The Future

The idea of a brain-machine augmentation to humans may seem like an improbable fantasy at this point, but BMI is really the next step in a trend that has been happening since the dawn of humanity.

In the beginning, language turned into writing, which then turned into print. When we learned how to harness the power of electricity, things sped up. Telephones, radio, and television were another stage in how communication between people was increasing.

Then phones became mobile. Computers turned from machines reserved for work and games into portals into a digital world that more than 4 billion people are part of.

BMIs are just the next development that will increase communication and integrate humans more completely into the digital world.

A History of Human Communication

Let's think about some technological developments as stepping stones in a progression of increasingly direct ways that brains communicate with each other.

Alternatively, it could also look like this:

Or this:

It could very well be that the second era of brain communication - the 100,000 year Era of Indirect Brain Communication - is about to end. It's possible that in the last 150 years, the rate at which humans have been improving communications media has been enough to transition to the third era. We might be living on the border between indirect and direct brain communication.

And because indirect brain communication involves physical devices, Era 3 may be the era in which your brain is the device.

Of course, this won't happen overnight. People won't just wake up one day with an amazing tertiary digital layer added onto their brains. But we have already taken tiny steps towards creating a full-blown Era 3. Lots of humans are already walking around with electrode implants, cochlear implants, retinal implants - all developments that demonstrate the fact people are already using technology to enhance their brains.

Cool BMI stuff involving communication

Thought communication

Imagine having a brainstorm session, but the conversation is entirely nonverbal - everything is literally thinking together in one giant brain groupchat. Communication on this level gets weird, because no one has ever done it before. When communicating through language - words, sentences, and gestures - some essential meaning is lost in the process. With direct thought communication, this meaning preserved on its way to someone else's brain.

When you're watching a movie, your head is buzzing with thoughts, but you're probably not having a spoken word dialogue going on. Thought conversations will be like that.

Multimedia communication

Instead of having to describe to someone a book you just read or a song that's stuck in your head, you can just beam the idea into their head in the same way that you would show them on your computer screen.

Instead of sketching a design out, a graphic designer could just think what they have in mind on to the screen. A musician could directly project their vision for a song into music making software. Animators could create an entire scene just by focusing on what they had in mind from the drive to work.

Sensory communication

So right now, you have two cameras (your eyeballs) and two microphones (your ears) built into your brain. Down the road, we can actually feed information into these sensory organs, wirelessly, and create experiences from pure digital data. In the same way that you can receive sensory information, you can also give it.

Imagine you're on a beautiful hike with the Sierra Club.You want to show your friend the view, so you think a brain connection request out to her. When she accepts, the BMI connects your retinal feed to her visual cortex. She asks for more senses to get the full picture, and once you connect those, she'll be able smell the trees, feel the breeze, maybe even taste the Nature Valley granola bar you're eating.

This could also have a lot of practical uses. A surgeon could control a machine scalpel with her motor cortex instead of holding one in her hand, and with the sensory information she receives from the device, it'll feel like an 11th finger to her.

Sensory communication could also mean that you can record your memories, or share them. So yeah, that one Black Mirror episode could actually happen.

Cool BMI stuff involving internal control

A good brain-machine interface will stimulate any part of your brain in any way. In addition to being able to communicate on more efficiently and on a more meaningful level, BMIs have the potential to take complete control over your brain.

Getting rid of mood disorders

According to neuroscientists, a lot of evidence points to the possibility that mood disorders are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. Right now, we take drugs to balance out those chemicals. Neural interfaces, on the other hand, can target one area at a time and can be tuned in real-time. If drugs carpet-bomb the chemical imbalances in our brains, BMIs can be like precision-guided missiles.

Increase your knowledge

Want to know a fact? Instead of pulling up Google and typing your question in like a savage, just refer to the cloud and you'll be able to know it, intuitively. In more advanced stages of BMI development, you can just know the fact the moment you want it. Did it come from your own brain or the cloud? Who cares? The entire cloud is basically your brain anyway.

Scary pitfalls

As with the advent of any new technology, there will always be some people out there who will take advantage of it for selfish or sadistic reasons.

Hacking

With such integration of the human brain and artificial intelligence, it is theoretically possible for your brain to be hacked. Meaning that hackers could have access to your thoughts, sensory input, and memories. They could also put information in, changing your thoughts and gaining control of your conscious mind. It is impossible to completely protect a computer system from being hacked, so even if the technologies become very advanced, there will always still be some possibilities for hacking.

Trolls

Being more connected to each other is a good thing, but just like the Internet, some troll-type personalities will always surface to ruin things for everyone. Bad guys will have even more opportunities to spread hate or build hateful coalitions.

Why this will still probably be awesome

Technology has allowed bad things to happen that wouldn't have in the past, such as the development of bombs, the spread of fake news, and the streamlining of terrorist recruiting processes.

And yet no one wants to go back to an era when half of all babies died at birth, when we had to ride horses or walk to get anywhere, and when there was no Wi-Fi. While new technology always comes with its drawbacks, it always seems to help more people than it harms. Advancing technology always proves to be a net positive.

People love to bash on new technology because they view it as unhealthy (looking at you, baby boomers) but if given the option, they definitely wouldn't want to go back to older, more inconvenient days.

So while there will be a long list of dangers that come from the third era of communication, there will always be more good guys that wage war on the bad guys who try to take advantage of this technology. And in the future, people will probably look back on 2018 definitely not want to go back.

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Carter, Jamie. “The future of brain-computer interfaces revealed.” Techradar, Future plc, 2 Oct. 2012, www.techradar.com/news/computing/the-future-of-brain-computer-interfaces-revealed-1101287.

Chudler, Eric H. Ph.D., and Lise Johnson Ph.D. “Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Future of Humanity.” Psychologytoday, Sussex Publishers, LLC, 23 Apr. 2017, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-bytes/201704/brain-computer-interfaces-and-the-future-humanity.

Urban, Tim. “Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future.” Wait But Why, 20 Apr. 2017, waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html.

Wu, James, and Rajesh P.N. Nao. “How close are we to Elon Musk's brain-computer interface?” CNN, Cable News Network, 12 Apr. 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/04/12/health/brain-computer-interface-partner/index.html.

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