If you haven’t noticed, across the years, tech is getting closer to the bone. Enter BCI. In the ancient days of the twentieth century, you travelled to an office to use a PC; at the dawn of the 21st you carried a laptop with you; today you merely keep a smartphone in your pocket… now you have a supercomputer on your wrist (smartwatch)… very soon you will have the computer on your face (smartglasses). The ultimate destination of all this? The supercomputer in your body. The general term that enables this miracle (or nightmare, depending on your perspective), is called the BCI: a Brain Computer Interface.
BCI’s are, in their present day embodiment, a very fine array of wires, or sensing electrodes, that are surgically implanted inside the skull, and which make physical / electrical contact with small groups of nerve cells inside your brain. Yes, this is real. In early sci-fi / cyberpunk, we used to call these people “wireheads.” It now appears that the goal of Elon Musk and others is to make all of us wireheads.
Of course, this innovation will grant us truly miraculous “superpowers”… who wouldn’t want to control an entire computing ecosystem — your entire digital universe — just by thinking?
But every miracle comes with a price. The price of a BCI? The fact that a major multinational Big Tech corporation will have a direct — DIRECT — pathway to your brain. And unlike your phone which you can stash in a drawer, or your laptop which you can shut off — the BCI cannot be removed, and it cannot be shut down. The BCI has become part of your biological self.
The corollary of this is: “Don’t worry: your data is safe in the cloud with us.” It was bad enough when this was phone call data, email contents, and location data (Big Tech — and their customers — know who you call, what you say, and where you are). But now, this new class of tech – the BCI – authentically has the potential to be recording what you think.
Yes, I know, experts will say that that’s a stretch. Well, it is and it isn’t. Sure, initial implants (c. 2024) are quite primitive arrays of 64 sensors… that generate less than a millionth the datastream of, say, an FMRI. There is no real understanding of how those 64 data points translate to actual thoughts.
In fact, the calibration process is quite the opposite. Since the implants are going in “blind”, they require a re-training of the human in order for any true utility to occur. For instance (being intentionally basic here), the user thinking “chocolate” might move the on-screen cursor “up”, and thinking “basketball” might move the cursor downwards. Through an extensive calibration process, the user develops a basic command vocabulary, determining which thoughts / ideas will trigger which computational inputs / actions.
The theory is that after a while (hours, days, months) of using the system, the human brain will re-wire / re-program itself with its own translation matrix, and the thoughts of “chocolate” and “basketball” will slowly disappear, replaced by “mouse up” and “mouse down”. Thank god for neuroplasticity. The result? Effectively, true digital telekinesis.
Important to note that all Gen1 devices are one-way: they merely receive and translate signals from the brain. A valid question is, given the intimate access of these devices to the interior of your brain, what happens when the recievers are upgraded to be transceivers… in other words, what happens when BCI’s stop just reading your thoughts, and start to transmit signals — to insert thoughts — into your brain?
Food for thought. Literally.
What Companies are building BCI?
Companies exploring this include:
- Synchron
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Synchron’s BCI is inserted through a patient’s jugular vein, so no open brain surgery is required. It’s delivered to the blood vessel that rests on the surface of the brain’s motor cortex. The stent-like device is connected to an antenna that sits under the skin in the chest. The antenna collects raw brain data and sends it to external devices.
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- Paradromics,
- Precision Neuroscience,
- Blackrock Neurotech, and
- Elon Musk’s Neuralink
Related: BioBots
But BCIs are not the only tech that is set to invade our fragile bodies. That’s just an interface. How about some teeny tiny robots with your morning coffee?
Biobots are ultra-miniature, micro-scale and nano-scale robots that are ingested (swallowed) or injected into the body (subcutaneous or bloodstream), and either flow with the blood or the food, or self-navigate with propulsion, or are externally guided (i.e. magnetically) to move through the body. Primary functions today are precision drug delivery (via payloads), and microsurgery (via teeny tiny scalpels).
Companies developing biobots include:
AI Acronym Soup
BCI is not the only three letter word in our Future. You might also be interested in:
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engine: OpenAI DALL-e3
prompt: “image: graphic novel style: robotic “doc oc” style tentacles inserting a bunch of electrodes into a semi-transparent skull in an OR, with the brain of the patient visible and glowing.”