Silicon Valley Wants to Put a Chip in Your Brain
An Anonymous Coward writes:
A battle is looming not just over privacy, but the future of the human species.
There will come a time, in the not-so-distant future, when you decide to stick a computer chip in your brain.
At least, that's what D. Scott Phoenix told the audience at TED 2026 in Vancouver last month.
"Someone you work with will get it first. And you'll hold out for a while, the way you did with the smartphone. But eventually, you won't," said Phoenix, dressed in all black with a tiny mic attached to his ear. "The advantages of integration will be hard to compete with."
Put bluntly, in his view, "We're on the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI."
This perspective, as outlandish as it may sound, is commonly held in Silicon Valley. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mused way back in 2017 that "a merge is probably our best-case scenario" for survival after the emergence of superhuman AI. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is a vocal advocate of "transhumanism."
There is good reason to be skeptical about an imminent evolution for the species. The technology to perform this kind of merger - to radically change what it really means to be human - remains in its earliest stages. Even setting aside the uncertain future of AI, the so-called implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) is still quite nascent.
[...] Ownership of extensive neural data can be used to do anything from serve extremely targeted ads to surveil or manipulate consumers' behavior. The tech billionaires who believe in the possibility of true human-AI integration may also see a chance to make some more money in the meantime.
"If data is the oil of the 21st century," former UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay wrote in November in the Financial Times, "then 'brain' data is the crude oil. We need to guard it more jealously."
Resistance to private sector accumulation of neural data is growing quickly, with red states and blue states alike passing legislation to protect the privacy of neural information.
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