### Brain-Computer Interfaces: Promise and Ethical Dilemmas

Neurotechnology promises to enhance human capabilities, but raises serious concerns about mental privacy and identity.

### The Promise and Perils of Brain-Computer Interfaces
* 🧠 Humans have long sought to **unlock the full potential of the mind**, with historical attempts like the CIA's hiring of "**mind readers**" during the Cold War.
* 💻 Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are emerging as a **groundbreaking AI technology** that could allow us to **control machines with our thoughts**, but this raises concerns about **mental privacy and identity**.
* 🔍 "What you can do in a mouse today, you can do in a **human tomorrow**," highlighting the potential for **manipulating human thoughts and actions** through neurotechnology.
* 🛑 The technology poses risks, such as creating a **divide between augmented and non-augmented humans**, and the possibility of **biased information being fed directly into our brains**.
* 💡 Despite these dangers, the motivation behind developing neurotechnology is to **help those suffering from mental health issues**, with an estimated **3 million Americans experiencing treatment-resistant depression**.
* ⏳ Innovations like implantable devices aim to **stimulate brain networks** to alleviate conditions like **depression and PTSD**, with procedures expected to take **less than 30 minutes** and be **less invasive than cosmetic surgery**.
* 🌍 The future of neurotechnology could see wearable devices enabling **communication through thought alone**, potentially transforming how we **interact with technology and each other**.
* ⚖ However, ethical considerations loom large, as the integration of technology with our minds raises questions about **privacy and the potential for manipulation by corporations and governments**.

Humans have long hoped to harness the full power of the mind. During the Cold War, the
CIA even hired supposed "mind readers" to help spy on the
Soviets in a top-secret program. What if we don't have to hope anymore?

Brain-computer interface, a special type of AI technology known as BCI, shows tremendous
promise in making our minds do things we've only previously imagined. But this all comes at a
price: access to your mind. Are we willing to open
up our minds to machines?

How much can we trust that
in this strange new future, our minds will still be our own? The brain is not just
another organ of the body, it is the organ that makes us who we are. With neurotechnology,
we can decide what type

of human being we want to be. Everything comes out of the activity of neurons in your brain. And for the first time in history, we've developed technology
that lets you record that activity and change it. What you're seeing here
is a mouse drinking, not out

of desire, but because
it was ordered to do so by scientists manipulating
its neurons - proof that the brain can be
controlled from the outside. That for me, was an Oppenheimer moment. Because I mean, on the one hand
we were super excited, like,

oh my God, we finally got into the brain. But of course, what you
can do in a mouse today, you can do in a human tomorrow. And that's when I started to be worried. So what are the most scary scenarios

that we can imagine with neurotechnology? Mental privacy, decoding
of one's thoughts. They could decode not
just what you're thinking, but even worse: what your subconscious, what
you don't know you're thinking. The second are identity.

Someone could go and
dissolve it, break it. And this is something that
nobody ever worried about in the history of humanity because
you cannot change the person. Guess what? Now you can. The third area of concern
are the decisions.

This is not science fiction.
We've done it with mice. We've turned the mouse into a puppet and made the mouse do
one thing or the other. The fourth area of concern
is to have a humanity that is fractured into
two types of humans.

Ones that are augmented mentally, and other ones that are
not, like in an underclass. The last nightmare scenario is to have people piping
information into your brain that is biased or discriminatory in a way that's sort of changing your belief systems.

Some people may be afraid. We're developing technology
to get into the brain, to map what the brain does and to change it. The reason we're doing this
has to do with the patients. Who doesn't have a
family member or a friend

that suffers from a brain
disease, either Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety? We know painfully well that
we cannot help these people because as doctors, we don't have the technology
to go into the brains of these people and understand
their problem and fix it.

That means that we have to develop these methods at any cost as soon as we can. At Motif, we are building implantable electronic devices to help people who suffer from mental health conditions that aren't being effectively treated by their drugs.

It's like a brain stimulator for mental health. Jacob interview, take one. Second sticks. Give us a sense of the scope of the problem you're trying to solve. How many people suffer from depression? We estimate it's about 3 million Americans

who are suffering from depression and have failed to respond to two or more drugs. For every person with a spinal cord injury, there are 10 people suffering from treatment-resistant depression. It's just invisible. One of the things that we've begun to discover about depression is that

these are circuit-level disorders, and in the case of depression, brain activity is predominantly trapped in this state. The device that we're building is a miniature implant and it stimulates that part of the executive function network that increases its activity.

So it becomes strengthened. So now it pulls you out of that ruminating state, the state of those negative emotions, and now you can begin to do the things that were impossible before. How long does the procedure take? We estimate the procedure will take less than 30 minutes.

And you go home that day. That day? That day. Okay. Yeah, it's less invasive than most cosmetic procedures. It's less invasive than a nose job. Drugs don't activate networks. They activate neurons in your body and in your brain,

and it causes all kinds of side effects. If you look at people on
antidepressants today, a lot of them fall off because of
weight gain, sexual dysfunction. These are things that we
shouldn't even be exposing people to because this is a brain disorder.

So how far off is this? We expect that we'll achieve
FDA approval in the coming years and a clinical trial
will follow shortly after that. What other mental illnesses
do you think you can cure? We're looking at PTSD, we're looking at ADHD,
and we're looking at OCD.

Wow. What about Alzheimer's? I would not be surprised
if in the next 10 years we'll have electronic therapy that can prevent the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's. How is this different from Neuralink and what Elon Musk is trying to do?

What other brain computer
interface companies are trying to do is get as much information as they can into and out of the brain. And that's important if you're trying to treat something like paralysis. But we're looking at a different problem. We're thinking about how can we restore

the circuits in the brain. There are all kinds of
potential use cases here, and certainly curing incurable diseases is at the top of the list. But what if a brain implant
could make you smarter? Is that possible? I think the short answer
is sort of. I, you know,

making someone smarter? Maybe.
Giving someone the ability to focus on demand? Absolutely. Wouldn't it be
great if I could push a button and then suddenly my
attention level is at 11? So that's possible? Absolutely. That's coming. Absolutely.

What are you most excited
about in terms of the potential? Mental illness can be measured and is going to be
measured in the same way that we can measure the
progression of cancer or any other kind of disease. We can measure it, we can
treat it, we can beat it.

When you think about
somebody who tells you that they have cancer, your
immediate thought inside is, I feel so sorry for you. And you tell them that,
I'm sorry. I love you. Let me help you. The exact opposite is

what happens with mental illness. And you're judged, labeled
and ostracized by society. You struggled with severe depression for a long part of your life. You hear about a possible solution, but it involves implanting a chip. Yep.
In your brain.

Yep.
Were you scared? Oh, I was the exact opposite. You know, that's one of the main things that I hear a lot is
"You got brain surgery, were you freaked out?" Couldn't care less. You know, I was euphoric to die.

And so the worst case scenario
was I died and I loved it. Like bring it on. Cause my
life insurance didn't pay out unless I died by an accident, right? I didn't have suicidal coverage. So how is your implant different from

what Motif is working on? So my implant is, you know,
older technology, so invasive, you know, eight hour procedure
surgery, very intense, very in depth, very costly, right? This is a big endeavor. What Motif is doing is they've
essentially created

a technology the size of a pea
as, as tiny as you can get. And it's not brain surgery, it's a minimally invasive procedure. They essentially drill
a hole in the skull, which is an extremely normal
procedure for a neurosurgeon.

They place the pea there, cover
it up, we activate that power and that's going to be able to provide the therapy for the patients. The greatest potential here
is stopping the massive public health crisis that is out there. It's reducing costs for the
overall healthcare system.

It's making literally
millions of people, millions and millions and millions
of people in this country, multiply that times a
hundred for the world, right? It gives them their life back. What would your wife say? What would

your kids say? They're blown away. You
know, I had this moment with my son, my middle guy. We were quiet in the
car for a couple minutes and then he just said, you know, dad, I really appreciate you
fighting and sticking around,

right? And so you get those moments. It's just life. Life is incredible. That's beautiful.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Most of us touch our phones
hundreds of times a day. We talk to loved ones and
friends, text, email, order food.

Imagine if an illness or accident meant you could
no longer do any of that. Thanks to brain computer interfaces, there's now hope we could
do many of those things just by using our brains - truly hands free. Hi, this is Rodney.

We're now at a period in
medicine where lots of technology for the brain has shown
a lot of potential, but we've had trouble getting
into the brain in a safe and scalable way. And so Synchron's vision was, how can we
build technology using the

natural highways, the blood
vessels into the brain in a way that can solve problems that haven't previously been solvable? So the stentrode is a stent electrode. We took the concept
of a stent in medicine.

It's a technology that's
delivered in through a catheter, through a tiny little break in the skin to get into the blood vessels. The first application of
the stentrode is in the use of an implantable brain
computer interface.

If we can detect activity in
the brain that is associated with the control of movement, then you could restore their ability to exert their free will, exert their volition in the
world directly from the brain. This is Rodney. He has
ALS and can't speak,

but with the help of
his implant, he's able to send me a text message
using only his brain. What the technology is about
is the restoration of agency, of autonomy, of giving people
back control over their world. And that has a huge impact on

how you have relationships in your life. Good morning. How are you doing today? Right now, this
technology is only available to a select few, but it could
change the lives of millions. To have the impact that we
think neurotechnology can have,

we have to solve problems
in a way that can scale. Neurological disability
is the number one cause of disability in the world. Huge patient need. But the problem traditionally in neurotechnology has been, if the technology requires
open brain surgery,

it's been limited to very
specialized academic centers. So what's different about what we're doing is
we've taken the view that to be successful, we have
to solve the problems without open surgery.
We know that can scale and help millions of people a year.

There has not been a company yet that's achieved market
approval, FDA approval for an implantable brain
computer interface. It's, it's a great big challenge and we've got some really
exciting breakthroughs coming that mean that we can get to a whole range

of regions in the brain. We'll be rolling out a pipeline of products over the course
of the next couple of years. I think the pipeline would be: neurotechnology shows up in the form of non-invasive wearable
technologies that we can take on,

take off. For instance, five or six years ago, Meta acquired Control Labs, a company that makes neurotechnology
in the form of a wristband. So just by thinking about
something you would be able to scroll or shuffle through
music on your smart glasses,

which we also know that
they recently launched. So we're basically designing
this neural interface, which is, I think one
of the more wild things that, that we're doing. It's not reading your mind, but what it is doing is allowing
your brain to communicate

with something the same way that your brain would
communicate with your hand. Apple filed a patent for an EEG
capability in their AirPods. So you could imagine controlling
aspects of your device, maybe checking your email and having your AI in your
AirPod read that email to you.

But you're doing that just by thinking. Brain-computer interfaces, they really do present the possibility of creating superhumans, allowing us to have senses
that currently aren't possible. Whether that's hearing things
we currently can't hear or seeing ultraviolet light
that we currently can't see.

I mean, right now you
might replay a memory by watching a video on your phone. With a brain-computer interface, you could actually go and
transport back to that memory and be in it. I think the goal of
some scientists would be

that we don't just use a brain
interface to control aspects of our body, but of
systems outside the body. That is the goal: to
provide humans eventually with superhuman capabilities. You are one of the many
people who helped create AI

that emulates the brain and now you say their brains are better than ours in many ways. Their brains will
become better than ours because they can share different
copies of the same model, the same neural net can share information much more efficiently.

So what's the next move? Putting AI devices in
our brains to catch up? So Ray Kurzweil thinks hybrids of AI devices in our
brains are the future. I'm not so convinced. I think
once these things are smarter

than us, they just won't need us. Hmm. So we just won't have a chance? Well, but we are
building them, remember? So we do have a chance, but we're going to need to be very
careful about what we build

and I think we could easily
build things that wipe us out. And so just leaving it to private industry to maximize profits doesn't
seem like a good strategy. Isn't the genie out of the bottle? The genie is definitely
out of the bottle.

But for the existential
threat, we'll get collaboration between governments on how you prevent this existential threat. What is openBCI? OpenBCI started as an open source brain
computer interfacing company. Over time we've evolved from
building just the low cost

open source modules into
working on much more complex integrated systems like Galea. Alright, let's fly. Alright. So what we're looking at now is four separate channels that are isolating four
locations on my face. Basically my left
eyebrow, my right eyebrow,

my left cheek, and my right cheek. And what we've done is we've
mapped those four muscles into the four controls of the drone. Check it out. No hands. You flew a drone without a controller. That's really just the tip of the iceberg.

We look at things like the
heart, the brain, the muscles, the sweat on your skin. And we try to make inferences or decode your intention
inside of a computer, your emotions. Things
like stress, arousal, fatigue, workload.

If you can take a person's emotions and bake them into any application inside of a computer in real time,
you'll have things like movies or games or stories where
the ending isn't written already, but rather the game
is changing based on the way

that you're perceiving and interacting with
characters in the story, the narrative, the game. What about telepathy? Will I literally be
able to read your mind? Will I be able to know what my partner is thinking
from across the table?

To know what another person is thinking, I think it's up to the
person who's thinking, right? Like, like we shouldn't have
a window into everybody else's mind without them giving us permission. If I gave you permission, right?

Would you be able to read my mind? Eventually or soon at
a crude state, right? Like high level emotions.
Are you happy? Are you sad? You know, are you stressed? Are you calm? You can already look at those metrics at,

at a somewhat high level. The way computers are gonna change is that we will integrate the individual's mind or the individual's
emotions as a core component of what a computer is. When we do that, we'll actually be able to look at emotions on
a very personal level.

There are real concerns
about privacy here. Oh yeah.
Imagine if my mental and emotional states are stored online. They already are. Yeah.
Well what if the government has
access to them and advertisers and corporations? Yep.
How do I protect myself?

Well, this is the kind of sad reality: we already have these kind
of digital twins that exist on the internet, inside
of the servers of a lot of major technology companies. It's kind of sad how
much control we've lost

of our own emotions. And especially when you
consider that at the same time, we have no access to it. I like to say that today we actually have an immense
amount of ethical debt that we have to pay off with technology.

We've extracted people's emotions. We've started to classify
people into different camps, and now we're tailoring and
sculpting advertisements and information and news and videos and content based on these
representations of people. It's probably the most
difficult technological

problem to solve these days. How do we backtrack from the ways that we built computers and, and most specifically, how we harvest and collect psychological
information about people. How do we backtrack and how do we give that
power back to the user?

Is backtracking even
possible at this point? Or are we hurtling towards giving up more and more of our minds to technology? And how much choice do we really have? If your phone was constantly
reading your thoughts, would you give it up?

Brain computer interfaces are
enabling direct communication between the brain and machines. Do you think this crosses
one final barrier? Like, are we giving up this last part of ourselves that makes us human? I don't think so actually. I think they're a kind of neat idea.

I don't, I don't see that as a loss of humanity. Would you put a chip in your brain if you knew it could enhance your neurological functions? If I knew it could enhance my neurological function and it wouldn't have any nasty side effects

and there was a very high probability it wouldn't kill me. Yes, I would. As AI is influencing more and more of our decisions, are we willingly opening ourselves up to some form of mind control? Like could AI challenge what it means to have free will?

In order to answer that, we need to agree on what free will is. And most people think free will is some kind of randomness. I think that's complete nonsense. Free will is doing it to achieve your own goals, not

to achieve somebody else's goals. So if AI is influencing more and more of our desires and our decisions, are we making any autonomous decisions anymore? If I have a goal and I do something to achieve that goal, it seems to me I'm acting as my own free will.

If other people are creating the goals in surreptitious ways, then that does seem to be an intrusion on my individuality. Well, that's the fear, is that once we open our minds to these devices, that tech companies and the government will have access to all of our thoughts

and then take advantage of them. Just like some people would argue they already have. If tech companies, the government could see all our thoughts, do you think they wouldn't take advantage of it? Why would they not? Why would they not.

If you could put a chip in your brain that would make you
happier, would you do it? Okay. This feels like an episode of Black Mirror. But yes, if it's gonna make me happier, but then it's like, what is,
like how would they get it

to fit everybody's
definition of happiness? Like, would it work with
your brain chemistry? I guess I would need the logistics, but yes, you can't really
be happy all the time. Yeah, I think you need to
experience all emotions

Because I want to know what
exactly it is that I'm feeling so I know what the problem is. If I have a chip in my
brain to make me happier, then I'm not fixing the
problem of why I'm not happy.

Would you wear a helmet
that if you put it on it would make you smarter and double your salary? Geez, that's a lot of pressure, huh? I have to keep the helmet on all the time? Yeah, well you
put, if you put the helmet on,

you get smarter and
richer, but tech companies and the government have
access to your thoughts. Hmm. I'm not hiding anything. So maybe. What if it would
make you smarter and double your salary? Yes. I feel like I should say
no, but I'm gonna say yes.

Cause I was such a C
average college student. I'll take the help where
I can get it. So yes. Well, that's changing the
field a little too much now. As long as it is not invasive in changing who I am as a person.

What if it means tech companies and the government have access to your thoughts? Oh, right. No, no, no. Definitely not.

The Thrill and Threat of Mind Hacking | Posthuman with Emily Chang

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Bloomberg Originals

The Promise and Peril of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs)

Historical attempts to harness the power of the mind, including Cold War era CIA projects.

BCI's potential to enhance human capabilities.

Ethical concerns regarding access to and control of one's mind.

Experiments demonstrating external control of brain activity in mice.

Potential negative consequences: loss of mental privacy, alteration of identity, manipulation of decisions.

Motivation for BCI development: treating brain diseases like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety.

Development of implantable devices for mental health conditions.

Scale of the problem: millions of Americans suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

Mechanism of action: stimulating brain circuits to alleviate depression symptoms.

Potential applications beyond depression: PTSD, ADHD, OCD, and Alzheimer's.

Comparison with Other BCI Technologies and Future Potential

Distinction from Neuralink: focus on restoring brain circuits rather than extensive data transfer.

Potential for cognitive enhancement: improved focus and attention.

Potential to revolutionize mental health treatment: measurable, treatable, and potentially beatable.

Contrast in societal response to physical vs. mental illness.

Personal account of undergoing a BCI implant procedure and the lack of fear.

Comparison of the speaker's older, more invasive implant with Motif's minimally invasive device.

Addressing challenges in accessing the brain safely and scalably.

Using blood vessels as a natural pathway for implantation.

First application: restoring movement control in patients with ALS.

Advantages of a minimally invasive approach for scalability.

Emergence of non-invasive wearable technologies.

Examples: Meta's wristband for controlling smart glasses, Apple's patent for EEG in AirPods.

Enabling brain-device communication similar to hand-device communication.

Potential for enhanced senses and memory access.

Long-term goal: controlling external systems beyond the body.