If you could read my mind (and that’s a really big if ) . . .
We have a long way to go before realizing Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a telepathic future
Internet satellites, virtual reality, even real working AI: it all pales in comparison to the future that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has in mind.
In aQ & A session with site users on Tuesday, the 31-year-old said he envisions a world where people — presumably Facebook users — don’t need these types of communication intermediaries. Instead, they’ll communicate brain to brain, using telepathy.
“One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” Zuckerberg wrote in response to a question about what’s next for Facebook.
“You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it, too.”
But hold up: is that even possible? And is that something anyone actually wants?
To understand how Zuckerberg’s vision would work, you have to understand how the brain works.
In a nutshell, your nervous system is composed of cells called neurons, which communicate with each other using chemical signals called neurotransmitters. When a neuron receives one of these signals, it generates a tiny electrical spike. And because millions of these signals are required for everything your brain does — clicking your mouse, reading this text, remembering breakfast — your brain is sending off pinpricks of electrical energy all the time.
Scientists can measure and map this electrical activity using existing technologies such as EEG and fMRI machines.
Cognitive scientists have partially reconstructed clips of movies their subjects were watching, by measuring their brainwaves
And once they have enough maps, they can begin to read them — a point that neuroscientists and researchers are just now approaching.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a team of cognitive scientists have managed to reconstruct clips of movies their subjects were watching, based solely on measurements of their brainwaves. “You could not see the close-up details,” wrote the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku after watching one of the “movies,” “(but) you could clearly identify the kind of object you were seeing.”
This is all well and good, of course, but the technology Zuckerberg envisions is a two-way street. How could we not only “read” a mind but also send a pattern of electrical signals into someone else’s head?
There are invasive options, e.g., implanting some kind of device in your brain. In 2013, scientists at Duke University implanted two lab rats with microelectrode arrays and taught one of the rats to press one of two levers. Afterwards, the second rat, which had not been trained, also seemed to know which lever to push: it had received neural signals from the first rat via the implant.
Recently, researchers have also had some luck with a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. When you put on a TMS headset, it generates a magnetic field over your scalp, which can be used to activate neural pathways. Last fall, test subjects in India were able to use TMS to “think” the words “hola” and “ciao” to test subjects in France; the process was painfully slow, however, and the words weren’t sent in their entirety — they had to be encoded as binary digits, uploaded to the Internet, sent, downloaded and then decoded as flashes of light.
This is, while promising, a really clunky system. It’s unsophisticated (no one has yet “sent” an actual emotion or idea), inexact (the rat still chose the wrong lever sometimes), and slower than virtually every other form of modern communication, save per- haps snail mail. These experiments also required access to some very pricey equipment. Even if you wanted to, you could not try this at home.
“‘Telepathy’ technology remains so crude that it’s unlikely to have any practical impact,” wrote Mark Harris at the MIT Technology Review.
That said, these are only the very earliest days of telepathy research, and new developments are in the works. Among other things, researchers are looking into handheld, cellphone-sized MRI machines that would make it easier and cheaper to capture your own brain activity. And the U.S. army is developing a telepathy helmet, almost like a virtual reality headset, that would condense and simplify all this electrical signal-sending — although that, experts say, is still decades away.
Is Facebook currently developing any technology in this vein? A spokesperson for the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though Facebook’s research division — the arm of the company that studies machine learning, artificial intelligence and virtual reality — has not published any work on brain-to-brain communication and does not appear to employ any researchers in the field.
But even if Facebook isn’t leading the charge toward telepathy — a wor- rying prospect in itself, given the site’s past indiscretions regarding research consent and user privacy — the field poses many ethical challenges, if only in theory. How would you control who “spoke” to you? What’s to stop someone from sending you disturbing or abusive thoughts, or otherwise “hacking” your brain? And if these signals are moderated by some third-party technology, like a headset or helmet, will they be recorded somehow and saved, and by whom and for what purpose? Could they be hijacked by advertisers like the ones in Minority Report, who tailor interactive billboards to private thoughts? (“John Anderson!” one calls out. “You could use a Guinness right about now!”)
There are, as of yet, no answers to these questions: an academic paper on the ethics of brain-to-brain technology, published in 2014, warned that there is neither legislation nor a formal academic protocol for this type of research. (The writers predicted that it could eventually provoke “public uproar.”)
For now, though, such concerns are many breakthroughs and advances away. Zuckerberg himself may be getting up in years by the time we’re communicating telepathically.