What do neural implants do?

How do you operate them?

Do they fake visual input to give you a HUD?

Can you think things to them? Commands? Wishes?

Can they give you information "directly"?

What I mean is: no reading - the implant knows what you want to know and puts it directly into your brain. A captain just knows that the Pelican is on-board, engine status, well pretty much anything that we wanted to know about.

Reading is distracting and interferes with thinking and reacting. It would be easier to just know the ship's current course and speed.

Scientists can predict decisions that you will make up to 7 seconds before you are aware that you made them.

It would make sense to have a user interface that can predict what you want to do so it can give you the information you need to do it well - especially in command situations.

A neural implant is in the best position to monitor your brain.

If the machine can know what you want to know without you having to do anything then it can supply the info without you having to do anything :-) The advantage of such a machine would give scientists and technicians incentive to make such a gadget. The advantages would make developing and testing the processes seem benign. I could see military personnel cooperating in dev and testing of such equipment. It would be seen as just a way to make their jobs easier and more efficient.

Our science is 5 centuries younger than the UNSCs. We can already: guess what you are thinking and can create artificial associations. Could ONI create new memories, associations, knowledge?

And if anyone wanted to do research that was immoral or illegal - we have to remember that humanity faced extinction. Scientists might balk at experimenting on humans but would they worry about the rights of Covenant species?

Their brains might be quite different than ours but you often learn general principles by comparing the operations of systems that evolved very differently but carry out roughly the same tasks.

Does anyone remember Coma?

In the book/film people were kept alive in a comatose state and used as organ donors. Now imagine that done to Covie prisoners but with the added wrinkle of inserting neural interfaces into them. You could tease out how their visual systems process signals, ditto for hearing. Work out how they store and recall memories.

Can you make them suggestible? compliant? willing allies?

Films tend to display the resistance to brainwashing as a struggle - almost like pushing against a force with all your might. I wonder if that is the right metaphor.

Chinese people don't fight against being Chinese. Patriots don't struggle against their patriotism.

Countries fight wars and then they work together after the war. We tend to accept our realities. The Arbiter accepted a new relation with humans once he learned the truth about Truth. All it needed was some new information.

Imagine that all he experienced in h2 after he lost conciousness after falling down the hole was all artificially generated.

Or what if he just stopped knowing that humans were his enemies? If we know 7 seconds ahead of time what decisions someone is going to make - 7 seconds before even they know what decisions they will make...

Imagine if we know what information someone is trying to recall...

Imagine if we can see a part of the subconscious trying to present a piece of information and imagine if we could intercept that and substitute something else...

Or imagine if we could act even at the subconscious level...

You could make any prisoner completely compliant and willing helpers.

General principles learned from other species could be applied back to the benign knowledge of human brains gained from centuries of study and benign development of command neural interfaces.

If we know what people want to know and how to present it then it wouldn't be too much of a step to suppress and replace what a subject knows. And you are already changing how they think because the NI would have been part of their thinking process for years (if they used them during their careers).

getting back to Locke... it is conceivable that his armour has more than enough processing power to support an AI that can supervise his thinking processes or, at least, skew what he perceives and how he perceives it.