A few months ago, Elon Musk announced his plan to build some fascinating mind-reading implants. This year, in July, he confirmed that his start-up “Neuralink” has designed and developed a wireless implantable device that can connect to the human’s mind (Neuralink, 2019).

Musk’s motivation to create this device is that he is convinced that there is an “existential threat” posed by artificial intelligence putting human beings at risk of being surpassed by this technology.

According to Neuralink’s statements, they have already been able to test some prototypes which get implanted into the human brain in order to detect neuron activity. Technology advances have allowed Neuralink to create “threads” of the size of a hair, allowing a very precise injection at specific targeted brain parts. These so-called “threads” connect to brain cells and amplify the signal created by them, allowing subjects to, for example, control a computer with their brains. The signals created by these “threads” can also be downloaded and processed by a “software ecosystem” (Neuralink, 2019) allowing the software to translate these connections into actions that need to be performed on a certain device. Musk confirmed that some experiments have already been performed on rats and they are planning on the next phase of testing on monkeys with the aim of getting an approval from the FDA in 2020.

It is quite logical to think of this device as a mind manipulation device and dig into conspiracy theories but from my perspective, this is a new level of customer segmentation. This tool will become extremely handy for companies to know exactly what the customers want, and what they are willing to pay for it. Currently, companies gather data of things we searched for, and can easily push notification through their online channels to sell us a product. These mind-reading implants are a game-changer. They could potentially allow companies to know what the consumer is thinking about and therefore customizing their offers. Sure that big data already allows this is some scale, but there is so much more we keep in our minds that and we don’t search on google which will definitely open many doors.

References:

Neuralink.com. (2019). Neuralink. [online] Available at: https://www.neuralink.com [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].

Wong, J. (2019). Elon Musk unveils plan to build mind-reading implants: ‘The monkey is out of the bag’. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/17/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-implants-mind-reading-artificial-intelligence [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].

Boston Dynamics, a company founded as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has announced this week the official launch of their robot dog called Spot. This company has been working on robotic designs ever since 1992 focusing on the needs of the U.S. army, facilitating quadruped robot designs to enable realistic human simulations.

These dog looking bots will probably see their first steps at construction sites since they are able to carry heavy items, open doors, walk on rough terrain and operate under extreme weather conditions (-20 to +45 degrees celsius). They would come in very handy in battlefields as well, being used as searching devices, without putting human lives at risk or even accompanying military resources while carrying equipment. During a presentation in April, Boston Dynamics has also shown how multiple Spots can work together to move trucks or cooperate to get objects from one room over to a different one thanks to the platform designed which integrates hardware with software that can be edited by Spot’s owners. Each user can write code lines to get Spot to do several different tasks as seen on many of the online videos that got popular in the past few months – Spot has been seen organizing dishes in the washing machine, drifting through obstacles, bring the owner a cold beer and even twerking, making some of these videos viral even outside of the tech community. Although Spot is only in its initial phase, these kinds of robots could serve society through patrolling communities, recording and monitoring human behavior and identifying potentially risky situations through an initial process of “teaching” spot human behavior and their plausible outcomes.

Nevertheless, since this platform allows each user to work on the code to have Spot behave differently and perform different tasks, the sky is really the limit of how Spot will interact with the real world. And this leads to the question about who in the end is responsible for the actions of this robot? How can Boston Dynamics monitor the instructions each user gives to Spot? What is a good model of platform governance for this kind of business? In the end, a situation like the one shown on Black Mirror’s episode “Metalhead” were these robots are configured to hunt down humans does not seem to be unfeasible… While regulators and technology companies figure out how to manage the possible flaws in their innovations, society will have to do their homework and rethink on how we should use these robots for the good of us all.

Wakefield, J. (2019). Robot dog Spot on sale for ‘price of a car’. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49823945.

Ellis, C. (2019). Boston Dynamics’ uncanny robot ‘dog’ Spot is now strutting into workplaces. [online] TechRadar. Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/boston-dynamics-uncanny-robot-dog-spot-is-now-strutting-into-workplaces.