What’s the most pressing issue surrounding the development of neural interfaces?
When we contemplate the role of neural interfaces in our future lives, a lot of people will think of applications like telepathy: sending messages directly from my brain to yours. But first we need to have a deep discussion around privacy as a human right. Our data, which we give away free, has value. Companies like Facebook and Google mine that data to create economic value for themselves. With brain interfaces, you’d be giving away access to your most valuable data of all: your thoughts, your thought processes, your creativity. That is the last frontier of human privacy, and if we walk into the future with our current disposition toward privacy, I think we’re headed for trouble.
What role should regulators play?
I don’t think our government is going to be able to pass a law with the necessary complexity to make privacy a human right. And that’s why I go to the root of the problem. We need to focus on improving ourselves. We need to recognize the dignity and value of humans. We need to start figuring out how to improve humans at the rate we’re improving our digital tools so we can evolve together. I don’t think that’s going to be solved by the government stepping in and trying to save us. This is an economic incentive and a cultural challenge we have to tackle collectively.
What prompted you to want to develop a mass-market device?
I want to rapidly evolve and improve my cognition. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to increase my IQ; rather, I want to see beyond what I already know. The brain is an unbelievably powerful tool of intelligence, but the problem with our brains is they deceive us into thinking that we are rational, logical and consistent and that we remember things correctly. Nothing could be further from the truth. I still don’t see all my biases. But what if you could create neural interfaces that would act as a mirror of the mind? People could see how they thought. That’s the first step in acknowledging that we really are a very flawed form of intelligence—as awesome as we are.