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I think being able to 'hack' humanity, either through direct brain interface or indirectly by genetically manipulating embryos, is game over. As Scott says in Meditations on Moloch, it's incredibly important that there are lines humans physically and mentally can't be made to cross, and giving us the power to manipulate those lines means giving Moloch that power. I'm pro-LLM and generative AI precisely because we lucked onto a creation system that inherently trends towards humanlike intelligences; on first glane this technology seems like exactly the opposite.
That said, I very much doubt this goes past motor control. Spinal signals and even the motor cortex are incredibly simple compared to something like the prefrontal cortex where actual thinking goes on; the motor neurons are basically just laid out in a nice map ready to be prodded at. I very much doubt that this tech is anywhere near actual 'telepathy', more just very advanced prosthetics. If the technology stays at that level, which I think it probably will given our total lack of knowledge about the prefrontal cortex, it may be worth exploring.
I think people overstate it because there's already many powerful ways to "hack" people by just using normal sensory input (or augmented by drugs) and the world hasn't collapsed into zombicracy yet. It just happens to manifest every now and then, and then collapse.
We will live to see new terrifying horrors though. I'm sure this will create wholly novel kinds of mental illnesses, for one.
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