Do you know how that "reconstruction" works? They are not just displaying brain data, with a little post-processing added. If you play the video, you'll see completely spurious text floating around in some of the reconstructions. That's because the reconstructed video is a weighted sum over a few hundred videos taken from Youtube. They have a computational model of the mapping from visual input to neural activity, but when they invert the mapping, they assume that the input was some linear combination of those Youtube videos. The reconstruction is just about determining the weights. So maybe in reality you just see a caravan of elephants walking in front of you, but your "reconstructed" visual experience also has text from a music video flickering past, because that music video supplies one of the basis vectors and it was assigned a high similarity by the model.
If you click through to the discussion on Youtube, there are commenters freaking out and speculating that the words must be subconscious thoughts of the people who had their brains scanned. So we're getting several lessons at once from this exercise: If people are reconstructed from a lossy backup, there may be spurious insertions as well as lost data; and, the non-technical public will interpret artefacts as real, in a creative way which also attributes much more power to a technology than it possesses.
I didn't "know" the details of the reconstruction, but I suspected it was relatively simple, and you've confirmed that. Also, I agree denotationally with everything you said about inevitable bugs and a public that leaves something to be desired. Nonetheless it is neat anyway, because sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) is roughly right, and this is non-crappy enough that it deserves some appreciation :-)
Also, if someone was going to use non-destructively collect data from various sources to attempt a side-load by constraining on observab...
Paul Christiano recently suggested that we can use neuroimaging to form a complete mathematical characterization of a human brain, which a sufficiently powerful superintelligence would be able to reconstruct into a working mind, and the neuroimaging part is already possible today, or close to being possible.
Paul was using this idea as part of an FAI design proposal, but I'm highlighting it here since it seems to have independent value as an alternative or supplement to cryonics. That is, instead of (or in addition to) trying to get your body to be frozen and then preserved in liquid nitrogen after you die, you periodically take neuroimaging scans of your brain and save them to multiple backup locations (1010 bits is only about 1 gigabyte), in the hope that a friendly AI or posthuman will eventually use the scans to reconstruct your mind.
Are there any neuroimaging experts around who can tell us how feasible this really is, and how much such a scan might cost, now or in the near future?
ETA: Given the presence of thermal noise and the fact that a set of neuroimaging data may contain redundant or irrelevant information, 1010 bits ought to be regarded as just a rough lower bound on how much data needs to be collected and stored. Thanks to commenters who pointed this out.