The US army has been working to develop mind-reading units for years. The intention is to create applied sciences that enable us to assist individuals with mind or nervous system harm, but additionally allow troopers to direct drones and different units by thought alone, as Paul Tullis reported in 2019.
A number of multi-millionaires who made their fortune in tech have launched initiatives to hyperlink human brains to computer systems, whether or not to learn our minds, talk, or supercharge our brainpower. Antonio Regalado spoke to entrepreneur Bryan Johnson in 2017 about his plans to construct a neural prosthetic for human intelligence enhancement. (Since then, Johnson has launched into a quest to maintain his physique as younger as doable.)
We are able to ship jolts of electrical energy to the mind through headbands and caps—units which might be typically thought-about to be noninvasive. However on condition that they’re probing our minds and doubtlessly altering the best way they work, maybe we have to rethink how invasive they are surely, as I wrote in an earlier version of The Checkup.
Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink has acknowledged it has an eventual objective of “making a whole-brain interface able to extra intently connecting organic and synthetic intelligence.” Antonio described how a lot progress the corporate and its rivals have made in a characteristic that ran within the Computing challenge of the journal.
When an individual with an electrode implanted of their mind to deal with epilepsy was accused of assaulting a police officer, regulation enforcement officers requested to see the mind information collected by the system. The information was exonerating; it seems the individual was having a seizure on the time. However mind information may simply as simply be used to incriminate another person, as I wrote in a current version of The Checkup.
From across the internet
How would you are feeling about getting letters out of your physician that had been written by an AI? A pilot examine confirmed that “it’s doable to generate clinic letters with a excessive general correctness and humanness rating with ChatGPT.” (The Lancet Digital Well being)
When Meredith Broussard discovered that her hospital had used AI to assist diagnose her breast most cancers, she explored how the know-how fares in opposition to human medical doctors. Not nice, it turned out. (Wired)
A federal decide in Texas is being requested in a lawsuit to direct the US Meals and Drug Administration to rescind its approval of mifepristone, one in every of two medicine utilized in remedy abortions. A ruling in opposition to the FDA may diminish the authority of the group and “be catastrophic for public well being.” (The Washington Publish)
The US Environmental Safety Company has proposed regulation that might restrict the degrees of six “perpetually chemical compounds” in ingesting water. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are artificial chemical compounds which were used to make merchandise because the Nineteen Fifties. They break down extraordinarily slowly and have been discovered within the setting, and within the blood of individuals and animals, all over the world. We nonetheless don’t understand how dangerous they’re. (EPA)
Would you pay hundreds of {dollars} to have your jaw damaged and transformed to resemble that of Batman? The surgical procedure represents yet one more disturbing beauty development. (GQ)
