Imagine a future where you are watching a movie on your couch while wearing your ‘MindLink’. It is a device that connects your mind, your thoughts directly to the digital world. It is a Brain-Computer Interface or BCI. Since you got this BCI device, you no longer have to actually use your finger to touch a screen, your hands for gesture control, or even your voice to activate Siri. All you do is think about it and the digital world talks to you directly, bypassing your other senses.
Now imagine that you really like what one of the actors in the movie is wearing. You send a ‘thought command’ to your BCI and it knows that you want to know more about what you just saw. It extracts the image from your short term memory, performs a search online, and presents your mind with options where you can buy it from. You like a deal and ‘think’ the three magic words, I WANT IT. The BCI device places an order online and Voila!
You saw it, you liked it, you bought it. All while using nothing but your thoughts!
Understanding Your Brain
The human brain is an incredibly complex machine. It is made up of literally billions of neurons that are constantly emitting tiny electrical pulses in order to send messages to other neurons. This complex web of electrical and neurochemical activity is always busy with:
Receiving signals from your sensory organs like eyes, ears, nose, skin.
Processing raw signals and compiling it.
Building a model of your surroundings based on these signals.
Using this ‘model of your reality’ to achieve your goals, whatever they may be at a given time.
In other words, making you conscious.
“Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters(temperature, space, time) in order to accomplish a goal(eg. finding mates, food, shelter)” -Space Time Theory of consciousness by Michio Kaku¹
Imagine you are your brain. You are locked in a bony skull tasked with making sense of the world around you based only on the raw data that your sensory organs continuously feed you with. So in order to ‘perceive’ your surroundings, you have to combine these data streams with your prior knowledge and expectations and build a model of reality based on informed guesswork.
So when your eyes capture an object, the data about the intensity and frequency of light incident upon every unit of the retina is sent to the brain. The visual cortex of your brain then synthesizes this data based on its prior knowledge and forms an image of what your eyes captured. At that moment, if a device can somehow capture this neural activity that happened in your mind and interpret it, it is theoretically possible to extract what you saw in a digital format. This is what Brain-Computer Interfaces do.
Understanding Brain-Computer Interfaces(BCI)
Any machine that can acquire brain signals, analyze them, and translate them into commands that digital devices can interpret is a BCI. They can be Invasive or Non-Invasive.
Invasive BCIs need to be surgically implanted in your brain. They physically interface with specific areas of your brain and can tap into the electrical activity that happens in real-time. The most well known invasive BCI technology is perhaps Elon Musk’s recently launched company Neuralink. They have designed a neural implant that is made up of micron-scale threads that contain electrodes. These threads are inserted into areas of the brain that control movement.
The implant in the picture above is almost as big as a coin. These implants can not only read but also stimulate brain activity. Musk’s company plans to develop robots that can autonomously perform the surgery and send the recipient of the implant back home in a few hours. The first application of Neuralink is the treatment of neurological disorders.
However, if the idea of sticking electrodes in your brain doesn't sound very appealing to you, there is the option of Non-Invasive BCIs which can record brain activity from sensors placed on or very close to the head. These are devices that you wear or strap around your head like a cap and do not need any surgical procedure prior to use.
The most common non-invasive BCI mechanism is using an electroencephalogram (EEG) device which involves placing electrodes on the scalp to record the voltage fluctuations triggered by the firing of a group of neurons in the brain. Clinically, EEG is most commonly used to diagnose Epilepsy. However, EEG readings are time delayed and low resolution, which means it is very difficult to record signals with precision. For example, you can wear an EEG device and select letters displayed on a screen by looking at them, but the fastest you can go is probably one letter every 10–20 seconds.
Other higher resolution non-invasive technologies rely on recording magnetic activity with magnetoencephalography(MEG) or recording metabolic activity with functional Near-Infrared spectroscopy(fNIRS). The Time Domain (TD-fNIRS) device called Flow 50 developed by a Neurotech startup called Kernel is showing encouraging results and a promise of commercial viability.
Are we there yet?
It is clear that we are very, very far from where technology needs to be for non-medical, day-to-day, commercial applications like ‘Shop with Thoughts’.
Any BCI technology that aims to facilitate the shopping experience I envisioned at the beginning of this post needs to pass the below tests:
Read my Mind, literally- The ability to read intention will be critical. The machine needs to know when you ‘wish’ you had something versus when you are explicitly issuing a command. Simply wishing ‘I want it’ is not the same as giving consent to your device to buy it.
It also needs to know when you ask it to make a purchase while in an inebriated state of mind and hold off on making any transactions until you are sober again.Brain’s fingerprint- How does your BCI know it's you and not your friend or even worse, a fraudster who wore your BCI ‘hat’ when you were away and began rattling off their wishlist to your Amazon account? Strong Authentication will need to be developed based on the user’s brain fingerprint to prevent fraud.
No penny for my thoughts- With online BCIs you are literally exposing the dark depths of your mind to a machine that is connected to the internet. This statement alone can be the theme of an entire season of Black Mirror. So any ‘Pay with Thoughts’ product will need to be fortified with privacy and security measures that will safeguard your thoughts from ever getting posted on Twitter. It also needs to prevent any external attacks on your brain.
It is not a matter of if, but when, before the technology reaches a level where it can meet all the above criteria. Of course, any BCI technology should first be deployed to address neurological disorders and in general mental health. But it will be a matter of time before it then becomes more pervasive in our lives and become as common as wearable tech is in the year 2020 and when that happens B-Commerce (Brain commerce) wouldn't be too far behind.
I strongly believe that the next step in the evolution of humans is a symbiotic relationship with the machines that we created. The future is a shared Augmented Intelligence and not a Humans vs Artificial Intelligence dystopia.
There are things that computers can do way better than humans. For example, performing large mathematical computations at the speed of light and transmitting information to other machines with high fidelity and speed. Humans suck at both. We are thousands of times slower than computers at multiplying even 2 digit numbers and when we want to communicate with other humans we have to rely on talking and listening or typing and reading which is not even comparable to the speeds of two computers communicating with one other.
On the other hand, humans are remarkably fast at learning, analyzing new information, and updating our cognitive models. Our ability to take into account social, moral, and political parameters into our decision-making process along with facts and figures is what makes us uniquely human. Machine Learning is nowhere near in this department.
Instead of teaching machines how to be human in their Artificial Intelligence and living in fear of a singularity event, wouldn't it make sense for humans to evolve into Homo Droid?
References
[1]Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
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