From The Verge: Today, a few thoughts about mind control.
On the occasion of the launch of Facebook Dating last month, I noted here that “a defining feature of Facebook’s approach to product development is its ruthlessness, which often manifests as a kind of shamelessness. If good taste ever dictates that Facebook stay out of a product, history shows that it’s likely to wade right in.”
Facebook’s efforts to develop a brain-computer interface would seem to me to fall into this category. Other companies that found themselves under investigation by various world governments after a series of privacy scandals might ease up a little on the development of products that seek to read our minds. But to Mark Zuckerberg, the risk that the company might fall behind on next-generation computing technologies is too scary to ignore. And so you get developments like this one, from July, when Facebook announced it had worked with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco to build an interface that could successfully decode spoken dialogue from brain signals.
On Monday, we saw another aspect of that ruthless / shameless dynamic playing out. As the company faces multiple antitrust investigations over competition issues, it announced it had acquired CTRL-Labs, maker of a wristband capable of transforming electrical signals from the brain into computer inputs — a so-called “brain click.” (The Verge profiled the company in 2018.) And Facebook paid big for it — between $500 million and $1 billion, Bloomberg reported, making it the biggest acquisition since the company paid $2 billion for Oculus.
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