Several multi-millionaires who made their fortune in tech have launched initiatives to hyperlink human brains to computer systems, whether or not to learn our minds, talk, or supercharge our brainpower. Antonio Regalado spoke to entrepreneur Bryan Johnson in 2017 about his plans to construct a neural prosthetic for human intelligence enhancement. (Since then, Johnson has launched into a quest to maintain his physique as younger as doable.)
We can ship jolts of electrical energy to the mind through headbands and caps—units which might be typically thought of to be noninvasive. But on condition that they’re probing our minds and doubtlessly altering the best way they work, maybe we have to rethink how invasive they are surely, as I wrote in an earlier version of The Checkup.
Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink has acknowledged it has an eventual objective of “making a whole-brain interface able to extra carefully connecting organic and synthetic intelligence.” Antonio described how a lot progress the corporate and its opponents have made in a feature that ran within the Computing issue of the journal.
When an individual with an electrode implanted of their mind to deal with epilepsy was accused of assaulting a police officer, regulation enforcement officers requested to see the mind information collected by the gadget. The information was exonerating; it seems the individual was having a seizure on the time. But mind information may simply as simply be used to incriminate another person, as I wrote in a current version of The Checkup.
From across the net
How would you are feeling about getting letters out of your physician that had been written by an AI? A pilot research confirmed that “it’s doable to generate clinic letters with a excessive general correctness and humanness rating with ChatGPT.” (The Lancet Digital Health)
When Meredith Broussard came upon that her hospital had used AI to assist diagnose her breast most cancers, she explored how the expertise fares in opposition to human medical doctors. Not nice, it turned out. (Wired)
A federal judge in Texas is being requested in a lawsuit to direct the US Food and Drug Administration to rescind its approval of mifepristone, certainly one of two medication utilized in treatment abortions. A ruling in opposition to the FDA may diminish the authority of the group and “be catastrophic for public well being.” (The Washington Post)
The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed regulation that will restrict the degrees of six “eternally chemical compounds” in ingesting water. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are artificial chemical compounds which have been used to make merchandise for the reason that Nineteen Fifties. They break down extraordinarily slowly and have been discovered within the surroundings, and within the blood of individuals and animals, around the globe. We nonetheless don’t know the way dangerous they’re. (EPA)
Would you pay hundreds of {dollars} to have your jaw damaged and transformed to resemble that of Batman? The surgical procedure represents yet one more disturbing beauty pattern. (GQ)