[tines]

Not a direct comment on the article, and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here, but aren't neural interfaces like Neuralink and other things the absolute perfection of means for societal control? No doubt they are unimaginably useful, but they're also a dictatorship's wet dream. Is it not only a matter of time before they're installed in every baby's brain by government mandate in authoritarian regimes?

[bobthepanda]

I feel like this way overstates what we know how to do with neural interfaces.

[_Microft]

That, or getting perfect feedback on how people reacted to ads?

[jayd16]

Control how? Like inducing pain remotely?

[ElFitz]

That could be a very good way of torturing dissidents without leaving any physical marks. Beyond anything physical harm could accomplish.

Or controlling crowds of protesters by inducing pain.

Taking it up a notch, reading emotional states could help figure out the general mood of the population, as well as specific subsets or individuals, and either figure out how to make potential dissenters happy (à la Brave New World), or get rid of unsatisfied members of society (1984).

Finally, I think (not sure) I remember Musk talking about one day storing and retrieving memories via such devices. This would allow to pretty much rewrite individual and collective history. Most definitely way beyond our current technology’s capabilities, but way better than whatever Big Brother could ever dream of.

[markdown]

You won't need to force them on people... people will beg for them. Their use by the privileged few will in short time massively widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Humans in capitalist societies will be split into two "species", plain vanilla lame brains like you and me, and the augmented super-geniuses who've augmented their brains with the sum total of all recorded human knowledge.