Helping disabled people is probably the most important near-term application of this. I just like to ponder about long-term "sci-fi" implications, in terms of how and when these kinds of ideas will become actually plausible.

Some applications, like digital eyes, which connect directly to the optic nerve, would be first used to cure blindness, but soon people would start replacing their functioning eyes too, if it allows feeding pixels directly into the brain. Same with prosthetics, if they'd be better than biological ones. Then if you have cyborg eyes, arms and legs, why have a biological 'core' which is pretty much useless at this point.

Storing the brain in the body would actually be a bad idea. Human brains could be stored in a warehouse and they'd control robotic bodies remotely. You'd be able to jump into different bodies all over the world, and choose from different form-factors (ant, whale, dragon, etc.) This would actually be easier to implement, because the life-support system for the brain could be larger and consume more energy and other resources. You'd also be able to choose whether you want to live in a simulated world or a physical world through robots.

I think this is where we're quite realistically heading in less than 50 years.

I've interviewed with / been to the facility of this place: https://science.xyz/products/vision/

They're exploring the "digital eye" concept you mentioned. Really cool stuff. Probably less than 50 years for the fixing some types of blindness.

Really cool. Glad to see someone is already working on this.

As these technologies become reality, funny to think that we may see a class of disabled people leapfrog the rest of society and become hyper-enabled. Becoming essentially superhuman, with heightened abilities in things like vision or prosthetics due to being the first to adopt bio augmentation

Your hopes are realistic and the actual use of such technology.

I also want some kind of biological USB, that we need years of training to be able to use fast xD