Big Tech Wants Direct Access to Our Brains

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/magazine/neurotech-neuralink-rights-regulations.html
https://archive.ph/mgZRE

As neural implant technology and A.I. advance at breakneck speeds, do we need a new set of rights to protect our most intimate data - our minds?

On a recent afternoon in the minimalist headquarters of the M.I.T. Media Lab, the research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna handed me a pair of thick gray eyeglasses to try on. They looked almost ordinary aside from the three silver strips on their interior, each one outfitted with an array of electrical sensors. She placed a small robotic soccer ball on the table before us and suggested that I do some "basic mental calculus." I started running through multiples of 17 in my head. After a few seconds, the soccer ball lit up and spun around. I seemed to have made it move with the sheer force of my mind, though I had not willed it in any sense. My brain activity was connected to a foreign object. "Focus, focus," Kosmyna said. The ball swirled around again. "Nice," she said. "You will get better." Kosmyna, who is also a visiting research scientist at Google, designed the glasses herself. They are, in fact, a simple brain-computer interface, or B.C.I., a conduit between mind and machine. As my mind went from 17 to 34 to 51, electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG) sensors picked up heightened electrical activity in my eyes and brain. The ball had been programmed to light up and rotate whenever my level of neural "effort" reached a certain threshold. When my attention waned, the soccer ball stood still.

For now, the glasses are solely for research purposes. At M.I.T., Kosmyna has used them to help patients with A.L.S. (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) communicate with caregivers - but she said she receives multiple purchase requests a week. So far she has declined them. She's too aware that they could easily be misused.

Neural data can offer unparalleled insight into the workings of the human mind. B.C.I.s are already frighteningly powerful: Using artificial intelligence, scientists have used B.C.I.s to decode "imagined speech," constructing words and sentences from neural data; to recreate mental images (a process known as brain-to-image decoding); and to trace emotions and energy levels. B.C.I.s have allowed people with locked-in syndrome, who cannot move or speak, to communicate with their families and caregivers and even play video games. Scientists have experimented with using neural data from fMRI imaging and EEG signals to detect sexual orientation, political ideology and deception, to name just a few examples.

Advances in optogenetics, a scientific technique that uses light to stimulate or suppress individual, genetically modified neurons, could allow scientists to "write" the brain as well, potentially altering human understanding and behavior. Optogenetic implants are already able to partially restore vision to patients with genetic eye disorders; lab experiments have shown that the same technique can be used to implant false memories in mammal brains, as well as to silence existing recollections and to recover lost ones.

Neuralink, Elon Musk's neural technology company, has so far implanted 12 people with its rechargeable devices. "You are your brain, and your experiences are these neurons firing," Musk said at a Neuralink presentation in June. "We don't know what consciousness is, but with Neuralink and the progress that the company is making, we'll begin to understand a lot more."

Musk's company aims to eventually connect the neural networks inside our brains to artificially intelligent ones on the outside, creating a two-way path between mind and machine. Neuroethicists have criticized the company for ethical violations in animal experiments, for a lack of transparency and for moving too quickly to introduce the technology to human subjects, allegations the company dismisses. "In some sense, we're really extending the fundamental substrate of the brain," a Neuralink engineer said in the presentation. "For the first time we are able to do this in a mass market product."

The neurotechnology industry already generates billions of dollars of revenue annually. It is expected to double or triple in size over the next decade. Today, B.C.I.s range from neural implants to wearable devices like headbands, caps and glasses that are freely available for purchase online, where they are marketed as tools for meditation, focus and stress relief. Sam Altman founded his own B.C.I. start-up, Merge Labs, this year, as part of his effort to bring about the day when humans will "merge" with machines. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are investors in Synchron, a Neuralink competitor.

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