Ben: > What is the empirical grounds for your optimism?
Not much other than the fact that they have started to do it. And if you can signal one command to a machine, then, it strikes me, there should in the end be no limit to the commands that can be signalled.
Perhaps we should distinguish two things - one is the true mindreading machine we would like - a machine that could read the thoughts of a person at the end of a room, the other is interface technology, where a person is hooked up and may have to be specially trained to communicate with the machine.
Bear in mind that science has used very little imagination here to date. Science only started studying consciousness ten years ago. It still hasn't started studying "Thought" - the actual contents of consciousness: the streams of thought inside people's heads. In both cases, the reason has been sheer prejudice and nothing to do with true science. So science has been mentally stunted when it comes to studying thought - no imagination has been used to try and recreate thought streams - although it's hardly that difficult let alone impossible to do, and artists from Shakespeare on having been making a reasonable fist of it for hundreds of years.
I'm confident that well within the next 10 years, science will a) recognize Thought as a vital area of study (with the same mushrooming of study that took place with Consciousness, if not larger) and will b) understand why Thought is so important - above all, to improve human thinking. The room for improvement is vast and the economic payoffs will be vast. I don't think it's accidental that the technology of thoughtreading is starting to accelerate at the moment.
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