Mark Zuckerberg Has His Sights Set on Creating Mind-Reading Brain Implants

Mark Zuckerberg's got a lot of money, and it sounds like some of it is going to brain implants that can read minds.

Mark Zuckerberg
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Image via Getty/Rodrigo Buendia

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is pledging to put up $50 million dollars in an effort to try and fight deadly diseases throughout the world. The money will be spent on a number of projects, including one called Cortera Neurotechnologies, which works to produce "clinically viable and minimally invasive neural interfaces" for patients suffering with incurable neurological disabilities.

One of the developments from Cortera are "High-Density Microelectrocorticography Arrays" which create high-resolution brain recordings. While a lot of these massive words are likely to go over the heads of you and I, in layman's terms the aim of the technology is to give someone who is paralyzed control over prosthetic limbs by following the commands of their brain. 

Speaking on Cortera's founder Rikky Muller, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which has the lofty goal of curing/controlling all diseases within this cenutry, said:

"Muller is developing new wireless microsystems that directly interface with the brain for long-term, minimally-invasive neurological recording. Her broad goal is to engineer novel implants that can simultaneously sense and alter physiological responses to enable drug delivery and the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders."

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According to The Daily Mailan advert posted earlier in 2017 suggested that a mysterious new division of Facebook, called "Building 8—which aims to develop "seemingly impossible products"—was already working on mind-reading technology. Like a lot of job descriptions, they were kind of hard to understand. One stated that the key responsibilities for the person in the position would be "[a]pplying 'machine learning methods, including encoding and decoding models, to neuroimaging and electrophysiological data."

Another was for a "neural imaging engineer," whose responsibilities would include "a project focused on developing novel non-invasive neuroimaging technologies."

Previously, Zuckerberg called a telepathy system the "ultimate communication technology."

"One day, I believe we'll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology," Zuckerberg said. "You'll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too, if you'd like."

We get the paralysis part, but we'll let you decide if this friends knowing what you think thing would be good or bad.

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