Labs around the world are building machines that we can control with our minds. How long will we have to wait for an upgrade?
You get back from work, crash out on the sofa and pick a track from your favourite playlist. Without moving from that spot you start heating up the oven to cook dinner before beginning a conversation with your friend who lives on the other side of town. You do all this without ever saying a word or pressing a single button. How did anyone get anything done before brain interfaces?
The idea that we could run our lives from inside our heads is, obviously, a fantasy, but there are those who are attempting to make it a reality. In 2017, SpaceX and Tesla billionaire Elon Musk announced a new venture, Neuralink. Its aim: to build a high-bandwidth, implantable braincomputer interface that will put us permanently online and allow us to communicate wirelessly with anything that has a computer chip. The device could, theoretically, allow us to have thought conversations with our friends, share memories as if they were smartphone videos and ‘know’ anything we wanted by simply calling it down from the cloud.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced plans to develop next-gen brain-computer interfaces, with the aim of enhancing the abilities of military personnel. A recently released document suggested a possible experiment for testing these devices: “a human subject controlling multiple drones in a virtual reality setup, while receiving sensory feedback to portray the status of each drone.” In other words, we might one day see soldiers controlling drones with their minds.
It sounds impressive, but is it possible? Primitive versions of brain-machine interfaces have already been used to help paralysed people move prosthetic limbs, but could we really see this technology making the leap to everyday use?
Group thinking
Denne historien er fra September 2018-utgaven av BBC Earth.
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