Mark Zuckerberg hopes Facebook will be able to read your mind

Two giants of the tech world, Facebook and Elon Musk’s latest venture Neuralink, have both announced that they are working on brain-to- computer interfaces.

At Facebook’s recent F8 developers’ conference, Regina Dugan from Facebook’s R& D division Building 8 showed a video of a woman using such an interface to type eight words per minute, and spoke of the company’s ambitions to develop a similar system capable of typing hundreds of words per minute within a few years. Dugan has experience in this area: the technology in the Stanford University video was similar to systems developed at DARPA, the US military research agency, while Dugan was director there.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later enthused about the technology in a Facebook post, saying: “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about five times faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale.”

Meanwhile at Neuralink, work is in progress on a system to help restore communication to brain injury and stroke victims. Musk says they expect to have a product on the market “in about four years”.