Mind Meld
Facebook might be one of the last companies you want reading your mind, but that won’t stop the social media giant from trying.
In a leaked company meeting on Tuesday, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer highlighted recent progress on the company’s neural interface tech, BuzzFeed News reports. The ultimate goal, ostensibly, isn’t to harvest our thoughts as yet another form of personal data — but rather to give people to ability to control software with their thoughts.
Pre-Emptive Defense
All the same, Schroepfer seemed to acknowledge that getting people to actually use the tech might be a hard sell, according to the leaked meeting audio acquired by BuzzFeed News.
“We have to build responsibly to earn trust and the right to continue to grow,” Schroepfer said. “It’s imperative that we get this right so that people around the world get all these amazing technologies… without experiencing the downsides.”
Buying Power
Facebook has been working towards this brain-reading system for years. The company announced its plans to develop a brain-computer interface headset in 2017, and in September 2019 it purchased the neural interface startup CTRL-Labs.
Based on the leaked meeting, it sounds like Facebook has made some progress toward its goal — so, if Facebook’s narrative is to be believed, the sci-fi dream of sending commands to a computer just by thinking about it may soon become reality.
READ MORE: Facebook Said It’s Developing A Tool To Read Your Brain [BuzzFeed News]
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