TECH REPORT
Could Gabe Newell’s mind control dreams become reality?
Gabe Newell, chief plumber at Valve and part-time Half-Life 3 tease, held forth on New Zealand TV show 1 News earlier this year on the subject of braincomputer interfaces.
It turns out he’s all in favor of them, and Valve is working on software to interpret the signals from our brains, using hardware described as being ‘like a modified VR helmet’.
From our experience, that means it will be largely sampling from around the eye area, but that’s probably where the ‘modified’ part comes in. He’s been working with OpenBCI, a company taking an open-source approach to BCIs, and told 1 News, “If you’re a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake.” Wise words, indeed.
Newell has been hanging out in New Zealand to shelter from the pandemic, and BCIs seem to have become his pet project while he’s out there. Newell’s not necessarily talking about connecting you directly to your games, however, but reading your mind-state to improve the immersion of the interactive experience you’re playing. If a BCI can measure whether you’re excited, frightened, or elated, it can better tailor the experience to push those feelings further.
Newell took things another step, however, speculating about being able to write feelings back to the brain. “You’re used to experiencing the world through eyes,” Newell said, “but eyes were created by this low-cost bidder that didn’t care about failure rates and RMAs, and if it got broken there was no way to repair anything effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not at all reflective of consumer preferences.
“So the visual experience, the visual fidelity we’ll be able to create—the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual fidelity. The real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you’ll be able to create in people’s brains. Where it gets weird is when who you are becomes editable through a BCI. One of the early applications I expect we’ll see is improved sleep—sleep will become an app that you run where you say ‘Oh I need this much sleep, I need this much REM.’”
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Which sounds rather terrifying, but it is not out of the realms of possibility according to Professor Reinhold Scherer, who studies and builds BSIs at the University of Essex, “Neurostimulation can induce or evoke feelings, and also sleep,” he explains. “The question is how targeted the stimulation must be to create a specific effect or perception. There are several invasive and non-invasive approaches to modulate cortical activity so, in principle, it is ‘easy’ to stimulate the brain.”
What’s much harder, though, is stimulating, or reading, it accurately—at least without drilling holes in someone’s skull. Elon Musk may brag about his monkey that can potentially play Pong through a BCI, but there’s more Black & Decker than black magic involved there. “It’s not an unhappy monkey,” Musk said during a talk on Clubhouse, some sort of new social media app we don’t really understand and can’t be bothered to look into. “You can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight dark mohawk.” Which makes it OK, we guess.
As the monkey certainly discovered, there’s hair, skin, a chunk of bone, some membranes and a layer of fluid between the surface of your brain and any electrodes that want to read its activity. The bits of your brain underneath are not always the same size or in the same place from person to person either, making calibration of a BCI a tricky process. “If you play a lot of piano, then probably your hand-eye coordination area will be larger than someone who plays [football], who will have more coordination with his feet,” says Scherer. “When you’re measuring from the outside, it’s like being a reporter at a [football] stadium. You have a mic and a helicopter, and you’re sent 5000m above the stadium and are asked to record a conversation between two people.”
Put like that, we can see the attraction of lowering your mic further into the stadium by drilling through its osseous roof. In a 2016 Pew Research survey of US adults, however, only 34% were either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ enthusiastic about having chips implanted into their skulls, whereas a nice 69% were either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ worried about the idea. The cyborgs of the future may be a rare breed.
Musk defines much of the population as cyborgs already, however, because we have a ‘tertiary digital layer’ provided by phones and PCs. “With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d say probably at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.”
Back at Essex, where they have a strict no-drills policy, the impetus is on improving the sensitivity of electroencephalograph headsets, and training users to do things with them. Things such as playing World of Warcraft, where it took about 20 hours for players to train their brains to emit the right signals. Luckily, though, “Once you establish the specific pattern, it is rather robust,” says Scherer. “I trained with the students, and we went on to do a different project that interfaced to Google Earth so you could move around and play music from different countries.” Having trained in Cerebro- World-of-Warcraft, it took much less time to start using Mental Google Earth.
There’s a sense here of some very rich men speculating about the future of BCIs, and academics shaking their heads and raising signs that say “I think you’ll find it’s not as easy as that”. Some limited BCIs are already with us, and whatever the pace of development, they’ll keep coming until we’re finally offered the opportunity to have a chip embedded in our motor cortex. Who amongst us would turn that down?
MUSK DEFINES MUCH OF THE POPULATION AS CYBORGS ALREADY