Culture & Merging Our Brains With The Internet
Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) offers many benefits. And risks. How will culture see, adopt and adapt this new technology? A look beyond the hype.
Most of us look at the advancements in connecting our brains to the internet and other digital technologies with a mix of squeamishness, fascination and utter fear. It’s long been a trope of science-fiction, but is becoming reality. What does this mean to us as a culture and society?
Today, we’re in the early phases of awareness when it comes to these technologies and they too, are in the very early phases of experimentation, but the competition to achieve viability with what is called Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is intense, if only within a small group of organisations.
Neuralink recently announced the successful installation of their technology into a mans brain and that he’s doing quite alright. Other companies say they’re more advanced and better. Australian researchers claim they’re miles ahead of Neuralink and may well be.
These technologies are advancing and no doubt Artificial Intelligence tools will play a role, especially in the interface software. And there are good uses for some of these BCI tools. They may help those with complete paralysis or limitations in speaking to fully engage with society in meaningful ways.
BCIs are among a suite of technologies that are in play to merge together what today are largely siloed technologies. Smartphones put the internet in our pockets, where once the internet was a place we went to through a PC, now it is everywhere.
But there are limitations to how we can interact. Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology furthers this integration, but reside in the background, an operational layer if you will. Interoperability between many systems and tools is still quite messy, with a mish mash of rules, regulations and capabilities.
Many companies create motes around their technologies, citing the need to protect their competitive advantage and that this helps them innovate. It does not. It may well hamper innovation. That’s for another article.
BCIs may also enhance those with speech impediments to communicate better, or those with intellectual challenges find more opportunity. Various BCI technologies may help us map the human brain in greater detail, to understand the workings alongside other tools like MRIs and certain scanning devices.
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” — Dr. Emerson Pugh, Physicist
There are the risks of BCI technologies, as there are with any technologies. No technology is neutral, all are a double-edged sword and all have unintended consequences. These are immutable laws of technology for humans.
Such tools are expensive to install in a brain, be they a sensor, a mash or a direct device. They carry medical risks. You are after all, drilling a hole in your skull. This could lead to greater economic divides for those who can afford them and the subsequent advantages they may gain. There’s the risk of being hacked and the implications of over-dependence.
So far, BCI devices have been operating at the fringe of culture. You can’t just go out and buy one at a store or order one online, plop it into your skull and go all Ready Player One.
Just like AI right now has us in a knot over existential concerns for the future of humanity, BCIs will eventually fold into this mix of questions around the ethics of this technology. BCIs will also impact our sense of personhood and identity, not just of ourselves but our relationships with society.
There may be social stigma, much like Augmented Reality (AR) glasses. A decade ago they were seen as invasive and socioculturally rejected. But they are slowly merging into society and becoming more accepted. This is culture at work. That too is likely with BCI technology.
There are anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and ethicists deeply involved in the development of BCI technologies. Not just in academia but with the businesses working on these tools.
An upside to this is that AI will advance ahead of BCI technologies and as humanity sees the existential threat and the benefits of AI, we are likely to put in place cultural norms, behaviours, rules and expectations around AI before BCI technology becomes more viable for larger markets. This would help us better evolve the technology into society.
As these disparate technologies begin to come together, to be able to interoperate with one another, culture will be the ultimate arbiter of how we see them playing out. In the initial phases of BCI tools, they will face sociocultural challenges such as acceptance and how they’re impacting our norms, behaviours and traditions.
Culture will decide, over a few decades, whether or not it thinks BCI technologies give us a survival advantage as a species, either in the macro sense of our sociocultural systems, or within in highly defined niche uses. Typically, like AR and VR, such technologies find niche uses before they’re adopted by broader society.
One suspects that culture will find BCI tools more acceptable in helping those with physical and mental challenges first. We tend to favour technologies that benefit us in social ways first. It is certainly a fascinating space to watch evolve.