I wish I could close or move windows around with my brain. It would be so nice.
I just need to open my work laptop and watch it utterly fail at even the most basic tasks for me to be convinced our level of technology is no where near where it needs to be to start sticking electronics in people’s heads.
Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, sie fliehen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten. Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen, es bleibet dabei: die Gedanken sind frei.
Ohh…eh.
2019 left me with the impression Starfish was wireless.
Sticking stuff into my brain isn’t on my to-do list.
The startup here is making stuff for medical conditions, not games.
That’s fine and might be beneficial medically one day, but I was under the impression Gabe was also interested in using this tech for VR/AR too eventually.
I think the general idea is that the ar/vr stuff would be non invasive
He’ll only be able to make the first prototype, and then a second. He will never make it to 3.
By then he should be able to pass the tech off to a smaller, independent contractor like Gearbox (please don’t; I don’t want Randy in my brain) or Obsidian.
He’ll make a few versions:
- Brain Chip
- Brain Chip Army
- Brain Chip Police
- Brain Chip 2
- Brain Chip 2 Coastal Vacation
- Brain Chip 2.1
- Brain Chip 2.2
- Brain Chip 2 VR
Will never make it to 3 though.
Yeah no thanks
Project deckard. Gamers are getting the chip to run games inside their brains.
I didn’t know they were doing brainchips. I trust Gabe with it way more than fElon, for sure.
Karen Sandler did a great talk on closed source software medical devices many years ago.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qW1h1s_ojpM
This even more the case if it’s your brain! It probably won’t work for decades, but we should get house in order long before it does.
Like https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete shown or https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/411102/neuroscience-technology-consumer-products-safety-maintenance more recently or the older 2010 paper “Predictors of Assistive Technology Abandonment” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400435.1993.10132205 ?
Don’t be negative, it’s all good! /s
Right to repair, and openness, is absolute must for devices being put into peoples bodies. The fight seams to not even started yet. Most people are completely asleep to issues right now.
Might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I don’t really see a problem with brain implants. I wouldn’t put anything in my brain in a thousand years, but if someone’s willing to accept the risks, why not? They have the potential to significantly improve quality of life for many people.
It could become the standard in time, like smartphones. I can easily see it becoming the norm, making it more expensive and difficult to use a normal smartphone instead of some brain implant, much like how “dumbphones” are coming back as overpriced and gimmicky. Maybe they pullsomething similar to the “green bubble” like apple did, alienating people without implants.
This is a very important concern. Tech companies already exert entirely too much power over society through smart phones and their accompanying apps. The damage they would do with direct access to your neurons is incalculable.
The only thing that comforts me is that I firmly expect that society as we know it will entirely collapse before this technology can really be capitalized. It’s not a very comforting expectation, but it somehow bothers me less than the idea of techno-fascist corporate feudal states taking control of everyone’s thoughts.
It is sort of funny how the idea that humanity would wipe itself out used to be a worst case scenario and now it is one of the more comforting options.
I am siding with the zombies in that apocalypse.
It’s exactly like AI. Could the technology be useful were it to be used in service of goals that would serve humanity? Absolutely. Will it be used by billionaires in a way that will be harmful to most people in order to further entrench their power? Most definitely.
At least some of the people developing this stuff think they’re going to be able to partner AI and neural links. I think the desire is they think about the solution to a problem and then they don’t have to do the work of creating it. It will just exist magically because the AI will do it.
It’s egotistical bollocks that comes from believing your ideas are always right, and that a back of the napkin idea is the same as a fully engineered solution.
“Someone might abuse it” is a reasonable concern. “Therefore nobody should be allowed to use it” is not a reasonable answer to that concern, IMO. We’d never have anything with that approach.
There’s a lot to be said for the scale of damage that can be done with something, especially relative to the effort needed to do that damage.
These days tech companies are doing enormous damage to people’s brains (saturating our dopamine receptors to the point that many people have depression and executive dysfunction) to turn us all into consumption machines that can only find happiness by consuming content and buying commercial products and services.
Imagine how much more harm they’ll do when they have direct access to our neurons, without even LED pixels as a buffer in between.
So regulate the uses of the technology. Don’t ban it outright.
Those companies are doing their manipulation currently by using the Internet and social media, should the Internet and social media be banned outright? We’re using social media to discuss this right now, that discussion should be suppressed?
Technology and social media are entirely under regulated with basically no privacy restrictions. Look what DOGE has done to the entire American Federal agencies… “Read-Only”-- As If. They just pirated all our information.
Like everything else, it will be come enshittified and we will be living in the Johnny Mneumonic world.
You can say that about literally any consumer product, however.
If I lived in, say, Iain Banks’s post-scarcity anarcho-communist utopia The Culture, I’d get a neural lace in a heartbeat. But living in this capitalist dystopia that most of us does, I don’t trust corporations to not use this sort of technology for domination over the populace.
For perspectives on how it might go (general vibes, not the same technology) I recommend HYPER-REALITY (6 mins short film) or David Brin’s Existence novel.
Continuum is a tidy lil show addressing this, too. Actually, not so tidy, a bit of a mess. But still entertaining and intriguing at times.
thanks, I’ll check it out!
Not “The Matrix” – we will just serve as batteries for someone’s AI or Crypto farm while having/living in lucid dreams?
Tbh the Matrix never made sense from that angle, metabolism uses more energy than it generates. I think the original script said humans being farmed for their brain processing power, not body heat, which would have made marginally more sense. (Also why not just keep people in a coma in either case; anyway I’ll stop poking at Matrix plot holes 😂)
I’ve read Consider Phlebas, due to either your or another lemmings’ recommendation and it’s very ‘80s sci fi in writing style. I felt it required a bit too much attention for a good audio book at work, but wasn’t really interesting enough to pick up the physical book. Player of Games is supposed to be very different, is it worth giving it a shot or is Iain Banks’ writing just not to my taste?
Tbh I think Consider Phlebas is one of the weakest Culture novels, so I’d absolutely give Player of Games a shot! I started with that one, and it does a much better job at showing The Culture’s society than the mere outside glances we get from Phlebas.
With the possible exception of Phlebas, I recommend going through the series in publication order. But feel free to skip Inversions and State of the Art, imho they both mostly suck 😅 The rest of the books are great :)
That’s the challenge with technical advances. It’s not just solving the technical problem, it’s also solving the societal problem.
If you look back into history, Automated elevators was a major panic until people got comfortable with the idea.
Imagine the guy at BMW who invented subscriptions for heated seats teaming up with the guy at nvidia who does drivers and youll understand why I wouldnt
At some point in humanity’s future, I assume that it will be a thing and be widespread. Just too many potential benefits to having high-bandwidth links to the brain not to eventually do it.
But it’s a path with a lot of hurdles along the way, and risks.
Beyond expanding the brain’s functions it can fix things like some forms of blindness
The CRISPR technology is more advanced than brain implants.
If I can read your thoughts, it can change them. I guess it depends on the level of sophistication but it opens up the ONE place in the entire world that is completely yours.
The one place i cant leave, id love to not have my shit fucked up anymore.
Another problem is abandonment. When the company goes under or the device becomes outdated and they no longer want to support it the device can’t be easily removed. If the device was fixing a disability, the person’s disability will be reinstated.
Like “Unauthorized Toast”… with all the DRM laws, we could get arrested and charged with a felony for trying to repair ourselves.
I suspect we will end up in a situation where you have a “mount” that is connected to your brain. The mount is able to be serviced by any company in the field, because it is standard. From there, you have the actual chips which are going to be relatively easy to install and remove, eventually you might even be able to do so at your house. This allows competition while allowing being consumer friendly.
As for the disability side of things, it just means that when your chip is no longer serviced you easily swap it for another companies whose are.
My piercings are against God but technoligarchs think they will convince those people brain chips you can swap out on the fly are okay. lol
Anyways I’ll take one brain chip here in like 5 years.
I’m not trying to convince anyone. I well aware of where the tech will be in 30 years and I am getting one. If anyone else has a problem with it, they can wait until then to do their surprise pikachu face when the tech ends up being awesome, exactly how AI is going. LLMs are basically useless, but outside of those AI even in it’s modern incarnation is wildly inpressive, and will only get moreso.
10 years ago no one believed me when i told them about the LLMs we currently have. It was around that time I realised that the public makes sweeping generalizations about tech when 99% of them don’t understand the tech, the math, or even that something being present in nature means its replicable, because nature can replicate it(and therefore so can humans). That last one seems to be a huge disconnect in peoples cognitive abilites.
Edit: also anyone who tells you anything about your piercings in a disrespectful light can go suck an egg, they don’t live in your body. I realize im autistic but the fact that people try that shit and then other people are susceptable to that sort of societal pressure is wild to me. I do what I want, when I want, however I want. People call me weird and I openly ridicule them for thinking their opinion holds any sway over me. You try to shame me, and I will shame you for your massively inflated ego that you think has power over me.
I think a generic plug would be great but look at how fragmented USB specifications are. Add that to biology and it’s a whole other level of difficulty.
Brain implants have great potential but the abandonment issue is a problem that exists now that we have to solve for. It’s also not really a tech issue but a societal one on affordability and accountability of medical research. Imagine if a company held the patents for the brain device and just closed down without selling or leasing the patent. People with that device would have no support unless a government body forced the release of the patent. This has already happened multiple times to people in clinical trials and scaling up deployment with multiple versions will make the situation worse.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2818077
I don’t really have a take on your personal desires. I do think if anyone can afford one they should make sure it’s not just the up front cost but also the long term costs to be considered. Like buying an expensive car, it’s not if you can afford to purchase it but if you can afford to wreck it.
If it prevents or mitigates Alzheimer’s, or other degenerative brain diseases, it’s a good development.
What are the chances this won’t be proprietary?
had pass on all this bullshit.
Yeah, maybe just leave all that for people born in 2030.
This will be for paralyzed people
It will be used for paralyzed people to give it a soft spin, but the goal really is a super soldier or many other applications in the military industrial complex. If it’s not for blowing up people, it’s for killing people or controlling people. It’s not that technology is evil. It’s that our economic system and our mode of production and who benefits. That’s the problem. The rich are just basically building our prison.
We’re going to get Borg before GTA VI
Finally the logo makes sense
As long as theres no wifi and its to solve medical issues, why not? Better than trusting a nazi.
not “no wifi”. It’s “no any kind of wireless connections” and even then I’ll say no.
Digital onboard data processing and spike detection allows the device to operate via low-bandwidth wireless interfaces.
It also receives power wirelessly so probably going to be the only option.
Valve enabling Nazis on Steam is about as good as being a Nazi. If this is the first time you’re hearing about the problem, search for “steam nazi” via your favorite search engine and you’ll get some pretty good results among the first.
“The non WiFi versions cost more and are not supported by most insurance.”
- from the future
not “no wifi”. It’s “no any kind of wireless connections” and even then I’ll say no.
