Brain-Computer Interfaces
April 23, 2025 • #When we think about brain-computer interfaces, why do we always jump to the chip-in-the-head? Or the wire dongle with an antenna behind our ear? The Larry Niven “wirehead”?
Maybe it’s just a bandwidth thing.
Aren’t our phones a low-bandwidth version of a BCI? Certainly phones and social media and other modern tech modify our brains in similar ways.
Or perhaps it’s both the high-bandwidth abilities enabling so much more combined with the idea that they’re uncontrollable in some way. A piece of hardware pinging electrical signals inside our heads that we can’t be consciously aware of. We don’t know what they’re doing, and “unplugging” doesn’t give the airgap of leaving your phone at home when going for a walk.
There’s probably also a visceral feeling it gives us of an inhuman piece of inorganic matter being embedded in our heads. And our heads are our “selves”. The brain barrier is a special one to us, even though it’s technically no different than another organ, in terms of its make-up.
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