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Did you know that the stated mission of DARPA is to prevent technological surprise to the U.s.a., just besides to create technological surprise to our enemies? The newest news from those lovable, homicidal, acronym-happy wackos at DARPA is that they want to build an implantable brain-to-computer interface. Seriously, I cartel you to wade more than one Google search deep into researching whatever of the brain-related technology DARPA is working on.

WatchingYou

The thought hither is that DARPA wants a fleck smaller than a cubic centimeter — they characterize it as the book of two nickels, back to back — that will provide "unprecedented signal resolution and information-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world." Naturally, they've got an acronym for it: the Neural Engineering System Design, or NESD. They desire to implant it in the human encephalon, and use information technology equally an indwelling wideband interface for information transmission — and they've earmarked $60 1000000 over iv years for the purpose.

The resultant IP would be shared with the "industry stakeholders" that would help build such an implant, whose involvement DARPA is courtship at a Proposer's Day next month. In one case those meetings are had, the research grant writing will start to catamenia, and we'll have more information about the specifics of the projection and the device.

ElectRX2

DARPA has besides worked on brain computer interface projects to restore movement to damaged limbs. Such systems could too be improved past the NESD projection.

Currently, the best neural interfaces we have are used for things like limb prosthetics, and they only use nearly a hundred channels at a fourth dimension — and those channels get noisy, imprecise feeds considering they're many-to-one aggregators, collecting signals from hundreds or thousands of neurons per channel.

Prior fine art in the field of brain-computer interfaces, while promising, is still young. The NESD project aims to create an indwelling brain-to-estimator interface, capable of data transmission between the module and up to a million individual neurons at a time. "The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical linguistic communication used past neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology," according to DARPA's press release.

Inquiry like this represents an enormous bound frontward, and it will have to exist profoundly multidisciplinary. Straight out of the gate, NESD'south objective will require a good map of the connectome, and an intimate understanding of how neurons and their support cells exercise what they practise. Implant engineering similar this requires low-power electronics, materials science and mathematical modeling too. But imagine a HUD utility that could pick up sensory input from your brain, analyze it, and compare that data about your environs to a much larger database in real-time — like something you'd come across on JARVIS's resume. Information technology'due south even possible that by integrating magnetic encephalon stimulation, nosotros could get remote I/O capabilities for the human mind.

Despite how shiny this looks, though — in light of the PRISM sideshow (can you believe that was back in 2013?), it boggles the mind to contemplate the security risks introduced by a wetware interface between a calculator — whatsoever computer — and the human encephalon. I for one welcome my new advertizing and surveillance overlords. Who's going to become a chip put in their head made by the aforementioned governing bodies that gave us warrantless wiretapping and MK-ULTRA?