The US navy has been working to develop mind-reading units for years. The purpose is to create applied sciences that enable us to assist individuals with mind or nervous system harm, but additionally allow troopers to direct drones and different units by thought alone, as Paul Tullis reported in 2019.
Several multi-millionaires who made their fortune in tech have launched tasks 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 potential.)
We can ship jolts of electrical energy to the mind by way of headbands and caps—units which might be usually thought-about to be noninvasive. But on condition that they’re probing our minds and probably altering the way in which 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 said it has an eventual aim of “creating a whole-brain interface capable of more closely connecting biological and artificial intelligence.” Antonio described how a lot progress the corporate and its rivals have made in a function that ran within the Computing challenge 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 particular person 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 latest 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 is possible to generate clinic letters with a high overall correctness and humanness score with ChatGPT.” (The Lancet Digital Health)
When Meredith Broussard discovered that her hospital had used AI to assist diagnose her breast most cancers, she explored how the expertise fares in opposition to human docs. Not nice, it turned out. (Wired)
A federal decide 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 medicine utilized in remedy abortions. A ruling in opposition to the FDA may diminish the authority of the group and “be catastrophic for public health.” (The Washington Post)
The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed regulation that may restrict the degrees of six “forever chemicals” in ingesting water. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are artificial chemical substances which have been used to make merchandise for the reason that Nineteen Fifties. They break down extraordinarily slowly and have been discovered within the atmosphere, and within the blood of individuals and animals, all over the world. We nonetheless don’t know the way dangerous they’re. (EPA)
Would you pay 1000’s of {dollars} to have your jaw damaged and transformed to resemble that of Batman? The surgical procedure represents one more disturbing beauty pattern. (GQ)