Cognitive Congruence

A Whole Extra Hemisphere

As computers have improved over time, so have our interfaces with them. We have moved from machine code to programming languages and OS commands, and then to graphical point-and-click. Recently, prompt-driven interfaces are enabling us to conjure up sophisticated multimodal outputs from pure natural language. At some point, we won’t even need to speak or punch in brief instructions; it will be feasible to engage with computers directly, at the speed of thought.

Brain Computer Interfaces remain largely experimental, deployed mainly in persons with severe disabilities and expressive aphasia (an inability to speak). Many of these technologies provide a lifeline for persons with conditions such as Locked-In Syndrome and Motor Neurone Disease. By strobing quickly through the letters of the alphabet, brainwave reading technology can discern a user’s intention to select a letter. Along with predictive text mechanisms, this process can enable a practiced user to spell out messages at a rate of a sentence or two per minute, providing a crucial line of communication.

Along with communication, BCI and biofeedback devices can also potentially aid with other conditions, such as memory problems and Parkinson’s, as well as mood or anxiety disorders, and the treatment of serious depression.

However, along with these medical and accessibility enhancements, the same technologies offer a tantalizing glimpse at a future of increasingly intimate connections with and through machine media. BCIs may one day enable communication at the speed of thought, the transmission of feelings, and perhaps even communication of knowledge or biographical memories.

Much of the existing research has been in neural implants which necessitate highly precise surgery under the skull. It seems unlikely that anything so expensive and invasive will take off outside of cases of dire medical necessity, or to gain specialist covert talents for military or espionage purposes. Organizations such as Neuralink seem focussed on this niche.

Other forms of BCI involve readers of electrical brain waves through direct contact with skin. Traditionally, this required the addition of saline solution, which was acceptable in a medical context where there is an emphasis on accurate data. Advances in the consumer space have enabled a wide range of devices that can be readily worn on the forehead, over the ears like eyeglasses, without incurring a bad hair day. These devices are commonly used as meditation aids, potentially aiding concentration also.

There have been some experimental devices from companies such as OpenWater which are non-contact, using specific frequencies of light as sensors for brain activity. These new methods will enable radically more sophisticated monitoring of the brain, and should greatly increase the bandwidth and reliability of interfaces between the brain and the outside world.

I think it will be quite some time before businesses adopt these technologies. I can see immediate applications in the military, and niche occupations requiring an ability to process large amounts of information with precision, such as certain domains of finance and medicine. However, non-medical BCIs present immense ethical challenges. We need to carefully explore and forecast in advance the ramifications of such technologies as best we can.

If BCI becomes commonplace, people may be coerced into adopting them as an implied condition of employment, as an efficient employee. This may lead to people being even more burdened with work and overstimulation. Not everyone may be able to use BCI, and any implanted technologies may go quickly out of date, and may not be easy to upgrade. Imagine being stuck with the limitations of a first generation smartphone for the rest of your life. The price of such technologies may also reinforce economic divides, rendering some people unemployable, or leading to indentured servitude for an employer willing to subsidise BCI as part of a work contract.

BCI has the potential to bring people together in ways otherwise not possible. For example, it could radically improve our empathy with each other, by better understanding someone’s inner experience, or how they might be feeling. It could also provide an instant form of punishment. By actively sharing in a negative experience that one has caused others to experience, one may be motivated to avoid causing similar distress in future.

However, it has also been observed by philosophers such as Jacques Ellul that technology is sometimes employed as a means of numbing people to conditions which they might otherwise find intolerable, an increasingly sophisticated form of age-old ‘bread and circuses’. BCI tech might be used to wirehead people into acquiescence of treatment that they would otherwise find highly objectionable. The ability to read thoughts may also compromise what little privacy remains in contemporary society. Potentially, such non-contact light-based systems could be used remotely by security forces to search for mendacious or politically/religiously dissenting thoughts. The potential for abuse is immense.

BCI technology can further streamline technologies which attempt to present immersive interfaces and blended realities. It may enable augmented reality within natural eyes, by interfacing with the optical network of the brain rather than technology before or inside the eyes. BCI can enable us to tune our environment with reduced or altered stimuli (turning down harsh sounds, for example) without requiring anything over our physical ears. These elements together will provide greater control over our personal circumstances on one level, but it may also insulate us from stimuli in a manner which could be unhelpful. The sudden breakdown of BCI tech could create a jarring and unsettling return to base reality.

Given the existing gross overreach of large tech platforms and authoritarian governments trampling human rights ‘for the benefit of society’, caution is warranted. Technology inevitably changes values, and BCI perhaps more than any technology before it. Our civilization may be transformed in ways we cannot predict, and which we may find objectionable by today’s standards. The future of BCI is exciting, but also unsettling.