Unfortunately it seems like this kind of thing pops up every 5-10 years so I’ve become quite skeptical of it.
One might worry that a good enough heuristic (i.e. word completion) will generate sensible sentences even from noise input. However, in this case, he is typing his son's name.
Having said that, I've just skimmed the Nature article. But what stands out is that they had 86 days of unsuccessful communication before they changed strategies and then all of a sudden started reporting success. I really hope this works but we should remain skeptical for the possibility of abuse here. Other commenters in this thread have reported that the researchers have committed misconduct in their brain research.
The only thing I fear more than being in the discussed patient's situation is being in their situation and having my thoughts incorrectly interpreted at best or outright manipulated at worst.
For example:
Make one person roll a dice and tell the number to the patient ensuring that nobody else can hear it. Kill the person that roll the dice to ensure the result is secret. Make another person read the BCI and write down the result. Repeat this 18 times and then look at the video and compare the dice and the BCI. It's a success if they guessed correctly at least 9 times. The expected number of correct answers is 3, and the probability to guess 9 randomly is only 0.1%.
If they do this only once, live streaming the experiment it is enough for me, but perhaps it's better to have a lower probability for a random guess. Also, I like that the "success" threshold is one half of the experiments. It's easy to explain, not too much in case it's not perfect, and less than a half is not impressive.
This reads like an excuse to kill 18 people...
The difference here may be that I think in many of the cases I’m thinking about it might not have been locked-in so much as people thought to be in comas or with other serious damage he where the truth is they probably weren’t capable at all.
That doesn’t seem to be the case here. He seems to lack the physical ability to communicate but I’m not sure there is a reason he would lack the mental ability.
The dude who was tortured with 12 years of Barney would like a word with you