I am not sure what is more surprising, that you can get 12WPM by simply using your brain, or that you can train monkeys to transcribe the New York Times or hamlet.
- WPM is a difficult metric to "game", since if they make a mistake they have to select the backspace key, and then select the correct key again.
- It's a proof of concept demonstration that a human (e.g. in the BrainGate[1] clinical trial) could use this prosthetic system to communicate in text. When a human were driving the system, the keys wouldn't light up; they'd just type freely.
This is what the alien robot swarms that arrive at Earth will be after, cheap organic computers
Unless they make gooey pods like in the matrix
Perhaps a jar of nutrient-rich slurry, housing five or six brains each, and a monthly cleaning of the probes?
Unless, for some odd reason our DNA is special such that the way our brains/neurons work would be some benefit.
At that point though, they would only need to snatch up a few of us and reverse engineer our DNA/genome to do what was stated in step one....
That would be a good topic for /r/writingprompts.