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If no one else is up to the challenge, I will add another unlikely chapter to the whacky-what-if scenario listed above.
Suppose the very same secret microwave-tower-to-satellite-to-microwave-tower technology that fuels the Brain-to-Brain Network I hypothesized about above, is on a technological collision course with the the high frequency trading cabal's efforts to provide ever faster, but increasingly minute incremental advantages to the equally whacky world where the super rich get ever richer by buying and selling stocks in subdivisions of time so small that ONLY microwave technology can manage it.
Yeah...I know...silly sci-fi isn't it?
What if it was an already maturing technology of some twenty years, but currently rested only in the hands of the NSA, CIA, FBI, NGA, IRS, and BLM types?
Black Lives Matter has this tech?
It's fun to play with technology that can fry your brain.
Especially if it can be hacked remotely.
On the other hand we desperately need to improve human intelligence on this planet.
Bay Area:
Yes. Those touch on the idea don't they? It looks as though folks like Musk and Zuckerberg have been given some convincing demonstrations of at least mind-to-computer control, but based on their own enthusiasm for what they are developing, have seen much more.
What if Voice-to-Skull and Video-to-Skull wireless technologies were not purely the stuff of paranoid dreams of Manchurian Candidate film fans, but a reality? I know it's a stretch, but i'm not suggesting heavy-handed mind control - only wireless communication. It feels, at first-blush, like "we have not only put a man on Mars, without telling you all, but we've opened a Hilton there as well." It seems absurd that such a monumental feat of Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, Extreme Low-Frequency Microwave line-of-sight-free networking, and digital processing research would not slap us in the face each and every day in business, medical, and political news. But that is why we have our mental exercise, yes?
The advantages of keeping such research secret, such as the US intelligence Agencies did with other programs like the Star Gate Remote Viewing Programs of the 70's, is of course prudently defensive. We don't know where it would lead. Surely, it would only be prudent to keep it secret, especially if satellite to ground-based microwave array to skull implant technologies actually worked. Perhaps transmitting and receiving information without wires from the audio and visual cortex is not too far a leap from the miniaturization trend.
Isn't that part inevitable? iPhones so small you don't need to hold them. Earpieces and microphones so small, you don't need to wear them. Some of you will know this piece of the mind game is old news. Maybe the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy 16 Series will come by prescription only...
"Not everyone can use the new iPhone 16 liquid. Make an appointment, today, and ask your Doctor if iPhone 16 Holo-drops are right for you. And remember, last year's iPhone 15s Contact Lens system is now more affordable than ever." (We don't even want to touch-on the iPhone Lasik fiasco of 3 years ago. Shudder)
Well. one conflict I see arising in such a scenario, is the also inevitable collision between government secrecy and private enterprise. You wouldn't be able to keep Doctors Strangelove, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Welby hidden away from the super-rich boys forever would you? Again inevitably, some non-government capitalist, just like Musk or Zuckerberg or Rice, is going to get wind that breakthroughs have been made - that microwave networks of immense power are humming with activity that makes no other logical sense, and will begin R&D of their own.
More horrifying would be the possibility that the technology is considerably more reliable than previously thought, and had in fact been used surreptitiously already.
Fun to think about but not reality. The brain is the most complicated entity known to man. Someday this will be possible maybe but we're not even close yet. Hell we can't even figure out the human genomes intricacies yet with it's diploid 3.2 billion linear base pairs. The brain is a somewhat random (learned) collection of 10 billion (if I recall) connections.
The genome is coming along. Prices for sequencing have dropped significantly and there will soon be many millions to run machine learning codes on. This is in progress. It'll take a while to collect the necessary data to train on brains.
What will happen first is we'll (China first) use CRISPR to engineer embryos so that they are super intelligent. A whole generation smarter than Einstein. It's only a matter of flipping ~50 SNPs in a genome to do it. 50 as that is the square root of the known number of SNPs that are already correlated with high IQ and the square root is all that is required. So it's relatively trivial to do soon.
At that point that generation, the elevated compute-power that'll be around in 30-40 years and the AI will figure the brain out.
Just_Passing:
I hear you. I think that's very accurate, with respect to the Holy Grail of Mind-to-Mind networking, but I put to you that it may end up not being necessary to decode each individual brain's interpreted neural activities to perform voice or image to skull transmission.
What an awful personal invasion it would be, if our mind’s had been linked surreptitiously, to have a digital imposter disguised as a dear one - bleeding us for soul exposing detail
To make it easier to diagnose and study sleep problems, researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have devised a new way to monitor sleep stages without sensors attached to the body. Their device uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze the radio signals around the person and translate those measurements into sleep stages: light, deep, or rapid eye movement (REM).
“Imagine if your Wi-Fi router knows when you are dreaming, and can monitor whether you are having enough deep sleep, which is necessary for memory consolidation,” says Dina Katabi, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who led the study. “Our vision is developing health sensors that will disappear into the background and capture physiological signals and important health metrics, without asking the user to change her behavior in any way.”
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I am a huge fan of science fiction. Playing the What-If Game is always a fun mental exercise with clever people...
What if we didn't have to wait for wireless brain-to-brain communication? For audible and visual brain-to-digital-and-back-to-brain communication?
What if it was an already maturing technology of some twenty years, but currently rested only in the hands of the NSA, CIA, FBI, NGA, IRS, and BLM types? (three letter acronyms only please) :-)
While Huxley and Orwell remain loads of fun on long rainy Saturday afternoons, lets face it, those gentlemen never were quite up-to-speed with what was coming in the Information Age.
What if a disproportionate number of ultra-conservative, secret squirrel, "My name is Smith...Joseph Smith" religious types had been tapping thousands of unwitting brains for years? Simply because of their disproportionate numbers in the organizations above. Tilting the technology in their favor since the 1980's.
What if the NSA had a deeper understanding of the nature of electro-bio-neurology than we had thought possible. Kept well compartmentalized and hidden within the bureaucracy of course. Would it have been for the better that such a thing had been kept secret? Would their hands not have been the best hands in which to entrust such technology?
Feel free to ignore the philosophical challenge. I think most of you have realized by now that I don't put these topics up on the board so that people will comment on them in droves. -eab