 Last week, a video came out demonstrating the capabilities of the Neuralink in a human subject, and this might be one of the coolest and simultaneously most horrifying pieces of tech that I've seen in a while when I think of the implications of it. So in case you haven't been following this, back in January, Neuralink conducted the first ever human trial, and there wasn't a whole lot of information given at the time or in the coming weeks about it until now. And the lack of news was making some people think that participant one, as the person was called, might have died from complications, like some of the primate subjects that the Neuralink was tested on earlier. But so far, things appear to be pretty good, and the Neuralink actually appears to have given the patient better quality of life. So in this case, the patient who received the implant is a 29-year-old named Noland Arba. Noland was in a serious diving accident that resulted in him becoming paralyzed from below the shoulders. Quadriplegics will probably benefit the most from this kind of technology when you think about it, because what's fundamentally happening is the Neuralink is able to take signals that are coming from the patient's brain and then convert those two digital signals that can send commands to different electronic devices. So here, the Neuralink was able to interface with Noland's computer, and then he's able to use it to play chess. He can also turn off or adjust the volume of the music on his computer. He can basically move the mouse around and do anything that you or I could do with his mouse. And he's also able to play Civilization 6 online thanks to the Neuralink, and he can even play higher APM games like Mario Kart. Noland is playing Bowser on the right here, and if you look closely, he's able to hit Donkey Kong with a green shell. So the Neuralink is actually capable of making much faster and more precise movements than any similar assistive tech that's been developed in the past, and like I said, he's only had it in his head since January. So I'm sure that as time goes on, he's going to get better and better at using it, and of course, better versions of the Neuralink will come out in the future as well. Noland said that what it feels like to use it is like using the force to control his mouse, so I'm sure that was probably a little bit difficult to get used to at first. And one of the first cool things that I thought of after the brain hacking in 1984-esque thoughts quieted down in my head was imagining the intense productivity of a Vim user or an Emacs user that has a Neuralink installed. Like, this could be used to treat Emacs pinky. That's another serious medical issue that pops up in the developer community, and any other finger strains that come from using these keyboard-centric layouts, you could just imagine hitting the control key or escape or any other hard-to-reach button on your keyboard. Maybe you could even set up special telepathic shortcuts that would be difficult, like really annoying to do physically, like control backspace or shift plus F5, but you could just use your Neuralink to activate those special shortcuts, or better yet, you could have a KVM switch hooked up to your Neuralink so that you can actually control different machines or different virtual machines at the same time. Now, the long-term goals for Neuralink as far as assistive technology is concerned is to be able to get the device to interact with robotic limbs and robotic eyes and ears and things like that so that people who are paralyzed, missing limbs or have other disabilities will be able to interact with these robotic parts. So the response time with current Neuralink technology is obviously already good enough for playing a lot of video games. So I would figure that as far as moving limbs are concerned, it's probably just about ready. It's just a matter of hooking them up to robotic limbs, and then, of course, the user who has the Neuralink training for a bit to get used to moving artificial limbs with their thoughts, you know, with this kind of like force power. And in the future, I'm sure we're going to see people without disabilities getting Neuralink implants as well to have superhuman capabilities. And this is where some of the really dystopian visions become clearer. So the Neuralink has been advertised by people like Elon Musk as the only way that you're going to be able to compete with AI in the future, right? You got to put this chip in your brain if you want to have any type of career or any future against AI. Because artificial intelligence is replacing and revolutionizing all these different fields of work. But there's a lot of issues that can come with having a proprietary computer installed in your brain. So just like anything else that's not open source, the manufacturer of these brain chips ultimately controls what they are able to do. So they could use that to read your thoughts, they could broadcast advertisements into your brain and possibly even control your thoughts in real time, which ultimately that means they're controlling you, you're like their zombie. And I know people will say that, oh, the Neuralink is read only, there's no way to actually hack into someone's brain through it. And maybe that is the case with the Neuralink, although I'm not completely convinced that it is. But if you think about the future of this to effectively interface with limbs and provide these other future capabilities that Neuralink wants to implement, you're going to need to have two-way communications between your brain and the device. You're going to want some kind of input from robotic arms, for example, to know how heavy something is, how much pressure you're putting on it, etc. But beyond the overt dystopian malevolence that can be done with these devices, there's real problems that real people are having right now with proprietary assistive technology. There's been a couple cases where a company called Second Sight Medical Products was unable to service faulty eye implants that were giving blind people their sight back because the company was going bankrupt and the implants that these patients had were obsolete. And because everything was proprietary, they weren't able to get third-party parts to fix it. They couldn't go to a third-party repair shop that fixes medical devices, if that's even a thing. So yeah, they're basically stuck with e-waste inside of their body, you know, inside of their eye until they're able to get it surgically removed. So yeah, Neuralink is a really cool technology. Don't get me wrong, but it has massive potential for abuse or, again, people just getting stuck with e-waste in their skulls that requires expensive invasive surgery to remove. So I really hope that open-source alternatives can be developed soon to try and curb that issue with e-waste and just planned obsolescence or, you know, even just being able to broadcast stuff into your brain, right? Because the only way you can even begin to confirm that something like that can't be done is for all of the code that it's running to be open-source. But even at that point, I personally don't think that I would want to have something like that inserted into my brain. And that's perfectly fine. I also don't buy the claims that a Neuralink is going to be the only way for people to compete with AI in the future. There's plenty of people that have been getting by fine without the latest technology and they have been for years. So don't get a chip in your brain unless you really, really want one for some reason. If you enjoyed this video, please like it and share it to hack the algorithm and check out my online store, base.win, where you can get awesome merch like the come and find it short sleeve shirt or the tie-dye tour tee. Plus you can get a 10% discount automatically at checkout for paying in Monero XMR. Have a great day.