How Silicon Valley’s singularity fear may help Alzheimer’s

Investment into mind-reading and cyborg technologies will likely benefit those with degenerative brain disorders

Facebook wants to read your mind and Elon Musk hopes to connect your brain to a computer within ten years, aiming to solve everything from Alzheimer’s to avoiding the AI apocalypse.

Such technology may sound unbelievable, but it’s a classic Silicon Valley move, noted Chris Brauer, director of innovation at the Institute of Management at Goldsmiths, University of London. “This is the Silicon Valley methodology,” he said. “It’s proven remarkably successful in other areas, to start with an outlandishly sci-fi possibility, and then throw tonnes of money at it and then go for the easy wins right away.”

Those easy wins will likely mean a burst of investment in developing tech solutions for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and epilepsy. “All of these areas are going to see enormous strides over the next few years because of the investment these guys are making… what they go for is trickle-up innovation,” Brauer said, adding a similar pattern was seen with the human genome project. “They’re going to try to solve some of these problems by doubling or quadrupling the investment and look to see a trickle-up effect.”

That’s good news for people suffering with brain disorders, but it’s not the end goal for the companies.

Former DARPA researcher, and founder of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Regina Dugan has moved to Facebook’s lab known as Building 8. There, she’s leading efforts on a brain-scanning idea to let users type at 100 words per minute via optical imaging, without brain implants, as well as a second project on skin vibrations that you can “hear”. Both will let users share messages silently and interact in AR and VR without fiddly hand gestures.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, eschews concerns about implants, with his firm Neuralink working on tiny implants called neural lace that will act as a brain-computer interface and the first step to turning humans into cyborgs.

The tech will be used with degenerative disorders in the next few years, Musk has said, and on healthy brains within the decade. Rival startup Kernel aims to implant a chip inside the brain, in the shorter term to help train the brain out of neurodegenerative diseases, and in the longer term to augment human intelligence to help us keep up with AI.

For Musk and others, that’s the new goal: helping humans accelerate our intelligence to keep up with AI, lest we be overtaken. That idea is called the singularity, and the concern is that computers will learn at an exponential rate. Those who believe in the singularity believe humanity will never organically match that, so we need augmentation.

“That’s what all of these guys believe is happening, and therefore they see themselves as acting in civic good and in an ethical, progressive manner,” Brauer said. “If we don’t take action now to prepare for this inevitable conclusion, then we won’t be ready when it arrives. If you think it’s an inevitable conclusion, you’d be irresponsible not to invest resources at our disposal to protect our humanity.”