12 Bytes

by Jeanette Winterson

Thomas Oxley, CEO of Synchron – a company based in Brooklyn that is developing BCIs – discussed this ‘dictionary of the brain’ idea with me at the TED 2022 conference in Vancouver. Oxley is a medical doctor and neurologist. The company’s BCI implant technology has just been given FDA clearance to go ahead, as of July 2022, and the first patient, whose thoughts can turn into text, has successfully had the implant. Oxley believes that this type of surgery will become as simple and normal as LASIK eye surgery. This opens the way for healthy people to become their own device, and to connect to the internet via their brain – and it’s this capacity that would allow us, potentially, to ‘read’ one another’s emotional states, bypassing the need for language as a ‘device’. What Thomas Oxley and I argued about is whether language itself is a player – not just a communication tool. When we find the words, are we, in fact, shaping the thought, and therefore the feeling, rather than just communicating it? I believe so. Language is not just a capacity – certainly not a set of instructions – it’s a mental reality. I guess, though, the hive-mind is likely to be a subset of merged reality, and non-verbal communication is inevitable. Alan Turing was fascinated by hive-mind communication back in 1950. Have a look at his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The metaverse will be a different kind of communication system, as well as a different kind of experienced space.