In 2017 Facebook amazed everyone by announcing that they wanted to create a headband to allow people to write with their thoughts at the speed of 100 words per minute.
Two years later the Menlo Park company announces that it has passed the first phase of the research and is about to activate the first tests on volunteers.
The progress of Marl Zuckerberg's company is described in great detail in a scientific paper from the University of San Francisco. In the study, researchers describe “voice coders” capable of determining what a person means by reading their brain signals.
The implications and implications of this research are remarkable and disturbing for at least two reasons. First, because they can show how close a machine can read the mind. Second, because they can show how close a technology giant is to collecting data directly from users' brains.
This is why ethics experts are alarmed (in two months they became active first those of economics for Libra and now these: of course Facebook creates headaches). It is already necessary, and quickly, to establish rules on how brain data is collected, stored and used.
In the report published today in the journal Nature Communications, the Californian team led by neuroscientist Edward Chang used very thin electrodes, called ECoG, which are placed directly on the volunteers' brains.
It's amazing, I'm really telling such a thing. And this thing is really happening.
The results
Users were able to write with their thoughts and scientists were able to read in real time the questions that three subjects read in mind from a questionnaire, and they also listened to the answers they thought.
One of the questions was: “From 0 to 10, how anxious are you?” The system has already collected questions and answers from 0 to 10 at a rate much, much higher than chance.
Another question was about their favorite musical instrument: volunteers could choose between “piano” and “violin”. The test was carried out on volunteers who were undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy and agreed to take advantage of this to test the technology.
Facebook declares that it is fully funding the University of California San Francisco project, and that its primary objective is to use the device to communicate with people who have lost the use of speech.
Possible applications
The final steps of the technology? Not imaginable. Sticking to "harmless" applications, I am thinking of devices such as headphones capable of controlling music with our thoughts, or interaction mechanisms in virtual reality environments.
“Being able to codify even a few commands such as 'home', 'select' or 'delete' would allow us to completely revolutionize VR experiences. Not to mention the augmented reality ones,” they write on the official Facebook blog.
In any case, the research stage must be quite advanced, given that in Menlo Park they say they are ready to show a working and wearable prototype by this December.
My famous doubts
Research into brain-computer connectivity is accelerating. At the moment the "hare" is Elon Musk's startup, that one Neuralink which just on July 6 presented its frontier technology.
Reactions are divided between disbelief and concern. The issue of writing with thought still seems a bit like something from a film. There are some hesitations about opening a window in your brain (now this is literally the means) to let a company in. You don't mess around with privacy, it's no coincidence that Facebook has just received a record fine of 5 billion for not having properly informed users about the use of their data.
“The brain is a safe place for free thought, imagination and dissent,” says Nita Farahany, neuroethics at Duke University. “We are approaching the fall of the last wall, the extreme frontier, in the absence of protections”.
Big Brother
It is already unclear who can access the data from these tests and the thoughts of the volunteers. How many researchers from the University of San Francisco and the men from Facebook? It's unclear how much money Zuckerberg's company gave. It is not clear how involved it is in the tests, nor how knowledgeable the volunteers are. University spokesman Nicholas Weiler declined to provide a copy of the research contract. And he equally refused the request for a copy of the informed consent he asked the volunteers to sign. He simply said that this form included a list of potential funders of the research, including Facebook.
We all know that a brain reader can make us control electronic devices in an extraordinary way, but it is also a way to control us. A company that can read our thoughts knows everything about us. Starting from our reaction to the contents we read, even if we don't put any likes.
Privacy!
“Brain data is rich in information and is absolutely sensitive data. This is a very serious problem and the privacy policies developed by Facebook are clearly insufficient,” says Marcellus Ienca. Important words, the researcher at ETH Zurich studies the various possibilities of brain-computer interfaces.
Facebook ensures that it will take all necessary security measures to protect this data. “We take the issue of privacy very seriously,” says Mark Chevillet, Facebook manager of this research project on mind reading.
