What Needs to Change for Mind Machine Interfaces to Become Widespread
Mind-Machine Interfaces are not talked about often. They aren’t an everyday conversation starter, nor do they pop up in tableside chats, but why? I think the reason is that people don’t trust the technology and that it is very diverse… let me explain.
Let’s start small. When you look at a specific lab, or study and watch what they are doing, in many instances it is amazing. From letting monkeys control a third arm to increasing rat’s abilities to remember mazes, it is really fascinating. However, what the public needs to really “adopt” something into their lexicon is a singular application. For the internet, it was the dot-com companies, for cars, the model T. One event or serious of events that were similar enough that they were all grouped together as “the internet” or “motor cars” for example. When the governing body of interest, the public, are able to grasp one of these big ideas, the respective ideas are thrust into the spotlight. Why am I sharing this?
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) are very similar. They are spread out over an enormous amount of applications, but it is so diverse that people don’t see it as one technology. So, in a way this title is misleading. BCIs are widespread in the sense that they are being researched and used in a wide range of areas from sleep studies to deep brain stimulation. However, the real reason is that they are simply too scary to be widespread yet.
What do I mean by scary? If someone were to come into your house tomorrow and ask if you wanted to be able to turn your lights up and down just by thinking it or change the temperature of the house by just thinking, I am cold, you would probably happily sign on the dotted line. However, if that person then explained that you would have to undergo very risky brain surgery and would have to have a wire coming out of your brain, hooked up to a computer, you might start to have second thoughts. The fact is that most BCIs capable of anything actually impressive are too dangerous for people who don’t need the technology to try them out. For BCIs to become widespread it is absolutely necessary that the end to end process becomes safer. This could entail non-invasive BCIs emerging as the most popular form, or it could mean implantation that is as safe and accepted as Lasik eye surgery. There are many researchers who believe that BCIs will never get to a point where they should be used on uninjured patients, as they won’t (at least for a long time) become more effective than our own brain.
Until the technology becomes safer it isn’t feasible for it to be spread throughout the general, healthy population. The good news is that even in the past couple of years BCIs have already become much much safer. If this trend is to continue it may not be out of this world to be interfacing with computers in drastically faster ways… quite soon.
Stay tuned to hear more incredible stories of how these interfaces are changing people’s lives and our perception of the human mind. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect you can reach me here via email admangan2018@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. If you like what you read and want to learn more about this amazing technology, please buy the paperback or ebook version on amazon! Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7RJLYC
