Sullivan mulls new tech that lets monkeys and people control robot arms and fly simulated helicopters with their brains alone. I will breeze through a couple points quickly to get to my larger concern.
– It will be great for amputees to have better and more powerful prosthetics. There is also no real reason why a healthy person cannot pick up a couple of extra super strong tentacle arms or whatever. Bionic augmentation possibilities are basically limited by the imagination (first up: a remote for people too lazy to move their thumbs).
– An infallible and ubiquitous lie detector would be a godawful idea. I suppose that case law would keep such a thing limited to where it is used (unreliably) today. However, if it uses the same tech that thousands or millions of people will have at home then it would be nearly impossible to keep a lid on grey market ‘apps’. Abuse possibilities are almost endless.
– As soon as they give monkeys brain-controlled exoskeletons with lasers, I’m moving to Greenland. It ought to be a vacation spot soon anyway.
I think that the most significant concern is that the brain is not a ROM device. Researchers have used quite similar weird science electro-hats (technically, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS) to activate or inactivate countless different parts of the brain. Switch off Broca’s area and you can no longer understand or use language (though, oddly, you can sing). Switch on somewhere else and you have a religious experience. Switch off another bit and you cannot control the urge to buy something you see advertised on TV. It certainly would give new meaning to the term ‘universal remote’.