Come to think of it, we'll probably have better means of telepathy down the road.
I don't think of this as depressing. If we could do something like this on the battlefield through text messages through either a voice to text interpreter, or the universe-forbid mind-to-text, there would be an enormous potential of getting rid of the command and control lag that is brought by orders and messages passed through signal operators. Come to think of it, it would make war much closer to a Real-Time Strategy game from the commander's perspective.
Also, I have this 20-year old uzbekistani friend who uses the thing with his group. I watch what he does from it from time to time and it shocks me how if used right, this could be an effective management tool in the civilian world as well.
I don't think there's so much of an issue with it in military applications as you point out.
The positive and the negative are both the same thing: It's not true telepathy, it doesn't read minds. I suppose that a negative for the military commanders but a positive elsewhere.
See, when I say 'both ways' above, I mean the joke way, where the torrent of garbage on Twitter is actually fully representative of the average thought process, and the more serious way where we acknowledge the fact that Twitter is not actualy telepathy: Even in sentence fragments shotgunned by narcississtic ADD-ers, we still seek to create an image of ourselves.
That image may or may not be grounded in reality and the intention may be subtle or it may be obvious, it may be unintentional or designed, but it's not the real thought process of the poster, merely what they have chosen to type.
On the battlefield, I don't know that this would do any more than existing two-radio communications or that it would be any quicker (why bother with text-to-voice, unless perhaps you're trying to be stealthy?).
