Interaction with our devices has been constantly changing. From joysticks and buttons for video games, or the keyboard and mouse with your computer, Amazon Alexa for voice commands or the Apple pencil for your iPad. There have been constant innovations to make interacting with our digital lives convenient and seamless. But Facebook is already working on a greater future, one where we don’t really have to say or do anything.
Mind-reading technology…sort of.
Facebook recently announced that they will acquire a neural interface startup named CTRL-Labs. The technology they have been working on is embedded in a wristband. As your brain wants to perform an action, such as a mouse click, the neurons contained in your spinal cord send an electrical signal to the muscles in your hand with the command do maneuver in a certain way. The wristband is able to decode these electrical signals and consequently convert them into a digital signal that is outputted to another device (Bostworth, 2019).
Facebook is betting on this technology being suitable for its virtual and augmented reality experiences. Head of Virtual Reality at Facebook, Andrew Bosworth, commented that this technology will allow humans to think beyond controllers to interact with machines (Bostworth, 2019). These efforts should significantly enhance the feeling of ‘presence’ which is a term coined to estimate how effective a virtual reality experience is in convincing one that they are present in another world.
This technology brings us a step closer to the sci-fi future where we can have internal dialogues and see technology bring these to life. Yet there are some ethical concerns around privacy as neuroscientists such as Patrick Kaifosh, co-founder of CTRL-Labs, continue to make these concepts a reality (Statt, 2019). Should companies be able to understand our thoughts? What about our unconscious thoughts? What will the effects be of having access to such data?
Concerns for these things have real life effects. As we see the shift to data-driven companies, the potential access to what we are thinking opens a lot of possible doors for targeted advertising and even manipulation as the technology is able to ‘look inside’ to some degree. As always, the technology is fascinating, but controlling our social feeds tends to already be problematic, access to brain activity is at a whole other level. Besides that, health and socialization impacts are enhanced as we can increasingly do more with less and less movement. What does this mean when our working lives can also migrate into the virtual world?
With far greater plans in store, we are seeing the first steps being taken so we can interact with an entire world, basically by thinking. The types of interactions this technology will create are definitely going to be profound, however we are weary of the direction we are moving into, and whether or not people are willing to give technology such access.
Sources
Statt, N. (2019, September 24). Facebook acquires neural interface startup CTRL-Labs for its mind-reading wristband. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20881032/facebook-ctrl-labs-acquisition-neural-interface-armband-ar-vr-deal.
Bosworth, A. (2019, September 24). Retrieved from https://ben-evans.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b98e2de85f03865f1d38de74f&id=2f219512e6&e=01b8264757
Hey Caleb, that was a very interesting read. It scares me how much data Facebook tries to collect from individuals. I wonder what the future implications will be of Facebook’s power, if you keep in mind that they already partly influenced the US election. Furthermore, if Facebook is already doing it what do you think about Google?
Anyway, maybe it will lead to prosperity for most people but at what cost? Because privacy is slowly fading away. There has to be a point in time where people will have to choose privacy over comfort, but that’s my 2 cents.