I agree with you, I too am skeptical about Neuralink being useful anytime soon.
The augmentation in my vision, at the beginning at least, is external. I don't attempt to modify the brain. I externally "record" a persons life. A simple manifestation of such a augment would be a wearable device: Google Glass.
It follows you around and forms "memories". This external augmentation, then is able to store, index and retrieve relevant memory at scale, with speed, and aid brains normal abilities.
Hopefully its easy to see that such an external augmentation is better than pen-and-paper based memory system.
We experience and learn so many things over years. However, our memories may fail us. They fail in recalling a relevant fact that could have been very useful for accomplishing an immediate task at hand. e.g. My car tire has punctured on a busy street, but I cannot recall how to change it -- though I remember reading about it in the manual.
It is likely that the memory is still alive somewhere in the deep corner of my brain. In this case, I maybe able to think hard and push myself to remember it. Such a process is bound to be slow and people on the street would yell at me for blocking it!
Sometimes our memories fail us "silently". We don't know that somewhere in our brain is information we can bring to bear on accomplishing a task on hand. What if I don't even know that I have read a manual on changing car tires?!
Long term memory accessibility is thus an issue.
Now our short term memory is also very very limited (4-7 chunks at a time). In fact, short-cache of working memory might be a barrier to intellectual progress. It is then very crucial to inject relevant information in this limited working=memory space if we are to give a task our best, most intelligent shot.
Thus, I think about memory systems that can artificially augment the brain. I think of them from point of view of storing more information and indexing it better. I think of them for faster and more relevant retrieval.
I think of them as importable and exportable -- I can share them with my friends (and learn how to change tires instantaneously). A pensieve like memory bank.
I thus think of "digital memories" that augment our relatively superior and creative compute brain processes. That is my (current) big idea.
Please see my post below. My current big idea is very similar to yours. I believe we may be able to exchange notes!
I unfortunately did not. I am also unable to locate the message I sent you! Maybe its because I am new to this site.