What?
A brain implant that makes your thoughts and feelings directly accessible to someone else.
Where seen?
In television series and science fiction book Made for Love tech entrepreneur Byron Gogol is developing a chip with which you can connect the brains of two people directly.
How close are we?
“Now you and your loved one can finally really get together. Every thought, every emotion, shared. Your brains completely connected. A network of two.’ This is how the ad in which the brain chip of tech mogul Byron begins Made for Love is announced. And if that gives you the shivers, that is exactly the intention of the book by author Alissa Nutting and the science fiction series derived from it, which can be seen in the Netherlands from March 8 on HBO Max.
It is a high concept, as it is called in fictional circles: a plot hung on one easily communicable idea. A believable idea, even. Because the fact that tech billionaires could choose the brain as the next destination for their futuristic ventures has long been a fact in the real world. There Elon Musk, known from Tesla and space company SpaceX, is working on Neuralink, a company that wants to develop brain chips.
The target? Neuralink is a bit vague about that. What is certain is that the company wants to connect people with machines. For example, to tap brain patterns caused by firing neurons and translate them into text or movement via computers. So you can help people who have difficulty with speech, or whose own limbs no longer want to move due to paralysis, or so the advertising slogan goes.
But just as Musk uses SpaceX to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station, but at the same time dreams of a science-fiction-like future with his company cranking up human colonization of planet Mars, at Neuralink he has a megalomaniac or visionary end, depending on who you ask. for eyes.
Musk is concerned that the rise of artificial intelligence is reducing us to an inferior species, and hopes with Neuralink to upgrade our brains into a faster and better information processing machine. Think of The Matrix-like developments where you no longer have to learn Chinese, but only have to install a new language module.
Or yes, that too, just like in Made for Love: so that you can exchange thoughts with other people. Not to further attract your romantic bond, by the way, but, for example, so that you never have to meet again, make a telephone call, or use other forms of traditional human information transfer.
And although that ultimate dream currently seems roughly as unfeasible as permanently colonizing our neighboring planet, working brain-computer connections do exist. In the past, they helped improve the memory of epilepsy patients, let people with paralysis control robotic arms that could even feel again, and ensured that those who could no longer speak could suddenly communicate again.
Who’s (satiric) dystopian vision of the future? Made for Love can breathe a sigh of relief: such applications, while revolutionary, are downright simple compared to reading a complex brain pattern like a human emotion or thought.