The Computerized Brain Trap
Mine has some little bugs but I'm sure there's a patch to fix them.
For no particular reason, I recently watched a lot of police body cam videos on YouTube. A couple things about these caught my attention. Mostly, how completely avoidable the majority of these problems were. For example, yelling, “I AM complying” at the police isn’t at all the same as really complying. But this is not a newsletter about the perversity of human nature, though lord knows there’s lots of material for one of those.
THIS is a newsletter about science and technology. And one bit of technology that was almost universally present in these videos was the alleged perpetrators’ cell phones. They were nearly obsessed with them. They used them to video what the police were doing. They used them to call friends and family and, in one case, their lawyer’s office. But it was after midnight and the lawyer wasn’t there. What a surprise! And once the people were arrested, they demanded that they be allowed to keep their phones.
All this brings up a serious question: How is all this going to change when people can have a phone (or phone-like device) embedded in their brains?
No, seriously! Hear me out!
There are several companies working on what’s called a brain-computer interface. Interface is a fancy word for a connection between two things. It’s a good word because it’s shorter than saying “connection between two things.” Also it’s good because it sounds technical, so it makes the people who use it sound smarter. Hopefully.
The earliest uses of these brain computer interfaces have been in helping people with certain medical conditions like paralysis, get back a little independence. For example, planting electrodes in the brain of a quadriplegic who is unable to speak. The electrodes sense brain impulses1 associated with speech and sends them to a computer that can decode them. This helps people communicate who wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Please don’t ask about those of us who talk with our hands. No BCI (Brain computer interface - get it?) can deal with that yet. It would be funny to have a robot that did it for you though, wouldn’t it?
(I had a joke to put here but decided that it would probably only be understood by people my age or older who grew up in the same kind of ethnic melting pot around my old home. My father would have laughed at it!)
Hooking a bunch of electrodes up to someone’s brain and running them to a computer is the old-fashioned way of doing things. And they work best for someone who is stuck in a hospital bed. What some folks, such as the brilliant folks at Elon Musk’s Neuralink, is something like a simple chip they can stick into your head that will be able to talk over WiFi to a computer and get it to do things for you.
Neuralink seems to be the market leader here. They say that, using the Neuralink chip and a product inaccurately called Telepathy2, people have been able to browse the Internet, play games, use CAD (computer aided design) software and type with an onscreen keyboard just by thinking about it3.
That doesn’t seem very impressive but it’s early days. Controlling your computer is only a step away from controlling your phone. I mean, how big a step is it to go from voice-to-text to brain-chip-to-text? Or from voice commands to brain commands? Five years, tops. Ten or so at the outside to merge the brain-chip with a phone-chip. Twenty-five if you need the FDA and the FCC both to sign off on it. Fifty if you need to wait for Congress.
So let’s fast forward a few years and look at a simple scenario. The police pull over a car for speeding. Just to keep this simple, we’ll say it’s a vintage car that doesn’t have any AI to drive it. There’s an actual human behind the steering wheel. The officer who made the stop asks for license and registration. The driver hands those over but also starts yelling that there’s no reason for the stop. People do that a lot. Even after the cop tells them why - maybe, “You were doing 75 in a 30 zone” - people will still often claim they don’t know why they’ve been pulled over. It’s funny but apparently in the presence of police, some people suffer some kind of brain freeze.
Only now, with a computer-enabled chip in your head (maybe communicating with a bigger one in the car?), you can do things like post directly to TikTok that you’re being harassed! “They stopped me for no reason! I need a lawyer right now! I’ll pay anything!” And all the time you’re posting this stuff, you’re in handcuffs and the police are still asking for your ID.
You’ve also sent a synthetic voicemail to the president asking him for a pardon and an email to every lawyer in the city asking them to file a lawsuit against all police everywhere. Plus, you sent commands to an AI agent that generates a video that shows the police dressed as clowns pulling you over for eating a sandwich that was cut diagonally instead of horizontally.
All from the comfort of the back of a police car.
Here’s another side effect of brain chips. Suppose the police have special software for theirs, so they can do things like running license plates and facial recognition just by thinking about it. What happens if they try to arrest someone who uses their account on a dark web marketplace to buy a brainchip virus and upload it to the cops standing nearest to them? I’ll admit, it would be hilarious if the police use their chip to access a department database and instead their brain is flooded with porn. Unless they decide to shoot the nearest likely source of the virus. Some people might consider that a problem.
Like always, we’re hurtling toward a future we don’t understand. Here’s hoping it’s at least a funny one.
Sometime in the recent past (I’m too lazy to look up which issue I said it in) I pointed to some recent confusion among solar astronomers that the current sunspot cycle is staying at maximum too long. Shortly after that, the daily sunspot number fell off a cliff. It never quite hit zero before rebounding but it’s definitely showing signs of moving away from maximum and toward minimum. So you can relax if you were worried that we can’t seem to predict the Sun. We really can’t but that doesn’t mean there’s a problem.
See ya next week!
The new poetry book I’ve been teasing is now available for purchase on Amazon! Between the Nova and the Night gathers fifty-plus original works that evoke awe, wonder, surprise and even humor. From the distant past to the far future and untold alternate realities, these poems chart a course through a cosmos that is vast, beautiful, and always surprising.
You already knew that the brain uses electricity, right?
Telepathy involves brain to brain contact. Not brain to computer contact.