Neural lace, wetware, brain-machine interfaces … whatever we call it, we can see the drive here. If the effort in the 19th and 20th centuries was to store reality outside the living body, in the 21st century the impulse is to incorporate the living body into media technology itself.
Facebook has claimed that it is funding research on brain-computer interface (BCIs) since 2016. This year in September, Facebook announced that they have acquired CTRL-labs, a neural interface startup in New York, to investigate brain technology that could read our minds.
What CTRL-labs is taking the electrical activity from the brain directly and decoding those signals to control devices. This neural interface technology allows people to use their digital devices without any movements but only with your mind.
Facebook is trying to reduce the ‘friction’ between our living biological body and the calculative capacities of its media technologies. They claimed that their short-term goal for this invention is to support people with paralysis by enabling them to “speak” by themselves without using muscles. If possible, this technology would gain a wider audience for Facebook.
However, to achieve this goal, Facebook has to access and collect our brain data, which is now prompting ethical debates. Nevertheless, this would be a great breakthrough in brain-computer interface technology that we can all look forward to. What are your thoughts about this new technology? Connect with us now and let us know what you think!
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