Fast forward some years into the future and brain computer interfaces have advanced to the level of reliability and mass production. It allows you to control all computing devices (smartphone, laptop, smart devices, etc) all with your brain. You’re able to do any task much faster on such devices, especially if it involves writing or more complicated tasks than clicking buttons. The downside is you have to get a surgery to insert the device in your head.
It’s just one way communication/read only (i.e. your device won’t be able to put thoughts in your brain)
Yes, it’s worth the surgery, so long as it doesn’t put thoughts in my head
Yes, it’s worth the surgery and it would be more useful if it could put thoughts in my head
The possibilities are endless when you also allow it to modify the state of the neurons in the brain. You can hear anything, see anything, taste anything, know anything. you can experience the most realistic vr simulation.
or have An AI in your head that can read your thoughts and instantly answer them for you before you even know it. It can store your memories for you on silicon, so you can have a near unlimited memory. Any known piece of knowledge from Wikipedia and the world wide web is instantly accessible to you as soon as the thought pops up in your head
Apart from needing to being able to trust the tech works as advertised and is safe from hacking (nothing worse than getting your brain hacked), i dont think i would want foreign thoughts in my brain. But people will do it mostly to get an advantage in this dog eat dog world, then the rest will follow suit to not fall behind and be obsolete.
We’re very far from this dystopic future if it ever pans out that way
What does the surgery involve? Just drill a hole and stick in a probe? Or take off the top of your skull and run hundreds of wires throughout your brain?
If I were still young and working I might do it. After retirement and no longer spending all day controlling computers for a living, it’s probably not worth it, since every surgery has risks.
Brain surgery isn’t exactly rocket science. Just remove a piece of the skull and implant the electrodes. The device itself fits in the spot where your skull was. Neuralink has a robot do this. In a few years it’ll be outpatient surgery, no more invasive than lasik.
What I’d want though is a fully open platform. Open protocols, interfaces, and with me having full control over where the data goes.
This might be optimistic. It’s not where cell phones are at today, which are just mobile surveillance devices that we all nevertheless carry around. But maybe the law will catch up at some point, or the fact that it’s a medical device will carry more legal weight.
I don’t really want surgery for anything if I can help it. For this, even if surgery weren’t required, depending on the possibility of things like getting hacked or getting a virus or just getting exposed to 24/7 advertising, my response would range somewhere from “Nah, I’ll pass” to “Oh hell no!”
If the medical risks are negligible I’d be tempted to do it. I need computers to work, my near vision is diminishing, and my spine can’t take the same stress as 10 years ago.
About the part where it makes you hyper-competitive, I don’t buy it at all. For the past 10 years I’ve worked in an environment full of younger people who ravenously consume every new productivity app & hack that comes down the pike.
They’re endlessly raving about the new tool that’s going to change everything, and 2 months later they’ve ditched it for a different tool that’s going to change everything. They never settle on the one killer approach, and there’s no visible improvement in their work output or life satisfaction. It’s because not only is the the tech failing to tell them what’s important, it atrophies their ability to figure this out for themselves. They’re on an endless treadmill pursuing an illusory competitive advantage that never really seems to go anywhere.
So I don’t think this is any kind of path toward super-intelligence or hyper-competitiveness. The interface doesn’t matter if all it’s doing is cramming people’s heads with more simulated relevance and clickbait. If it were otherwise, our phones would have made us supergeniuses already, but they’ve made a huge chunk of people demonstrably dumber.
While I was being a tiny bit flippant, I do think it’ll eventually get to that point. Like lasik, the surgery can have a large degree of automation. Despite the obvious risks of zapping people’s eyeballs with a laser, it’s become an extremely reliable and inexpensive procedure. A sufficiently developed brain implant can get there eventually. The first Neuralink patient had a very quick recovery time and no medical complications (just some minor issues with some electrodes pulling out).
Plus, they aren’t the only ones working on the tech. Someone will get there, if not them. There are only a few dozen people with brain-computer interfaces today but hundreds of thousands with quadriplegia. There’s enormous demand in solving the problem. But solving it for them will solve it for everyone.
I really don’t know this “Humans” user is legit. it’s all polls.
“Poll: how many dumps do you take a day”
“Poll: how many people here still use matches”
“Poll: is your car more than 10 years old”
“Poll: where are your parents from”
“Poll: do you prefer top or bottom”
“Poll: which is better; 100’ yacht or a learjet”
