Progress has become unstoppable. What was told in stories yesterday is now being researched in science. These include the Internet, the Iphone, touchscreens, the Cyperspace - all developments among many that have come directly into our lives out of imaginative stories. This trend also goes in the direction of communication between man and machine. A plug behind the ear could soon connect us to the database worlds.
Today you can already control prostheses with your thoughts. At the Applied Physics Lab, John Hopkins developed robot arms designed to make life easier for disabled people. However, before the prostheses can function fully, people's nerves must be changed by operation so that communication at the interface can run smoothly. After a little training, it will then be possible to control his prostheses, his artificial body parts with his thoughts. And almost everything on the body can be replaced, including the brain, but you should make a backup of it beforehand.
But this is only the beginning. Brain-computer-interfaces are a dream and something unstoppable. Of course we are still some years away from this future. But the connection between man and machine is already reality today. Today you can already control cursors with your brain waves, chips implanted on the cortex can already help to write emails and rats operate a kind of telepathy with computer chips.
There are many questions about these things and there will certainly be some problems with these inventions, but the possibilities that appear on the horizon show us that we are already living in science fiction.Already in summer 2017 it became known that Elon Musk is working on a project to connect computers with human brains, a kind of brain-computer-interface. His intention, however, is to protect humans from the AI. As you may know, Musk is an opponent of artificial intelligence.
The visionary had two years ago officially introduced his company Neuralink Corp and together with Max Hodak, the founder of Transcriptic, he wants to develop technologies to prevent artificial intelligence from dominating humanity.
Here, too, human nerve tracts are to be modified by surgery, and artificial nerve tissue is to help connect the human brain with the computer. That would be a direct interface in the cerebral cortex that works with mini-eletrodes implanted in the brain. The project wants to catapult the human intelligence to the level of a A.I. so that they cannot dominate us one day. Musk expected that the development of this technology could be completed in perhaps a decade and that this interface would then be accessible to everyone.
The research in these directions could definitely be of great medical benefit and help many people and be a huge blessing, but this research also raises ethical questions. I don't even want to know what the military missions of such a technology would be like and what suffering it would entail.
But apart from that, we humans would also be naked in our thoughts, which are our private property, we would like glasses and fully transparent and downright naked in our secrets. We would completely lose our identity and would even be hackable...
