EVERY YEAR, FACEBOOK gathers hundreds of developers, corporate allies, and members of the press to hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of our shared near future. The gathering is known as “F8,” and this year’s iteration included some radical plans, one of which could’ve been pulled from a William Gibson novel: Facebook is working on a means of using your brain as an input device.
Such technology is still many years off, as is, apparently, Facebook’s willingness to publicly think through its very serious implications.
Details on how the Facebook brain/computer interface would function are scant, likely because the company hasn’t invented it yet. But it’s fair to say the company has already put a great deal of effort into considering what capabilities such an interface would have, and how it would be designed, judging from its press announcement: “We have taken a distinctly different, non-invasive and deeply scientific approach to building a brain-computer speech-to-text interface,” the company says, describing the project as “a silent speech interface with the speed and flexibility of voice and the privacy of text,” with a stated goal of allowing “100 words per minute, straight from the speech center of your brain.” This process will be executed “via non-invasive sensors that can be shipped at scale” using “optical imaging” that can poll “brain activity hundreds of times per second.” [...]
Facebook’s assurance that users will be able to easily toggle between thoughts that should and should not be transmitted to Facebook’s servers doesn’t ring true to Klein, who points out that an intrinsic part of speech is that you don’t have to think about each word or phrase before you speak it: “When we’re engaged in a conversation, I don’t have this running dialogue that comes up before my mind’s eye that I say yes or no to before it comes out of my mouth.” Facebook’s announcement made it seem as if your brain has simple privacy settings like Facebook’s website does, but with speech, “if you have to make a decision about every little thing, it becomes exhausting,” and would carry what neurologists call a “high cognitive load.” Klein added that, far from being able to switch between public and private thoughts on the fly, “the only way these technologies really will become part of our second nature is if they become subconscious at some level,” at which point Facebook’s “analogy with photographs” — that “you take many photos and choose to share only some of them” — “breaks down, because then you’re not consciously choosing each thing to let through the sieve.” The whole thing comes down to a sort of paradox, according to Klein: For this technology to be useful, it would have to be subconscious, which precludes the kind of granular privacy decisions described in Facebook’s PR comments.
