FWIW, the term "neural lace" was coined by Iain Banks.
From Excession:
One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace.
~ That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.
She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing.
~ Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I'd never really thought of it that way.
~ It is not generally a use much emphasised.
~ I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device back into its bowl on the table.
That’s briefly mentioned near the end of the first paragraph:
... solution to this unappealing fate is a novel brain-computer interface similar to the implantable “neural lace” described by the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks in Look to Windward, part of his “Culture series” books. Along with serving as a rite of passage, it upgrades the human brain to be more competitive against A.I.’s with human-level or higher intelligence.
The only things in that paragraph that are correct are:
1. the name neural lace
2. Iain M. Banks coined it
3. He was Scottish.
It wasn't first described in Look to Windward. It didn't serve as a rite of passage in the Culture. It doesn't upgrade the human brain, and certainly not to the level of the Culture's ruling machine intelligences.
And at no point does the article quote the bit that I did, which serves as a cautionary note: the neural lace is the most effective implement of torture ever.
Once upon a time, the Geek Code had an entry "c++++ I'll be first in line to get the new cybernetic interace installed into my skull." It only took a little while for everyone sensible to amend that to "Waiting for skull interface 3.1, with security patches and a really good firewall."
From Excession:
One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace.
~ That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.
She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing.
~ Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I'd never really thought of it that way.
~ It is not generally a use much emphasised.
~ I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device back into its bowl on the table.