Here’s a decent 60 Minutes piece on brain-computer interfaces being used to give people with locked-in syndrome a way to control computer applications and even a wheelchair.
In the intro, the host makes clear that “they” (he and the producers, I guess) were all pretty shocked and impressed by this stuff. It is amazing. I posted a little bit ago about a pretty good (and long) piece from Esquire about the same sort of work.
The information is out there and the reaction is often amazement. I really think that this forces a fairly radical confrontation with the materiality of being human. It’s unclear to me why this isn’t talked about more. How can those with a firm commitment to an authentic human nature watch this and not start to wonder just where that “interface”—the line between the brain and the machine—falls exactly? As this technology progresses and eventually attracts more attention, maybe more people will start to agree that no such line exists…
