Some More News - Some More News: Brain Chips!

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Hi. On today's episode, we're looking at Elon Musk's Neuralink, and more generally, brain tech – how it works, its potential to help those with disabilities, how corporations would almost certainly use it to spy on us, and why we definitely don't want Musk in charge of it. Plus, Star Trek orgasms. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_tnH5UkMhZctHC5Qd2q1rvIJSX2jK9CsNUmWUMh-3R0/edit?usp=sharing Check out our MERCH STORE: https://shop.somemorenews.com   SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA   Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/  

I don't think it's lice, but definitely feels like there's something up here. Well, here's hoping. Anyway, hello there, my little newseroos. I got the old itch head, which is fitting poetic even on account of hey, here's some news brain chips are a thing now. More to the point, Neuralink is a thing, whether we want it to be or not. Yes, indeed, Elon Musk finally jammed his musky old thing

into someone's noggin. Patient One, a quadriplegic dude, became able to control a computer cursor with his mind, letting him play games and communicate with his friends and loved ones and his enemies. Hell, screw his friends. He can even mind tweet at strangers. Here he is after playing Civ 6 all night,

which is basically the only way to interact with that damn game. It is like history, heroin. Of course, you may have heard that the patient's unit, unfortunately, became largely unusable when 85% of the threads implanted in his brain pulled out of their proper positions. Honestly, considering that we're talking

about musk technology, this went better than most of us assumed. Anyway, hoping to solve the problem, the FDA just approved the implantation of a second version that sits even deeper down in your brain flesh near the tasty goo center. Of course, in the end, it's not about how deeply the control threads

are implanted into your cerebellum, but rather all the monkeys that we butchered along the way. Hit it, Bobby! ["The New World of the Dead"] ["The New World of the Dead"] How does a neural link? Bobby's what I call my tongue, which I use for giving news. Good job, Bobby! It got the message.

So, Elon Musk, the guy who screwed up Twitter, high-speed travel, electric cars, and everyone's collective goodwill for him wants to put a chip in our brains. Bold of me to say, but that sounds risky. But of course, like all the inventions I just mentioned, Musk isn't the only guy doing brain tech, nor is he the actual mind coming up with Neuralink.

He pays other, smarter people for that. And of course, for those with serious disabilities, this technology has the potential to enable things that are kind of course, for those with serious disabilities, this technology has the potential to enable things that are kind of hard to be cynical about. Some researchers building devices similar to Neuralynx are securing big wins. I mean, sure, playing Civ with your brain is sweet,

but look at some of the other stuff they've been doing lately. That accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. But thanks to a neural implant, he's been able to bypass his spinal cord injury and send signals from his brain down to his right arm. A motorbike accident in his late 20's left him paralyzed from the hips down changing his life forever. But now Oscar miss back on his feet thanks to groundbreaking

digital implants in his brain and his spine. thanks to groundbreaking digital implants in his brain and his spine. For 18 years, Ann Johnson hasn't said one word until now. Great to see you are dead. We decode Ann's brain signals using new AI algorithms, and they're essential to being able to do this work. Jesus tier miracles, folks. It's like a thousand dogs recognizing a thousand soldiers

who just got home from a thousand wars. So many terrible, terrible wars. War is hell, folks. So yeah, it's immediately evident that tech like the Neuralink is in theory helpful for people with disabilities. But of course the people pushing this are promising something far beyond that.

The idea here is of a body internet that will eliminate smartphones. Or as Musk himself describes it, this will be a way to stimulate your brain's pleasure center so that we may presumably live out that one scene in Lawnmower Man where you turn into a sex dragonfly. You know how since we all first saw that scene as kids, we wanted to do VR dragonfly sex, right? That's like, that know how, since we all first saw that scene as kids,

we wanted to do VR dragonfly sex, right? That's like, that's a universal experience we all had, right? That's what we don't look away. Am I right? But again, this is all mainly coming from the promises of Elon Musk, a man who once said he was making a robot and then revealed a guy in a suit. So this is all to say that it's hard to take anything that guy says seriously.

Also all that Nazi stuff. Remember the Nazi stuff? I feel like we've touched on the Nazi stuff before. So let's actually look at what this technology can do, try our best to separate it from the Nazi guy and weigh the pros and cons. And we will start by asking the obvious, how does this technology even work?

Well, being a newsman and not a neuroscientist, I actually, I have no idea. Fortunately, there are plenty of experts out there and here's how they put it. Gah! Oh, okay, sorry. That's an in memoriam package from the Neuralink lab. Who stuck that in there?

You goofs! Ah, look at all those goofs. Okay, well I guess I'm actually gonna have to Google how- Grrr! Okay. You know what? I'm suddenly realizing I do know how Neuralink works. That's weird.

That's weird. Probably fine though. So your brain is full of cells, right? It's like a prison that way. And that's beautiful. There's poetry to that if you're dumb. Anyway, basically, very basically, your brain thinks by sending messages between these cells,

a process that's powered by chemicals and little bits of electricity. Systems called brain computer interfaces or BCIs work by interpreting those sparks of electricity. Systems called brain computer interfaces or BCIs work by interpreting those sparks of electricity and translating them into impulses fed into a computer that's set up to understand that sort of thing. These systems come in lots of different shapes and sizes, but the one Neuralink built consists of a quarter size

circular microchip with thread-like electrodes that are placed a few millimeters under the surface of the parts of your brain that control movement. It decodes your thoughts, interprets them, then transmits them to your digital gadgets so that you can write emails without moving or call your mom while holding two ice cream cones or troll Reddit while you lock eyes with your partner

and pretend to listen to their hogwash. The first version of Neuralink's BCI system is called telepathy. Even though what it's doing technically isn't telepathy, it's telekinesis, but whatever, words are all make believe anyway. Endurably so. So Neuralink still has a long way to go.

Getting telepathy installed into a human person or two is just the first step. The company has a lot more to prove before its implant is cleared for widespread use. And really there's no guarantee it will ever be approved. While the process to get medical devices approved in the US does have fewer steps than the one for drugs, brain implants like the one made by Neuralink

are something called class three. That means they have to go through a longer, more rigorous approval process than other, less invasive gadgets before they can go up for sale. And that's just for use in people with serious medical conditions. Popping into the brains crafters

to have your subcranial computer set up by the Geek Squad, like Elon envisions, is much, much farther off. I'm sure he'll handle having to deal with the regulations and safety measures to avoid harming people. Well, so Neuralink's first study is called Prime. To my disappointment, it's not short for Optimus Prime, but instead for precise,

robotically implanted brain computer interface. As you may have noticed, it should technically be called Pribkey, but everyone plays fast and loose with acronyms these days, which I see as proof of civilization's decline or CivDec. If you want to enroll in prime, you gotta be over 22, have a caretaker and have been quadriplegic for at least a year without regaining any control

of your arms and legs. Oh, and you can't have any other brain implants, which is probably smart, I guess, if you suck. So after the first 18 months, Neuralink will conduct what it calls in its brochure, BCI research sessions, which apparently involve lots of video games and computerized chess,

if their Twitter videos are any indication. The prime study will take six years to complete, after which time we will hopefully have some hard data on how everything went. Then Neuralink will likely have to run another study on telepathy involving a much bigger group of disabled people. If those results are good,

it might finally get commercial approval from the FDA, meaning people with whatever disabilities it's ultimately approved to treat could get access to it through their doctor. So this is a legitimately promising technology that could help a lot of people eventually. Judging from Elon's history of trends and timelines and predictions, this will probably be more like 50 years, but here's hoping it's shorter. So that's how it works, but maybe you're wondering how Elon Musk, the kryptonite for success,

got his weird little hands on this. How did this very serious technology that was already being studied and was not his idea get hijacked by a dude yes-anding the Man Show B team about how people will cut off the tops of their heads to achieve full symbiosis? The fear is that eventually you're gonna have to cut the whole top of someone's head off and put a new top with a whole bunch of wires if you want to get, you know, the real turbocharged

version, the P100D of brain stimulation. I mean, ultimately, if you want to go with full AI symbiosis, you'll probably want to do something like that. Boy, he is just saying words there, isn't he? Like, it really seems like he's just sort of feeling like he has to agree with whatever Joe just said. Because he's desperate to be liked? Oh yes, certainly, exactly. I was going to say that.

In fact, if you really want the maximum experience, you'll have to cut off the top of your head, put giant tubes directly to your brain. Exactly, Joe Rogan, exactly. Anyway, terrible musk impression, I'm sorry, doesn't matter, but guy. So, back in 2016, Elon started dropping hints in interviews that if we wanted to stop the apparently inevitable rise of evil artificial intelligence, we would need to become part robot ourselves. To that end, he proposed that there should be brain implants that allow us to integrate AI into our own brains,

which kind of feels like outsmarting werewolves by injecting yourself with werewolf blood before they can bite you. Or how Musk puts it. Like AI is getting better and better. So now let's assume it's sort of like a benign AI scenario. Even in a benign scenario, we're kind of left behind. You know, we're not along for the ride.

We're just too dumb. Right. So how do you go along for the ride? Yeah, so you can't beat him, join him. Oh, cool. So I guess we know which character in the matrix Elon would be. Anyway, the next year,

the Wall Street Journal outed Neuralink's existence. And so Elon made the company official. Fast forward to 2021, the first time the public got to see Neuralink's tech in action. The company put out a video of a monkey playing the 1970s video game Pong with its mine, while sucking down a banana milkshake.

Impressive. Very cute. It was smart to show off the one that lived. But hey, you know, to make a Pong omelet, you gotta break a few primates. The path to get medical devices and drugs to patients nearly always involves unpleasant and sometimes fatal experiments on animals. But there's a set of regulations called the Animal Welfare Act that are designed to minimize how much they suffer.

The laws require that companies conducting animal research create committees that review and sign off on their experiments. And such committees are supposed to have policies in place that prevent conflicts. That is, members who have a direct financial interest in the outcome of an experiment shouldn't be part of the review or approval process. In other words, you couldn't elect the president of Pong or a banana milkshake lobbyist.

You know, big shake. Anyway, a year and a half after that Monkey Mind Pong video came out, Reuters reported that the U. the US Department of Agriculture was investigating Neuralink for violating the Animal Welfare Act by performing unnecessary experiments on pigs, sheep, monkeys, and other animals. I'm guessing krill.

We'll spare you the gory details, but basically, Elon pressured his staff to move fast and break things so the company could get the data it needed to prove its tech was safe for humans as quickly as possible. Moving fast, breaking things and safety. Like two peas in a pod plus a third thing, death. Death is the third thing. Elon told employees on multiple occasions to work like they had a bomb strapped

to their heads and even threatened to shut the whole operation down if they didn't speed things up. You know, because exploding skulls is exactly the image you want to associate with your brain tech. So the badly designed experiments and botched surgeries documented by the feds aren't exactly surprising, nor was it a shock when it came out

that Neuralink's Animal Welfare Advisory Board was at one point made up almost entirely of paid Neuralink employees. Elon famously hates safety regulations, which, dare I say, seems like a bad quality for a guy obsessed with firing rockets into space and transporting people and doing brain surgery. But finally, last May, after getting their shit together just enough to overcome previous FDA rejections and put that whole animal cruelty thing to bed,

Neuralink got the green light to start testing its device in humans. It placed its first implant in January. And as you saw, the patient's still going strong. For the time being, Neuralink's only aim is to solve brain and spine problems. As Elon putsink's only aim is to solve brain and spine problems.

As Elon puts it, A goal is to solve important spine and brain problems with a seamlessly implanted device. So you want to have a device that you can basically put in your head and feel and look totally normal, but it solves some important problem in your brain or spine. Get a company spokesperson, Elon, I am begging you. So the telepathy implant is specifically designed to give people with severe physical disabilities a way to control computers and phones with their thoughts.

The next step will be what Elon has called a vision chip, which will supposedly be ready in a few years. That one will give people with vision impairments their sight back, including folks who were born blind. So buy some tissues and brace yourself for all of those YouTube videos. You're gonna be touched as fuck. Your humanity will be reaffirmed as shit.

In a 2020 interview with New York Times journalist Kara Swisher, Elon laid out other potential uses for Neuralink, like curing Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. In fact, he seems to think that it could fix pretty much everything that goes wrong in the brain. Of course, you have to balance that against the fact that he thinks wanting to expand human rights

is a brain disease. So tell us more, you demagogue, you, you towering powerhouse of charisma. But all of these, all of your senses, your sight, hearing, feeling, pain, these are all electrical signals sent by neurons to your brain. And if you can correct these signals, you can solve everything from memory loss, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis, depression, insomnia, extreme pain, seizures, anxiety, addiction, strokes, brain damage. These can be all be solved with an implantable neural link. Anyone else would do, any other spokesperson. So at face value, all of this actually sounds fairly awesome

and like it could genuinely do a lot of good when and if it works. And even more incredible, actual smart people agree. Yeah, we believe that this is a revolution in the science and the technology and can have a lot of implications for the paralysis community. So this is actually a technology we need

as opposed to like a single lane tunnel that you slowly drive only one type of car through or another video first social media company. In short, out of all the bullshit Elon Musk is attempting, this might be his best shot at actually contributing something positive to society. Just as long as he doesn't like literally try to contribute and mandate that all the brain chips make fart sounds or something.

But he probably will, because like every Silicon Valley capitalist, Musk isn't stopping with medical applications. Remember, Elon thinks that eventually everyone will want a chip implanted in their skulls to keep AI from supplanting humanity. That's how Neuralink came about to begin with. Elon started freaking out about the AI apocalypse and landed on cranium implants as a galaxy brain solution. Then he realized he'd have to start

with something more practical, likely after discovering that the FDA would consider neither TikTok functionality nor impending annihilation by Skynet, valid reasons to put watch batteries inside people's heads. But no doubt, the moment he is allowed to, Elon is going to completely abandon the practical and helpful applications and go straight to the very frivolous and useless ones. And to watch him talk about it with our greatest scientific mind Joe Rogan, he's really open to some extremely stupid suggestions.

If you taught a child from first grade on how to use some new universal language, I mean essentially like a Rosetta Stone and something that's done that interprets your thoughts and you can convey your thoughts with no room for interpretation, with clear, very clear, where you know what a person's saying and you can tell them what you're saying and there's no need for noises, no need for mouth noises, no need for these sort of accepted ways that we've sort of evolved to make sounds

that we all agree agree through our cultural dictionary and we agree or we could bypass all that. Yeah, we can still do it for fundamental reasons. Right. Boy, yeah, you know how since the dawn of time we've all wished we didn't have to use mouth sounds? You know how everything needs to be about fucking productivity and maximum efficiency, even our casual chats?

Although to be fair to them, I would love it if they were having this conversation via brain chip instead of into microphones. I mean, it makes sense that these two duds want to transition from talking to thinking because neither of them can speak good like me do. But you can see how Musk doesn't quite even know what he has here.

And it's just sort of sponging up these random ideas vomited at him by Rogan. It's a common pattern where Musk starts in the ballpark of a good idea, like electric cars, but then exaggerates and over-hypes, completely fumbling the design and appeal of them. Probably because he's an egotistical alien who doesn't like interacting with people.

So like, of course, he's envisioned a future where we blow these meat popsicles and hop into shiny new robot bodies. And while that's a long ways away, there are, of course, still a lot of problems that brain tech presents. Both Neuralink's short and long-term commercial ambitions are giving some big-brained brain folks the, this is the technical term, heebie jeebies over the gazillion ethical issues that will undoubtedly come up if the company gets anywhere close to achieving its goals.

Mind reading, mind control, targeted ads that respond to the pattern of your thoughts. The possibilities are endlessly scary and come with bottomless soup, salad, and head chips, brain sticks, head chips, what am I trying to say? Trying to say? I think my lice are malfunctioning. We better go take a break.

And when we come back, we will investigate some of these dangers. Plus talk about all the companies making amazing leaps in BCI technology that probably aren't run by a racist jerk. Well, shoot. Oh, hello. I didn't see you there because I'm blind with rage, but you know what gives me a fleeting sense of calm

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Things have been super weird around here lately. What were we talking about? Oh, Neuralink, how it works, how it came to be, et cetera. But should we be talking about Neuralink? I mean, after all, it's unfortunate Elon's so good at demanding all of our attention because there are a lot more reputable companies who've already been doing work in this direction

in a much more responsible and sometimes even more impressive manner. I mean, look at this guy. He's been playing Final Fantasy XIV with his brain implants since 2019. As an aside, I love how many of these chips are used to play video games. I do very much relate to people gaining a type of mobility

and instantly using it to work on their Minecraft worlds. Pretty psyched for that tricky trials update or brainy blocks, whatever the brain chip update will be called. Anyway, it's one of Elon's, let's call it a superpower, where he gloms onto tech that already exists, throws a bunch of stupid money at it, and then gets everyone to associate it with his name.

But some of Neuralink's competitors are already way ahead of them, at least in terms of getting brain implants into people. One company, BlackRock Neurotech, not the BlackRock you're thinking of, uses tech that's been around since 2004. That's when the village came out, dog. Now, if we're splitting hairs,

like they do before they bore the hole in your skull, BlackRock's most tested technology isn't technically a full BCI system since it requires additional hardware beyond the brain implant to decode the signals it's recording. That said, it's still the most tested device of its kind made by a corporation.

One patient has had theirs for more than eight years. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are betting their brain boring bucks on a startup called Synchron, which put its BCI into its first human patient back in 2022 and has since gotten them into nine more. Unlike Neuralink's tech, implanting Synchron's device

doesn't even require full-blown brain surgery. It communicates with the parts of the brain that control movement via electrodes woven through the jugular vein in the neck. As a bonus, any vampires who come at you are in for a shock, literally. But seriously, vampires aren't a front to Jesus Christ. Put a trap in your neck veins.

Another company worth mentioning, Precision Neuroscience, co-founded by one time Neuralink co-creator Benjamin Rapoport, they plan to make a brain implant that would treat people with depression. So Elon isn't the first guy to envision a cyborg brain or make brain tech, nor is his version even the furthest along. He's a parasite, you see, on society. However, to be fair and balanced toward this Nazi parasite,

researchers have pointed out that having him involved does mean that brain implants for people with disabilities will likely happen a lot sooner. That's because unlike the many geniuses trying to make this stuff a reality, Elon has the frustrating ability to get lots of other dumb rich people to pour money into his ideas.

In fact, that's like the one good thing we can say about Musk. He has money and attracts money for some reason, not just to his own companies, but other possibly better companies also making brain tech for people with disabilities. A rising tide lifts all turds? Something good, a thing that floats that's also good.

Turds with money tied to them. Hope, you idiot, hope floats. So whether it be Neuralink or some other company, brain chips are coming specifically for people with disabilities. Every one of the companies we just mentioned swears their technology is meant for people with some kind of disability,

and that's who their human guinea pigs are so far. All the people enrolled in clinical trials for brain putters have had some kind of disabling condition, be it paralysis or severe depression, the paralysis of the feelings. The question that no one is really asking, however, is if this is all good, do we need this? I know that question sounds silly,

but it turns out that some disabled folks are skeptical as to whether all the money and effort put into developing this technology is really going to make life better for them. Let me explain, or rather, let me explain what other people have already explained. When it comes to tech for the disabled, the focus tends to be on exciting,

flashy medical moonshots that completely beat the disease. But these kinds of total cures are extremely hard to develop and therefore unlikely to be available outside of well-funded research settings anytime soon. And for some disabled people, being completely able-bodied again

isn't necessarily the first priority. As Glenn Hayes, who runs Public Affairs for the Spinal Injuries Association, told the BBC, "'If I could have anything back, it wouldn't be the ability to walk. It would be putting more money into a way of removing nerve pain, for example,

or ways to improve bowel, bladder, and sexual function.'" Bowel, bladder, and sexual function? Bowel, bladder, and sexual function? Hey man, what's even the difference? Am I right? Am I right? Stop looking away, okay? You look at me. Am I right?

Okay, see, it turns out that there's already a long history of inventing tech, that's big quotes, for disabled people, tech that's big quotes for disabled people, that never actually gets to help disabled people. Case in point, the US Department of Defense is by far the biggest spender on brain computer interface technology, investing hundreds of millions of dollars

over the last decade into making brain chips that they promise are definitely not for a secret cyborg super soldier program. Yet fewer than half of the veterans who could use a regular old prosthetic limb actually wind up getting one, according to a study of the VA healthcare system from 2014. This is in part a consequence of insurance providers

not being willing to pay for them in states that don't have prosthetic parity laws or required insurance coverage for prosthetic limbs. Hell, even people who are literally part of developing and testing advanced prosthetics may not get to take home their own, at least not for a long time. Take this Luke arm, a robotic arm developed by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

As author Annie Jacobson recounts in her book, The Pentagon's Brain, the press loved the Luke arm and it got a ton of positive media and internet attention. But once the cameras were off, the arms would just go back to a laboratory and patients would put their regular prosthetics back on. My goodness, is that fucking two-faced. It's like putting a black student on the cover

of your college brochure, then expelling them. One Iraq war veteran who participated in the project told Jacobson that he felt DARPA had an ulterior motive. Amputees like him were convenient human lab rats for tech that could ultimately be used to build those cyborg soldiers the DOD wouldn't even dream of developing and shipping to Israel to shore up U.S. financial interests in the Middle East. They're not gonna do that. They wouldn't dream. They can't have dreams. They're just an organization.

Years later, those high-tech arms are finally up for sale, but cost as much as $150,000 a piece. Given how miserly insurance companies are when it comes to shelling out for regular prosthetics, robot arms are probably out of the question for your GI or average Joe. Even the Joes used to test and promote the arm. They cost an arm and a leg.

I'm here all week, folks. You're here forever, title monkey, until you act up and we ship you to the Neuralink labs. But yeah, basically any time you see a video where a company gives a wounded vet some advanced prosthetic, it's likely they are just giving it to them for as long as it takes to get that good PR. It's both fucked up and, not at all surprising, when you think about it. That said, assuming

we can get to a place where these interfaces are safe and reliable, they'll likely get less expensive over time the same way all gadgets and or gizmos eventually do. At that point, it really will be a win for those who want them for medical reasons, because they'll, you know, hopefully actually be able to afford them. And that brings us back to the potential consumer applications for BCIs that'll come into play down the line,

and more likely than not, be shaped by capitalist forces. As a side note, as of now, most people without severe disabilities say they wouldn't want one anyway, according to a Pew Research Survey published in 2022. We the people also largely think the widespread use of them for cognitive function like Elon envisions would be a bad idea for society.

Another bad idea for society, Elon. But yeah, see, going back to the question of if we need this or if this is good, we already just pointed out that the immediate and practical need, i.e. helping people with disabilities, is questionable. When you think about this on the larger, more sci-fi scale, well, it starts sounding even worse.

After all, there are plenty of obvious ways this could all go very wrong. Like if brain implants that merge human intelligence with AI become accessible to the wealthy before they do the rest of us, rendering the slow-brained masses as serfs to godlike posthumans with decked out climate change survival bunkers,

while our cheaper, worse brain chips short out every five weeks until we update the software at the water bank so we can get more ads beamed into our dreams. Or the classic Minority Report scenario, except in this one, you get arrested for even harboring thoughts of crime.

You know, George Orwell had a word for that? Periodal larceny. Of course, we live in a boring dystopia, not Night City, so instead of befriending Idris Elba, it's more likely that our brain phones will be most abused by corporations that want to use our brain data to sell you shit. For example, up until a few years ago,

Facebook was working on a Neuralink competitor. They ultimately scrapped that plan to focus on building a mind-controlled wrist device that you use in augmented reality, but they haven't completely ruled out eventually building a mind-controlled wrist device that you use in augmented reality, but they haven't completely ruled out eventually building a BCI. And Facebook aside, there's another, much more obvious reason why we can predict

that companies would use brain tech to control your mind for capitalist purposes. They're already kind of doing that. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit accusing Amazon of tricking its customers. They say Amazon deceived millions of consumers into signing up for its prime subscription service. No word from Amazon yet about that suit. What's different about this mostly seems to be this dark patterns claim that the FTC is making about Amazon.

That they make it way too easy to accidentally sign up and way too hard to cancel on purpose. Right, so there's this thing called dark patterns, also called deceptive patterns or dark design. These are design choices that push you toward making decisions that serve the company's interests. Even when they know, you know what they're up to. I'm talking about things like forcing you

to go through tons of steps to delete your account or subscriptions that renew automatically or pre-selecting a more expensive premium service so you'll overlook the cheaper, more basic one. Even Starbucks is doing it or so a lawsuit alleges. On the Starbucks app, you can add money into your Starbucks card, but the app shows you a minimum renewal of $15,

even though the actual minimum is 10. That doesn't sound like much, but it's designed to add up to the tune of 900 million over five years. They also limit your ability to tip on the app, presumably because that's money that could go to them instead of their employees. So I guess it's nice to know

that Starbucks is subtly screwing everyone and not just their employees. So I guess it's nice to know that Starbucks is suddenly screwing everyone and not just their customers, our militantly pansexual Starbucks coffee. Of course, dark patterns are all over video games too. Much like how casinos use psychological tricks to keep you placing bets and pulling levers, some games, especially mobile games, harness the power of dark patterns to squeeze as much money out of you

or your kid holding your credit card as possible. There is at least one example where a game maker has even gone too far and paid the price for it. Epic Games shelled out $245 million to settle FTC accusations over its use of dark patterns that tricked players into buying stuff. Some of the dark patterns in that case

were really egregious, like users were charged for something when they were trying to wake the game up from sleep mode, which is obviously bullshit. But the even more insidious dark patterns are what make games truly addictive. They're also the best examples of a game of mind controlling you.

These include behavioral psychology hacks like variable rewards, where the payouts you get for achievements are random and unpredictable. Like a rat looking at a salt block that's got a little cocaine mixed in. You have no idea when exactly the next treat is coming, but God damn it, you know it's in there.

This is all to say that if companies are already trying to control our minds without brain chips, imagine what they'll do when we have them, or don't imagine. Just watch that episode of Star Trek where they all get addicted to Google glasses that make you cum. ["Star Trek Theme"]

Dumb. Oh. What was that? He'll reward. Ashley Judd is in that episode. Sadly, it's a Wesley one. Also lots of cum sounds. And speaking of the famously successful Google Glass,

if we want to know what companies would and could do with brain tech, we can probably look at wearable tech we already have. For starters, smartwatches and fitness trackers aren't considered medical devices by US regulators. So unless the data they record is shared directly with your healthcare provider, it isn't considered protected health information

under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. That means that in states without explicit protections for this kind of consumer data, companies can legally sell it to data brokers the same way they do all the other personal information they're collecting on you. So long as their intention to do so

is written into their privacy policies. And it is! All the major companies that make and sell wearable tech, like the Oura Ring, say unequivocally that they don't sell your data to advertisers. They do, however, share it with third party service providers that help them with things like sales and marketing.

That vague language has made some privacy advocates wary, and it doesn't always fly in places that take this kind of thing more seriously. Like Europe, where there are currently three separate lawsuits against Fitbit over the company's data handling practices. But back here in the US, well, we don't take this stuff as seriously. We're the humiliation nation, baby.

In fact, the US doesn't have any blanket laws that protect the brain data collected by Neurotech. And of course, after the break, we will talk about just that, as well as some of the applications for brain tech that are perhaps even more insidious than just selling you crap or making you jizz real good like in that Star Trek. Stay tuned for non-jizz! Hello to my many hams! John Ham, the Hamburglar, Dr. Ham, Little Ham, Secret Ham, Spam, Hamlet.

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That's weird. The ads were the exact products I was just thinking I needed in the exact order in which I thought of them. Isn't that so weird? That's so normal. I meant to say, isn't that so normal? And I said, so normal instead normal, normal, warmbo, weird, weird, there it is, norm blow.

So before the break, we masterfully journeyed you through the history and questionable applications of brain tech. We pointed out also masterfully that the current technology we have is often used to control and spy on us. So naturally this new brain technology will likely do the same, possibly worse.

But at this point, you might be thinking, so what? I just won't buy any of this stuff and kill anyone wearing it. Then I'll have nothing to worry about. Okay, well, violent. But also the thing is, depending on who your employer is, you might not have a choice. Well, thanks to this productivity paranoia,

the number of employers using worker surveillance has drastically increased. According to the Wall Street Journal, two thirds of medium to large companies now do this. Right, capitalism. Sup. So imagine for starters that your workplace offers an employee wellness program

that includes something like this muse of stress detecting headband as part of your benefits. Maybe as a fun way of offsetting the anxiety that comes with not getting paid enough to ever, ever afford a house. This might seem like a good faith gesture, except that the device is coming from your employer and not your healthcare provider or an insurance company.

So any data it collects isn't protected by HIPAA. While health data collected by insurance companies is considered protected health information, the data collected by wearable tech that you get as part of an employee wellness program is not. What are the implications of that? Right now, maybe not a whole lot. Most current wearable devices don't give that much data.

That Muse headband is mostly just a fancy heart rate monitor that plays Zen music. But taken to its darkest extreme, there's a possible future where mind-linked technology could actually decode your thoughts, something that researchers are actively working on. So someday you could get fired because you had a passing thought about organizing a union

or about how your boss is a micromanaging pompous dickbag who's probably surveilling your brain. Maybe not you, but your grandchild, I guess, assuming there's still water then, which, you know. So to be clear, the devices we have right now cannot read your mind, and they may never be able to. At best, they can pick up on the electrical activity in your brain and use it to make an educated guess about things like how exhausted or angry you are. Kind of like a more accurate mood ring, or a less accurate plumb bob. But despite the big question mark around accuracy, some businesses are already giving this stuff a try. Back in 2018, the South China Morning Post reported that the Chinese government was mining data directly from the workers' brains on an giving this stuff a try. Back in 2018, the South China Morning Post reported

that the Chinese government was mining data directly from the workers' brains on an industrial scale. Train operators, factory workers, and employees at state-owned companies were apparently being forced to wear helmets and caps outfitted with sensors that picked up their brain waves and used AI to interpret how they were feeling. A source who spoke to the paper said China was also using the tech

in military operations and on medical patients, apparently to monitor their emotions and prevent violent incidents. You know, like the kind of violence that might break out after you insist that someone strap on their government-mandated mind reading helmets, stuff like that. And the helmets are definitely doing something. An official at a state run power company said that using the tech made them an extra $315 million

in profits over three years. Creepy, how? Are they selling the runoff psychic pain like the Monsters Inc company? And of course, to be F and B to the M, it's worth noting that besides a bunch of other articles quoting what was written in the post, no one has independently verified whether the Chinese government is really using this technology on workers en masse. Still, if they are, they're not the first.

Take the brain tech startup Emotiv. Besides using neuroscience to answer very obvious questions like what perfume a customer likes, or if an interactive presentation is less boring than a PowerPoint, Emotiv makes brainwave sensing earbuds that it claims can monitor employees' stress and attention levels. A guy who runs a commercial real estate firm

told one reporter he started offering his clients Emotiv's earbuds so their companies could quote, run short-term experiments to track workers' responses to new collaboration tools and various work settings. For example, employers could compare the productivity of in-office and remote workers. To be fair, the CEO of Emotiv did tell the reporter working on the story that the dystopian potential

of this technology is not lost on us. So that's cool. It's cool that they know that it's bad. See, you think that's better, but it's actually worse when you noodle it. These Dilbert-esque office brain monitoring technologies are the predictable evolution of bossware, an irritating buzzword for worker surveillance tech that does things like record your keystrokes

and track your mouse movements. The idea that employees are cogs in a machine that must be washed at all times has been around in some form since at least the early 1900s, when all ore miners were required to have a spy donkey. That's true, except the donkey part. That was the opposite of true.

It's a thing I made up. It's a lie, sorry, okay. But now that AI is in the mix, a future that involves brain tech will inevitably tip the labor power balance even more in favor of employers. Oh, we should do landlords next. How can we better serve you, landlords?

He wants to jam little microchips into our eyeballs so you can see what we're seeing at all times and ding our safety deposits whenever we spill a drink? You fucks! That being said to those fucks, there are some scenarios where the benefits of brain tech might be worth giving up some of your privacy, even in the workplace.

Take this fatigue monitoring solution called a smart cap. It's basically a baseball cap that checks your brain activity for signs that you're getting tired using the same type of technology that the Muse headband does. Smart caps are meant to be worn by industrial workers performing dangerous jobs that require a lot of attention, like operating heavy machinery or Autobot wrangling. In 2021, when the device was acquired

by a mining company called Wenco, it said that the tech was already being used by more than 5,000 miners, truckers, and other workers. And while brain tech may not be quite as good as some companies claim when it comes to deciphering your mood, it is apparently more accurate at less complex tasks like detecting fatigue, which clearly I have.

Less complex tasks like detecting fatigue. But beyond legitimate safety applications, the risk benefit trade-off for most types of neuro tech in the workplace is less clear. Especially if your employer's interpretation of your brain activity gets used to punish, disenfranchise or disorganize you. It doesn't need to be in a loud 1984 way either.

Let's say HR dictates that you all return to the office permanently because of a perceived lapse in engagement when people work from home or take health insurance. If the Affordable Care Act were ever repealed, insurance companies could use data from wearable health gadgets to jack up rates or even deny coverage. From a regulatory standpoint,

there's currently no reason why data from mind tracking tech couldn't be included in those equations, and some employers would welcome it. After all, they're already working with insurance companies to cut their health care costs by crunching employee data, identifying the costliest workers and nudging them to get fit. A risky move if you're trying to prevent violent incidents. My goodness. Sure, I understand. to get fit, a risky move if you're trying to prevent violent incidents. My goodness, sure, I understand, like from a cold dickwad perspective, why a company might torture their own employees for profit,

but it takes a unique type of corporate turd to also rat out employees for insurance companies. That's like if the facehugger alien impregnated your chest and then conducted a tax audit. In space, no one can hear you file your 1080 ES. So yeah, this is all to say that in terms of aiding people with disabilities, brain tech is generally good, assuming it's actually accessible.

Wearable devices are also generally good if used to monitor very certain jobs. Like police body cameras are technically a wearable device used to spy on employees. And those are good, if they're kept on and the footage is released. And in theory, it's good, or at least not very bad, to have a commercial brain ship available for people who want to play GTA with their mind or do dragonfly sex. I'm not not into future crap.

And whenever we do a video on smartphones or the metaverse, I always feel a little bad for yucking all these Star Trek comes. And in a vacuum, the idea of augmenting your brain isn't necessarily bad. But unlike other tech, it seems that most people aren't into brain chips. Most people hear the words brain and chips and then Elon and then Musk

and absolutely nope out of that business. And I think at least one of the reasons why most people don't want to put a smart device in their skull is because they're more than familiar with how well all the other smart devices in their life work, which is to say, poorly. Like have you ever had a smart TV that you actually enjoyed? Or does that perhaps make it worse and confusing?

Everything from gaming consoles to fucking juicers are getting smart upgrades that we don't need. Every bit of software is now bafflingly subscription based. Every facet of our lives is jam packed with ads and fees, social media and targeted ads and constant data mining. And one of the poster children for that disrupt everything useless tech philosophy is Elon Musk, the guy who has attached his name

to the concept of brain chips. So yeah, in a vacuum, a brain computer would be neat, but we're not in a vacuum. Sound is traveling, and we all know what would happen if companies had a VIP pass to our gray matter. It would be the exact same corporate orgy as everything else. And that's all thanks to a government

that has seemingly zero interest in or ability to regulate new technology. Because presently, the only templates for regulating consumer brain tech are the existing laws around personal information and biometric data. Biometric data, which encompasses all physical characteristics,

definitely includes brain data, but there's still not much precedent for companies to go off when writing their privacy policies. There are no comprehensive federal laws that govern how non-medical businesses are supposed to handle personal data, even the sensitive biometric kind. What we've got instead is a patchwork of laws that pertain to specific industries like HIPAA

for healthcare and the Graham Leach Blyley Act for finance or COPPA for protecting kids. There is a law that gives the FTC the ability to go after companies that don't uphold their own privacy policies. But that's basically the same as letting a criminal write the laws and only charging them with a crime if they break their own thieves code. But enough about our founding fathers.

Fortunately, there has been progress at the state level in terms of regulating what companies can do with your personal data. 18 states have passed laws that describe consumer rights and business obligations around data privacy, and another nine have active bills making their way through the legislative process. In general, the trend is toward being restrictive

around what companies can do with so-called sensitive data, which by some interpretations would include biometric info like the bleeps and bloops from your brain. There's also a glimmer of hope, which floats, that for once humanity may have actually learned from your brain. There's also a glimmer of hope, which floats, that for once humanity may have actually learned from its mistakes. Neuro-rights advocates like lawyer Nita Farahani and researcher Rafael Uste have written books

and started foundations that aim to push the conversation about brain tech ethics forward, arguing that the implications of neuro-tech are so sweeping that human rights laws need to be reinterpreted to consciously include it. Some states and even entire countries seem to be heeding those warnings, even going so far as to take legal action

to prevent companies from abusing brain data the way they have other types of personal data. Chile amended its constitution in 2021 to add a clause that protects citizens' brain activity. And that law has already been put to the test, if only to demonstrate its power. The former Senator who created the bill used it to order the neurotech startup

we mentioned earlier, Emotiv, to erase his brain data after using one of the company's headsets. The company has since had to stop selling its products in Chile entirely until it can come into compliance with the new regulations. So they were decidedly not protecting citizens' brain activity. Other Latin American countries are coming up

with their own laws too. Mexico has two different neuro-privacy bills in the works that would add the same kind of language Chile uses into its own constitution. Brazil is considering a constitutional amendment that would do similar things, plus make it so that users of brain tech have the protected right to know

what kinds of AI algorithms are being applied to theirs. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Argentina all have bills related to brain data in the works. And so do a handful of states in the US. The Colorado House recently signed in a bill that would explicitly give neural data the same level of protection as other forms of sensitive data. And while Minnesota doesn't have its own comprehensive consumer data privacy law yet,

legislators there are working on a standalone bill that outlines a right to mental integrity and its afforded protection from neurotechnological interventions of the mind. California is reportedly working on rolling out a version of its own too. So eat it, Professor X, get out of our minds. You get the heck out of there. We don't even need Magneto's helmet.

We have laws in some places. Now, this is all really important progress, but if we're gonna use the old tip of the iceberg analogy, current privacy laws around brain data are like a Supreme Court justice chipping one measly martinis worth off of the ice we can see. There's so much else to consider,

including things we didn't even really get to discuss, like the ethical implications of using data from brain tech to exonerate or implicate criminals, or the remote but non-zero possibility of brain hacking, whatever that would even look like. Here's an artist's rendering from the psychic dolphin documentary Johnny Mnemonic. And so while it's good that some politicians are doing something, we're of course at the mercy of elderly politicians to regulate our tech. And here is when I show you that clip that I always show you when I talk about this. Mr. Choo, does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network?

Only if the user turns on the Wi-Fi. I'm sorry, I may not understand the question. So if I have TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home Wi-Fi network, does TikTok access that network? It will have to access the network to get connections to the Internet, if that's the question. Yes. Remember the olds, the olds in charge of our lives? Well, minus the recently deceased Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, who dumbfumously brought a snowball to the Senate to talk about how climate change was a hoax. So this is where I say, just like I said in our video on smartphones, that we really need some kind of EPA for technology. You know how we have an EPA, at least for now?

It was founded in the early 1970s in response to our realization that a lot of the industrial progress we made after World War II was in fact rapidly killing us. From an environmental standpoint, the 1960s felt like one long crisis. Commercial pesticides poisoned our water supply. There was an offshore rig explosion in California that killed thousands of birds

and soaked the coastline in oil and not in a good way. And then a bunch of chemicals burst into flames on a river outside of Cleveland, which had apparently happened at least a dozen times before without anyone noticing. Smog, pollution, you get it. Thus, the EPA was born. In theory, it's supposed to fix the problem

by bringing all federal efforts to combat pollution under the purview of one agency, which is responsible for conducting research on the various ways our industrial activities are harming the planet and in turn, us. It then acts on the results by working with states to set standards for how much fern gully grade ooze we can safely spew into the air and water without causing an inconvenient truth grade disaster. Meanwhile, it's a documentary?

Meanwhile, the internet has opened a Pandora's, sorry, Spotify's box of totally new problems that when we first encountered them, seemed like they would genuinely make our lives better. Congress has been freaking out over whether TikTok is Chinese spyware. We don't know where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech.

Hackers are trying to take down healthcare systems, and most of us can't agree on whether we want to fuck, marry or kill AI. And that's all before you get to the direct impacts of the internet and tech on human health and the planet. So we could take the various research efforts that are trying to address the expected short-term downsides and unforeseeable long-term consequences

of all of this progress and combine them under one agency. More importantly, that agency would be empowered to analyze how a new technology might impact society before it's haphazardly unleashed on the public and suggest appropriate legislation. Sure, we'd still get things wrong, but it would be a huge improvement over the move fast and break things now, beg

for forgiveness later approach. AKA the Mustigie experiment. I know this sounds a little silly when talking about something so speculative, but conversely to that move fast and break things motto, government regulations tend to be wait until things are broken, then move normalish speed, kind of. In other words, we only wait until something is a fucking disaster before we act to regulate it. So in a lot of ways, we're actually lucky

that Elon Musk is the mascot for brain tech because he immediately invokes and symbolizes all the potential problems this technology would have. He's an impulsive ghoul who regularly disregards safety regulations and treats his employees like crap while simultaneously demonstrating a textbook internet addiction. He's all the potential problems

with brain tech we can expect. And some problems we wouldn't expect. Like has anyone checked to see if Neuralink rusts when wet? So if we take action now, before it's too late, while it's still a little abstract, there's still a chance humanity can reap the benefits of a cyberpunk future without having to endure

the dystopian nightmare part. Will we though? Tune in next century to find out. I'll just be sitting here, waiting. Really itches up there. Kind of wonder if this has anything to do with Katie offering to cut my hair and then making me sit in that dentist chair

and drink all that NyQuil. I don't know what it is. Katie's so cool. I think I'll wire her all my life savings. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Katie, kangaroo, kill. Kill me! That's, Katie, Katie's cool. Katie's cool.

I think I'll wire her my life savings. Psh. Psh. Katie's cool. Quack, quack, quack. That's the sound a brain chip makes. I don't know what we're talking about anymore. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel.

We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to this as a podcast. It's called Some More News at the podcast store or the podcast place or the app, whatever, in your brain chip. You download the podcast into your brain. We've got a Patreon.com system or news so you can support us there if you'd like. We've got merch with stuff on it and there's going to be more of that. And you know what else?

Quack, quack, quack with the trolley. Ding, ding, ding with my brain chip. I don't know how to end this! Please cut away from the- stop it. Thank you.