A number of 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 are able to ship jolts of electrical energy to the mind through headbands and caps—gadgets which can be typically thought of to be noninvasive. However provided 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 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 rivals have made in a function that ran within the Computing difficulty of the journal. 

When an individual with an electrode implanted of their mind to deal with epilepsy was accused of assaulting a police officer, legislation enforcement officers requested to see the mind knowledge collected by the system. The information was exonerating; it seems the particular person was having a seizure on the time. However mind knowledge might simply as simply be used to incriminate another person, as I wrote in a current version of The Checkup.

From across the internet

How would you’re feeling about getting letters out of your physician that had been written by an AI? A pilot examine confirmed that “it’s doable to generate clinic letters with a excessive general correctness and humanness rating with ChatGPT.” (The Lancet Digital Well being)

When Meredith Broussard came upon that her hospital had used AI to assist diagnose her breast most cancers, she explored how the know-how fares towards human medical doctors. Not nice, it turned out. (Wired)

A federal choose in Texas is being requested in a lawsuit to direct the US Meals and Drug Administration to rescind its approval of mifepristone, certainly one of two medicine utilized in remedy abortions. A ruling towards the FDA might diminish the authority of the group and “be catastrophic for public well being.” (The Washington Publish)

The US Environmental Safety Company has proposed regulation that may restrict the degrees of six “without end chemical compounds” in consuming water. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are artificial chemical compounds which were used to make merchandise because the Nineteen Fifties. They break down extraordinarily slowly and have been discovered within the surroundings, and within the blood of individuals and animals, world wide. We nonetheless don’t know the way dangerous they’re. (EPA)

Would you pay hundreds of {dollars} to have your jaw damaged and reworked to resemble that of Batman? The surgical procedure represents yet one more disturbing beauty development. (GQ)