Facebook Brain Interface Is The Creepiest Way To Slide Into Your Mental DMs

This week at F8, Facebook's development conference, there were some pretty impressive announcements from the company that wants to become as utilitarian to your lives as oxygen or gravity. Facebook has always kind of been on the edge of going full Lawnmower Man, drunk with power, believing its world is the only world and we belong in it. Well, now it seems Facebook is working on a few things that will merge your world with its world and after you do that, there is no turning back.

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the conference by laying out the 10-year vision for the social media giant, focusing on augmented reality, virtual reality and what appeared to be some sort of cheesy looking virtual playground space you can visit with your Nintendo Miis.

Then there was a bunch of actual development stuff that I didn't understand so I zoned out, watched some Stephen Universe then zoned back in when Facebook started talking about getting into our brains.

Facebook wants to get all up in your brain. Like, all up in there. Sticking your hand in a bowl of Jell-O in there. All. Up. In. There.

Facebook executive and former DARPA director Regina Dugan announced (at around the 1:20:00 mark of the video) that Facebook will hopefully be able to create a non-invasive interface that will decode signals from the brain's speech center and unscramble them to create typed text -- at the speed of 100 words per minute. Right now, with invasive technology, neuroscientists have been able to enable a paralyzed man to type eight words per minute with his brain.

From the Verge's write-up:

Dugan stresses that it’s not about invading your thoughts — an important disclaimer, given the public's anxiety over privacy violations from social networks as large as Facebook. Rather, "this is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain," reads the company's official announcement. "Think of it like this: You take many photos and choose to share only some of them. Similarly, you have many thoughts and choose to share only some of them."

I couldn't lolz harder. I'm no neuroscientist, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night so I can say that Dugan is either too smart for the rest of us or she's way too optimistic about filtering through thoughts. As I type this there are tons of other thoughts running through my brain. Yes, as Dugan says, I am choosing which ones to share. Some I'm not typing, so perhaps that's how Facebook will be able to make the distinction, but I am thinking them. Yet, we tend to let our minds wander.

Dugan is suggesting that Facebook will be able to separate those thoughts from each other and only deliver the ones that were meant to be spoken -- since if you are typing why would you also speak the words?

Now, to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt here, I'd like to believe that it's at least possible that there could be a device created that would receive direct input from our neural net and translate that into actionable interactions. For instance, we could think to our phones and send texts without worrying about our fat thumbs mistyping and the awkwardness of auto-correct. Or we could play games on the Xbox without lifting a finger. Or we could receive input and the world could be an augmented reality playground. Though you can get that effect with LSD without letting a social network into your brain.

Or Facebook could squeeze us like an overpriced bag of juice as it sucks every morsel of neural data from our brains and in return, we get augmented reality auto-play video ads implanted in our frontal lobes.

There's another side to this coin that I just thought of so I'm typing it. If this interface is non-invasive, what would stop Facebook, or any other company, from being able to use it on us without consent? How would consent be given? Would our brains sync with typing devices like Bluetooth headphones sync with our phone? Remember, you don't pay for Facebook so you will always be the product.

I don't believe for a second that Facebook wouldn't mine brain data to serve ads, even in a theoretical sense. So it's easy to leap to the conclusion that some of our most perverse and hypothetically criminal thoughts could trigger some kind of action. A social network having the ability of telepathy just seems like a bad idea.

What if Facebook puts augmented reality Stories into our brains so that we could visualize the lives of our friends as if they are happening right in front of us?

Frankly, this is all a bit too Minority Report for me. I'd rather there be actual psychic precogs than Facebook playing judge, jury and executioner. I might be getting ahead of myself, assuming Facebook would abuse something as theoretically simple as translating what we're thinking of typing into words, but this seems to have some stronger moral and ethical considerations. Which I'll let you debate in the comments.

So, would you let Facebook into your brain?

Credit: Curtis Silver

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