Transumanar

First steps to neural interfacing for consumers

The Economist has a good article on applications of Brain to Computer Interfacing to computer games: “the promises of, respectively, Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky, two young companies based in California, that plan to transport the measurement of brain waves from the medical sphere into the realm of computer games. If all goes well, their first products should be on the market next year. People will then be able to tell a computer what they want it to do just by thinking about it”.

“First applications are most likely to be single-player computer games running on machines such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3. In the longer term, though, he thinks the system will be ideal for controlling avatars (the visual representations of players) in multiplayer virtual worlds such as Second Life”.

Before becoming available to Second Life users, the new neural interfaces might be available to PlayStation 3 owners in Sony’s forthcoming new service, Home, that puts users into a real-time, networked 3D community, where they can interact, join online games, communicate, share content and even build and show off their own personal spaces. Home will be available this fall as a free download from the PlayStation Store..

Home looks impressive: Second Life with the graphic quality of a console videogame. Take a look here and imagine moving in this world and interacting with things by thought. Add fullly imemrsive headset displays… wow!

The first applications of neural interfacing have been in the medical field. See for example the recent breakthroughs of Cyberkinetics, whose technology used in medical pilot projects has permitted severely disabled patients interacting with computers by thought. Now this technology is finding its way to the consumer market. I am not surprised at all to see that the first consumer applications of neural interfacing are developed for the computer gaming industry. In the computer gaming market there is a lot of money and there will be even more money, and game companies are able to attract very bright and creative people everywhere. I am more and more persuaded that other transhumanist holy grails, such as conscious artificial intelligence, will be first developed by the computer gaming industry.

From the Emotiv website: “Our mission is to create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of man-machine interaction, by evolving the interaction between human beings and electronic devices beyond the limits of conscious interface. Emotiv is creating technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind”. From the NeuroSky website: “Brainwaves have been used in medical research and therapy for years. We’re bringing it to the consumer world”.

So we will soon be able to think our way in Home and Second Life. If a computer can read information from our brains, it won’t be long before it can also write information directly to our brains and very fast: two way neural interfaces that will make computer screens and headsets obsolete, a Second Life that goes directly to the brain bypassing the eyes. And when our virtual environments will contain artificial intelligences, perhaps smarter than us, we will be able to communicate with them at the speed of thought. Let’s call things by their name: these first baby steps to neural interfacing for consumers will lead to *the* transhumanist Holy Grail: mind uploading, the transfer of human consciousness out of the brain into much higher performance supports, where we will be able to interact and merge with our AI mind children.

Posted by G.P. on 03/16 at 07:05 AM
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