Would you let Elon Musk plant a chip inside your brain?

Brain-computer interfaces + AI are enabling medical miracles -- and possibly total mind control

Prompt: “This is your brain on AI.” Source: Midjourney.

One of the problems humans have is that we think with our brains but talk with our mouths. And when the lines of communication between them are cut, words get trapped inside.

Researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley (Go Bears) have found a way to release those words from their captivity. Using a brain-computer interface (BCI) and AI, they've enabled a woman who had been paralyzed by a stroke to speak for the first time in 18 years.

Per Neuroscience News:

[Researchers] implanted a paper-thin rectangle of 253 electrodes onto the surface of the woman’s brain over areas ... critical for speech. The electrodes intercepted the brain signals that, if not for the stroke, would have gone to muscles in her, tongue, jaw and larynx, as well as her face. A cable, plugged into a port fixed to her head, connected the electrodes to a bank of computers.

For weeks, the participant worked with the team to train the system’s artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize her unique brain signals for speech. This involved repeating different phrases from a 1,024-word conversational vocabulary over and over again, until the computer recognized the brain activity patterns associated with the sounds.

Essentially, every time we think of particular sounds (or phonemes, like ah or ow), our brains generate the same pattern of electrical signals. By matching the signals to the sounds, we can decode what words the brain is thinking of. The researchers in this study discovered that an AI model only needs to recognize 39 phonemes to decipher any word in English.

Photo credit: Noah Burger, by way of Engadget.

As if that wasn't enough, the research team built an AI model that could recreate the actual sound of her voice, using a recording of her speaking at her wedding many years earlier. And it hiring a gaming graphics company to build an onscreen avatar that mimic'd the movements her face would make if she were speaking those words.

ICYMI: Researchers built a computer with human brain cells and taught it to play Pong

Aside from the inconvenience of having someone drill a hole in your skull and sink a cable into it, this is pretty damned awesome. The researcher's next project: Creating a wireless version of the same system that communicates directly with the brain implants.

Speak your mind

This is an application of modern technology I can get totally behind. BCIs are likely to represent an enormous improvement in the quality of life for victims of strokes, Parkinson's, and epilepsy, among other debilitating diseases. And it's also cool in a Star Trek kind of way.

But BCIs won't be limited to people whose normal functioning is impaired. There are plenty of folks who want to nothing more than to pretend they're living inside a novel written by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. They want to jack in and glide through the 'verse. [1] They want the blue pill, not the red pill.

A Canadian research group calling itself Towards Healthcare is predicting that the BCI market will grow to around $9.5 billion by 2032. [2] Which is maybe perhaps close to being true, if you turn your head at precisely the right angle and squint. [3]

The interesting thing about that prediction is how people will allegedly be using BCI in 10 years.

I'm not sure what's weirder here: The notion that 10.7 percent of BCI users today are using their brains to operate their Xboxes, or that 7.7 percent of people would rather put a chip in their brains and think "Alexa, turn out the lights" instead of just effing saying it.

Out of their minds

So what otherwise healthy person in his/her/their right mind would elect to have electrodes implanted in their brains? Probably a lot of the same people who voluntarily have microchips surgically inserted under their skin. There are more of these crazy motherfuckers bio-hacker cyborgs than you might think. Per a January 2023 essay in The Hill:

Today, more than 50,000 people have elected to have a subdermal chip surgically inserted between the thumb and index finger, serve as their new swipe key, or credit card. In Germany, for example, more than 2,000 Germans have opted to receive these implants; one man even used it to store a link to his last will and testament.

This raises enough ethical practical moral and political questions for a month's worth of blog posts (look for more on bio-hacking in future installments). But the ultimate question is, who controls the chips inside your head?

ICYMI: Can AI read your mind? Yes, it can.

Hopefully not this guy, who just got another $280 million from investors to feed into his Neuralink project:

In other words, the person who wants to own the implants in a large number of human brains is a guy who cozies up to Nazis and replies to serious questions with poop emojis. [4]

Neuralink was recently approved for human trials by the FDA. And, of course, there's an army of Muskovites lining up to be guinea pigs. [5] In a 2020 article in The Verge, Musk described the coin-shaped implant as "a Fitbit for your skull."

But the most important thing the device might be able to do, Musk said, would be to let people achieve what he calls “AI symbiosis,” which allows the human brain to merge with an artificial intelligence. “Such that the future of the world is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth — I think that that’s obviously gonna be the future that we want.”

I don't know about you, but the future I want does not include a Bond villain wanna-be inserting chips into people's gray matter to cure the 'woke virus' and prop up his fragile ego.

That's what you might call a no-brainer.

Would you like some dip with your brain chips? Tell me what you think in the comments, and please share this blog with your fellow bipeds.

[1] Future alien anthropologists, who arrive on earth long after humanity has gone the way of the dodo bird, will will regard Neuromancer and Snow Crash as prophetic texts.

[2] On the other hand, they misspelled Ottawa in their press release, so they might just be three 8-year-olds standing on each other's shoulders inside a trenchcoat.

[3] These estimates are always all over the map and vary by orders of magnitude, depending on who's doing the predictions. And yet research firms charge upwards of $4,000 for these reports. I am clearly working the wrong end of this business.

[4] His good buddy (and fellow proto-fascist) Peter Thiel is also in the brain chip business via a company called Blackrock Neurotech. Are you sensing a pattern here?

[5] No doubt the same geniuses who are paying $8 a month for a blue check on (not) Twitter. So I guess they don't have a whole lot to lose.