Other than algorithm, soon Facebook will read our minds directly. The umpteenth revolution of the man-machine relationship will therefore lead us, in a perhaps not too distant future, to do without the keyboard, making direct communication between the brain and the computer possible. This is the goal of the project Building 8, launched by Facebook a year ago and for which Mark Zuckerberg "stole" from Google Regina Dugan, former engineer in charge of Darpa, the American Defense R&D laboratory.
"Our neurons can 'stream' data equivalent to 4 HD movies every second, while speech transmits data comparable to that of an 80s modem," Dugan recently said at the F8 conference, dedicated to Silicon developers Valley. The word is therefore a waste of time, it weakens and slows down the real capacity of the human mind, even if conveyed quickly via the keyboard of a PC or smartphone.
“Type words directly from our brain? It seems impossible but it is not”, added the Building 8 project manager, who will try in the coming years to create a system capable of decoding words in the part of the brain that develops language, and transfer them to a computer at a speed of 100 words per minute, or 5 times more than what we are on average able to type on a keyboard today.
To reach this crazy - and even disturbing, in some ways - goal, Facebook has spared no expense, hiring 60 scientists specialized in Artificial Intelligence and forging partnerships with all the major American universities, from the nearby Berkeley to John Hopkins and the university of washington. “It is about developing non-invasive devices – explained Zuckerberg himself – in order to avoid surgery on people, which would prevent the project from spreading on a large scale".
The first step will be that of a brain able at least to answer, only with thought, "yes" or "no" to a question read or listened to through a device, or to enjoy virtual or augmented reality experiences without the need for smartphones, helmets or other devices. One of the last stages of the revolution, on the other hand, would be the one that will make learning foreign languages superfluous: not even English, given that the word conceived in one's mother tongue will be "compressed" and then subsequently "decompressed" by the machine, which will translate it into any other tongue. “Soon it will be possible to think in Chinese and hear the audio of our thoughts in Spanish”, exemplified Regina Dugan to the F8 audience.
However, direct dialogue between the brain and computer is not the only novelty being studied for the Building 8 project: inspired by the Braille system, Zuckerberg's new creature is also thinking of allowing our skin to listen, through the absorption of sound vibrations. Two innovations unthinkable today, and which open up new scenarios on at least two fronts, communication and privacy. “Nearly 800 million people in the world cannot read and write, but they can certainly think – explained the engineer -. This novelty will also lead us to cure smartphone addiction, which isolates us from the human world around us. We can at least go back to looking each other in the eye when we talk”.
The question of privacy is more disturbing: what will become of us if Facebook can access even our most intimate thoughts? “He won't do it – guarantees Dugan -, because he has no right to do so. It will work like now with photos: you take a lot of them, but then publish only the ones you want. So it will be with your thoughts, you will choose which ones to share”.
However, the most famous social network in the world is not the only one capable of attempting such a revolution. As often happens for the most unthinkable challenges, "on the spot" there is also Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and SpaceX and founder of Neuralink, a company that deals with brain-machine interfaces. According to the Wall Street Journal this new adventure of the man who produced the first electric car in the world and who is now launching the driverless one, started quietly in July 2016 and would be even more ambitious than that of Facebook.
