It's insanity that a company literally developing mind control and mind reading (or as they sanitize it: bidirectional brain-computer interface) hasn't been shut down yet, but here we are.
I just watched the first Black Mirror episode (latest season). While I'm all for science and progress, I don't see a world where you don't pay a subscription for your brain to work.
Brain surgery is invasive, but the power that the surgeon exercises over the patient is bound to the context of the surgery. Side effects may linger, but the surgeon cannot increase or alter the side effects after the surgery. With Neuralink installed, the owner of the proprietary software that runs on it (because let's be real, there's no way they'd let you control your own brain) has indefinite read and write access to your mind. No thought is private; no action is your own. Everything that happens in your brain happens either because the owners let it, or made it happen.
There is a market for advertising-subsidized neural implants.
Think of the profit potential of being able to directly influence consumer brains patterns. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry, minimum.
The fear isn't that it's an option; It's creating a world where you can't afford not to. Much like how modern life requires internet participation, the idea of a potential world that requires neural implant participation and the economic incentives described above is viscerally horrific.
> The fear isn't that it's an option; It's creating a world where you can't afford not to.
It's not even just that I couldn't afford not to. It's that in a way, I couldn't choose not to. Anything anyone says that has Neuralink installed is compromised. Any friendly suggestion to grab lunch at Major Chain Restaurant TM could be an ad. Any anecdote could be political campaigning.
It's not just not having it myself, it's the fact that those around me having it is a problem.
What a terrible position to be in if the technology actually helps disabled folks though. On one hand their quality of life may improve. On the other, there may be a huge (possibly justified) stigma on all implanted people due to what you're writing about.
