. That being said, two-bit encoding is exactly what Stephen Hawking uses with his thumb, so it's not inconceivable to use it on a neural level as a last resort, however impractical. And in some cases, it is: often paralyzed individuals use their tongue to manipulate a cursor, but this can cause all sorts of problems like abnormally large tongues due to muscle growth.

And I work in a lab that does BMI work, and we couldn't do the "call mom" command in the sentiment of lars, even though we use more spatially precise recordings (multi-electrode chronically implanted arrays). So I'm with that. OTOH we can do some cool things like control a computer cursor or tv remote with motor commands like "left-up" etc. Subjects reported that after a while they would cease to "translate" thoughts from movement commands into "BMI" commands like "change channel". It stands to reason they might be able to do the phone-book thing in that case.

Of course, few people find it worthwhile to get chronically implanted electrodes placed in their motor cortex, soooo.