[jruohonen]

> Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting.

I am skeptical. AI, Neuralink, or whatever might infer better on many things, sure, but these certainly will not be able to infer what non-dogmatic people think about, say, philosophy or politics already because humans have always a capability to change their minds, while AI is terribly bad at reorienting itself.

[ben_w]

Wires on synapses, however, are very good at sensing exactly what's up.

They're too expensive right now, and I really hope Neuralink turns out to be as much of a business disaster as buying Twitter, because if it's as much of a world-changer as Tesla or SpaceX…

…well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort.

[jruohonen]

> ... well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort.

I am all for dystopia; already with VR/XR/etc. you can probably infer a lot, especially once they start (or have done already?) scanning retina movements and such. But still: stimuli is a one thing and mind-reading (thought control?) is another.

[ben_w]

BCI is literal mind-reading: when the thought goes ping, it shows up on the wire.

The current limitation is that the number of sense-wires we can put on a BCI implant is a factor of ~2^30 smaller than the number of synapses in a human brain.