After some false starts and disappointments in the 1970s, DARPA opened the Defense Sciences Office by 1999 had the idea of augmenting humans with machines. At that time, it boasted more program managers than any other division at the agency. That year, the Brain Machine Interface program was launched with the plan of enabling service members to “communicate by thought alone.” Since then, at least eight DARPA programs have funded research paths aiming to restore memory, treat psychiatric disorders, and more.
Few methods can gather a lot of information from the brain quickly enough to operate the thing you connect the brain to—be it prosthetic arm, flight simulator, or drone. The more data you collect, the slower you become, and the faster you get the less data you can grab. Muller pointed to other problems. To pick just one: “It’s very hard to squeeze a high data rate out of a wireless device, because it costs power you don’t necessarily have when you’re in a power-constrained environment, like inside the human body,” she said.
A former executive with Google and Facebook and professor at the MIT Media Lab, Mary Lou Jepsen, spoke about the possibility of an architect using a brain-computer interface to upload blueprints for a building to construction robots directly from his mind and later promised kits for developers to mess around with in 2019. She did a TED Talk that’s been viewed more than 800,000 times in which she demonstrates the ability to cast light through a piece of chicken. But the human skull is nothing like a chicken breast. As far as anyone can tell, her technology is still basically nowhere, in terms of current human use. “All the BMI’s out there today, nobody wants to use,” said Gallant. “They all suck.”
