Blake Hall
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, exists in a peculiar sphere. There’s not much that they can throw out as public relations chum to the American public that would at all shock or surprise anyone all that much.
As perhaps the Pentagon’s wildest wildcard agency, it has flirted with (or straight up attempted) developing synthetic blood, robot exoskeletons, cyborg insects, cars for blind people, flying submarines, mechanical elephants, synthetic polio viruses, motherships, hafnium bombs, handheld fusion reactors and even a futures market for — get this! — terrorist attacks.
So the following story won’t send shivers up your spine the same way if it had, let’s say, been released by the White House. Still, it’s pretty corybantic.
They’re trying to develop a microchip that would be planted in our brains so that we could directly communicate with computers. They’re launching a new program titled “Neural Engineering System Design”, or NESD, and this — from the agency itself — is what they’re aiming to do:
A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology.
Basically, they’re going to try and figure out a way to turn the signals and commands our brains use (i.e. “neural language”) and transmit it directly into digital code so that — theoretically — our minds can be read by a computer, and vice versa (hence the “internet in your brain” thing).