FB Building 8 - “Is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go?”
Still from “Noor - A Brain Opera” with emotions of frustration (red) and interest (yellow)
I knew it would come to this. After premiering “Noor - A Brain Opera” (Is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go?) last year, it was just announced this week former DARPA director and research scientist Regina Dugan (who had also been at Google) has joined FB to develop a non-invasive brain computer interface to decode neural activity related to speech - using, among other things research on the semantic brain.
The semantic brain, picture from Nature
The researchers plan to use optical imaging with quasi ballastic photons to create a narrow beam with a new way of detecting blood oxygen levels.
Quasi-ballistic photons - hmm, look familiar? Like in the red emotions of frustration pictured above? Picture from Facebook
Then also this week Elon Musk announced that in 2021 there will be the first human with an internet link in their head - wrong. How about Neil Harbisson and the world’s first skull transmitted painting? Musk thinks Neuralink, his new company will do it first - sorry, the art world already beat him to the punch.
Musk wants to use TCMS, or transcrainial magnetic communication which I referred to in my 2013 Planet 3D post as ‘vulcan mind meld’. Sure he has fancy Neural Dust, merged with high end mesh electronics but that is because he went out and hired another DARPA alum, Paul Merolla, who happened to work as the lead chip designer at IBM on their DARPA-funded SyNAPSE program. Its like old McDonald’s farm in the brain realm - and a DARPA here, and a DARPA there, here a DARPA, there a DARPA, everywhere a DARPA/IARPA - E I E I O.
MIT Tech Review
They will lay these chips down using biodegradable silk, which at least gives silk worms an new factory to output to. This would require neurosurgery, which is invasive. And its open to being hacked, surveilled, and having implanted malware secretly inserted (its a chip after all).
Noor: A Brain Opera
So is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go?