The time is coming for us to make a choice, and we need to make this choice before it is too late.
An international team of scientists has, for the first time, successfully created a brain to brain interface, allowing humans to communicate with each other using nothing more than their thoughts. The experiment involved successfully transmitting the words âholaâ and âciaoâ from a person in India to another in France, with neither of them needing to move a muscle. One participant wore a device which measures brain activity, known as an EEG. They imagined performing an action, and the brain activity associated with this thought was picked up by the EEG and sent to a computer. The participant translated the alphabet into binary code, using either zeros or ones, and had a specific thought represent each value. The computer âheardâ these thoughts, and sent the values via email to another user. This person interpreted these zeros and ones as flashes of light, but instead of the signal arriving in the brain from the eyes, they used another device to plant the signal directly into their brain via magnetic stimulation.
The experimental set-up.
Source: PLOS One.
This may seem like a horribly inefficient process, it would be much easier to pull out your phone and type the message. But itâs the first big step down a troublesome path. No more will we suffer attempting conversation with someone glued to their smartphone. Soon, they will be able to instantly message someone without ever taking their eyes off you.
But the issues get much more serious than an inattentive conversation partner. These technologies open a whole new world of possibility, allowing those with access to the technology to be able to access a wealth of information, directly into their brains. This technology will allow those who are wealthy enough, or privileged enough, to become âplugged inâ cyborgs, able to store memories, send and receive massive amounts of information, and augment their thoughts. Those who resist these technologies, those who cannot afford them, or those who arenât chosen to receive them will be left behind. People will be divided, the augmented will gain intelligence, become people with the highest employment prospect, allowing them more access to these technologies, driving the wedge deeper into the divide between the augmented, and those who remain unplugged.
But if you canât afford to gain access to this technology, never fear. There will be corporations looking to profit, so why not get the free model, with pay-to-remove advertisements subliminally pushed straight into your mind? But at what risk? When companies are able to place information directly in your mind, they will do it cleverly, subtly, so you donât even realise that you are being manipulated. What is to stop governments demanding access to your thoughts, to surveil all connected to the network for âsecurityâ reasons? When we canât even effectively protect our computers from hackers, we would be connecting our brains to the same networks, where the risks are far more severe.
Is this the world we want, the path we wish to tread down? A divided world, where the privileged become augmented, at the cost of their own thoughts, while those that resist giving up their freedom of mind be left behind as unemployable, slow, uninformed. The technology may currently be in its infant stages, but we need to move, and stop it taking the wrong direction, before itâs too late.