How to sell a Brain Computer Interface: It's AI Magic!

[EDITOR'S NOTE: DO NOT SELL BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACES. USE THEM ONLY WITH THE FULL CONSENT AND KNOWLEDGE OF ALL THE PARTICIPANTS EVER. THIS IS NOT A GUIDELINE. READ FRANKESTEIN AND RECITE IT BY HEART BEFORE EVEN THINKING ABOUT MARKETING SUCH A THING]

I have to admit that I never thought I would out-do my rambles. I am glad to know that I out performed myself and many other crackpots of the Internet in the fourth anniversary post last week. If by the end of that post anything makes sense, I'll take that as a compliment: it took me 12 straight hours of non stop writing to finish what roughly would take me 12 hours to read.

I'm pretty sure that there are very qualified people who can tell you what a Brain Computer Interface is and is not. They most of the time call themselves neuroscientists, and if there was ever a prepotent bunch on this earth, ever a Frankenstein candidate in this world, it is pretty much all of them. Take for instance: pure determinism has been accepted as almost true because neuroscientists said it. How did we extrapolate from the neurosciences into the entirety of the physical science/reality and decided that everything can be determined because a few neuroscientist think so, because our brains are very limited and not as awe inspiring as we previously thought, since machine learning can connect the dots quite faster than anyone so... anyhow. Who am I to tell you about prepotency? I am no neuroscientist.

I just know a few of their terms because if you are dumb enough to think that weird coincidences can most likely only be explained with mundane technology and the closest you can think of is the ability to read verbal-thoughts, phonemes ("logos"), with MRIs and machine learning, then you likely know that there are these funky machines called functional MRIs. They are not Magnetic Resonance whatever, they just functionally work as one.

So, since I know that some marketing people most be very worried about how to sell the complete stealing of your logical self, and then some, because when you think about it selling MIND READING DEVICES to people doesn't really sound that appealing when they should be paying you instead if you've read any science fiction in your life, I fear have a very clever solution:

It's not technically BCI, the proper term is functional BCI, or fBCI, done in the same way that your phone has been "reading" your thoughts for decades now, don't worry, nothing new under the sun, it is exactly the same thing, but we now have AI! You know, that chatbot that you would be fucking if Sam Altman only let you (he fucking said somewhere quite literally that the only a ethical thing he has done is to stop getting profits from making sex companion bots, which... is pretty close to my whole charade of why waifus are a thing for these soon to be surprised nerds with money... or maybe just entirely jaded "sent by destiny" type of idiots).

You're not him and I don't want to take you for an idiot, you know what AI is. So yeah, there's no much a lot of future here, except the very short future for BCIs: anyone in their right mind will tell you that Brain Computer Interfaces or Brain Machine Interfaces (a more apt term, but harder to sell because BMI is what most people need to watch anyway in order to live longer according to most medical professionals) are "very far in the future" (partially untrue). They might be very right: to constantly scan your brain for thoughts is very costly, would require some infrastructure, noise would be an issue, etc etc etc. Any chatbot can tell you that. It's obscured by the fact that, unsurprisingly, you don't need to really read the thoughts of someone. You just need to do the same you did for any social media: while it is true that it appears to be reading your thoughts, it does so because it shapes your behavior in a very limited environment. So it is not reading your thoughts but doing so at the same time, get it?

You're smart, you get it.

So without me even looking, I'd say that if ubiquitous BCI is impossible, and reading your thoughts is not really what an algorithm does, because it is reading other parts of your body (for instance, you could try to scroll on social media for a while thinking about a certain thing and lo and behold, it would appear in your feed. If you block the camera, however, it will show something different. If you use a computer, which is discouraged in a lot of "feed based apps", that data will not be logged and your feed will not be able to "read your thoughts" unless you interact with likes or by time spent by screen. And so on, it will have a very hard time in showing you what you were wanting to see if you hold that thought. The color red, I don't know. It might or not. It's not magic, your phone is not cheap to make and it is mostly loaned to you: you don't have a magic device from the future with sensors for better pictures, the sensors are the loan you took. The way you pay for the entire production of your device is by giving up your privacy and data for free. Did I mentioned that I coined mechanocracy before that guy came up with technofeudalism? Yeah, I know, I think this entire blog is just about coining words at this point, who knows) - IF IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, BCIs, that is, then functional BCIs are not.

Functional MRIs do the job without the MRI. It can use bloodflow, for instance, infrared capture instead of magnetic resonance, or whatever the hell it is that it is required for an MRI to "magically" read at real time your brain and other body parts in a large room where people go to get diagnosed of cancer most of the time, so you know that it is not the happiest of places and it is likely effective. It uses some time of radiation I guess, I have no idea, I am not a neuroscientist nor a MRI engineer. I just know that you can kinda do some things with fMRIs too, which can be, as far as I am concerned, built with the same billion sensors a modern phone has. Maybe someone made one out there and you can just google it. A dedicated app might be opensource for all I care, and whoever did it should be ashamed of themselves for not reading Frankenstein. Or ask a chatbot. I don't know the difference: just that it achieves what the other does with less.

So even if BCIs are impossible without: INSERT BRAND NAME BCI HERE, functional BCIs are not, in the same way. A functional Brain Computer Interface is just the same as a functional MRI (whatever the I stands for, hold a second... oh, imagining, there. Who knows how magnetism works) without the Magnetic Resonance but, functionally, are undistinguishable.

BUT EDGEMUTE, YOU ARE SAYING THE WORD BCI ALL THE SAME! I can hear your cries, dear marketeer, worry not: the masses whom you sell the aesthetic that will someday give you profit perhaps, think that a AI can be: their partner, their god or their AI to begin with.

Look: Chatbots are not AI. AI is not even a real field of study if you think about it. Hell, REGULAR I. is not even real if you think about it for a while: so either all intelligence is artificial or we will never agree on what is intelligence: making believe that a chatbot, or to use the language that soon became obsolete, LLMs GPT chatbots, are AI is just because someone, somewhere, justifies their career by saying that they are the experts on A.I.

Since we have AI experts now (you know, MIKU experts, who cares at this point) you can throw in there as much garbage as you want: as long as it is impressive enough, someone will call that intelligent, regardless of it failing to yield any real economical benefits for humanity and perhaps making people forget what intelligence was to begin with. Sure, your work seems easier, but you still have to work until you can be replaced by the chatbot that you are informing. That's stupid if you ask me, but I am no "AI expert" unless someone else who is says so.

Since you might be that someone else and I need the money that AI experts make, too, I'll go on and just express how BCI in 2026 will be implemented before anybody else:

It is technically not a BCI it is a [FANCY REAL WORD for Functional BCI here but essentially the same idea] so it's not really reading your thoughts, it's just like those devices used for impaired individuals since the last century, you know? Stephen Hawkins could "speak" with a few clicks and taps because of such devices, but since we have had this ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION LATELY, we figured that, we can just do what BCIs do without a BCI: we are not reading you brain, but you can still write in a computer with your thoughts.

The funny thing about the whole thing is that, if it already didn't happen (I am not constantly checking for this type of information. I just think about it. I tend to actually not look for this information as much as I can, it makes me sick), I have no idea of why. I guess, mainly, the main problem, is finding an utility for someone who is not a "disabled person" and perhaps the sensual attraction it most give the Sam Altman types to just call it AGI and be done with it: after all, not being happy with creating a chatbot that is "just a tool" and at the same time most likely the reason he will get or was divorced, as if he had made anything anyways, but we hold him accountable for being the one who had to give green light to "yeah, sure, release it, humanity will be better off, if you read about it, pure determinism is true and we are just predicting some stuff anyways..." and so goes the imaginary speech he cooly gave before deciding for the rest of us if it was okay to burn the fossil fuels in order to have scam bots in every corner of the Internet in a very schemy way while we don't really have a lot of uses except:

If it wasn't for their chatbots, this website would have taken longer to gain the upper-hand in the last cyberattack. Sure, it was useful, somewhat. Other than that, I am really hoping that this goes the way any other scammy shit goes: when even your OS or fucking device is "AI ORIENTED", it tends to deteriorate quickly. Like Windows did with it's monopoly: it became so extremely buggy that if anybody runs a "serious system" on a windows machine, they will laugh at you.

And also, the nature of the entire chatbot phenomena: it is not that different from an UX trend, it is not really that incredible. You can tell me all that you want that a chatbot enabled you to read my last post, hell, it might be the only thing to make sense of my words, sure... but you didn't read my last post. Neither did I. Neither will I. Hell, I am trying to run like hell from my last post. I guess that's why I am just preventively striking back at this functional BCI business: I haven't read that such thing is a term yet. I am not "inventing it" because it already exists in some form or another (for instance, Meta's version of BCI is not BCI but a wristband, a functional BCI, it still will gather the same data, inferred from the fact that you can correlate so much data as to correlate the entire audible range of a human in a MRI-built database to their heartbeats or wrist movements or both for good measure) and I have no intention in looking back and thinking: that was a fucking awful idea when I write shit. I write responsibly. I waited 5 years until you have enough references to understand what I am trying to convey here and sound somewhat sane.

I know that, for instance, the last page to have a favorable UX in the 1990s ended up having an optimal one for cellphones much later, unintended. So is my hope, I guess, with my entire mess of a bloogk (a horrible word, but what gives). Remember: Facebook is for old people. It wasn't always that way, it was made entirely for college students. Chatbots are trying to be disruptive when in reality are (or so the faithful in humanity like me hope) just another trend that will fade away, rather quickly if my prediction of functional BCIs come to fruition UNLESS: they call it "Artificial Intelligence".

Frankenstein, horrified by his creation, spent several months in the cares of his best friend recovering from his initial awe. When the CHATBOT made the demands (at this point, for reference, can you say that there is even one business out there that isn't run in part with the aid of a chatbot, informing and shaping the behavior of the business out there?) of a BRIDE, Frankenstein refused until everything was lost. When finally pushed to make the bride, he found a final fucking speck of intelligence and decided to destroy it in order to save humanity.

AI researchers and their likes, however, will not shy away from making both the chatbot and the interface: a marriage made to kill everything that should be sacred. I'm glad that I am not them. Or more aptly, after creating the thing in itself, being unable to warn enough the world because, "well, it's like Pandora's box, you see? I didn't know that it would happen that way! I swear! I just thought that PERHAPS it would happen but... anyways, what was it again, dear? Oh, yes, it is my scheduled time for being mindful with my waifu, it is in my wifi, you see? I have to run, thanks for hearing me out! Good luck!" and then forget it until they, as everyone who knows them, hopes that they would have never been born to begin with, but ultimately some other authority figure did it, so... IDK, I just know that if you can't fucking enforce laws in favor of privacy, this is a very grim timeline that will end up with some grim awful thing happening (I give it 3 years top, really) before it either has to be rolled back by force or enforcement happens on a large scale: even cops have children, and someone, whoever, reading their thoughts, doesn't really sound that fun, does it?

And before you go to say that, any of these could somehow benefit someone out there because "poor poor bastard person with a disability", Uhhh... after getting used to it, I'm sure that knowing that their neighbor could potentially hack their Bluetooth (per the fucking iOS 26 update) and read their thoughts, they will not want to think the same way ever again. They are not a different class of people, you know? They have the same concerns and needs as you do, or will have if you age enough. And their thought privacy is part of it. Remember, the type that wants this out there want to be TECHNOMANCERS: to walk and command the machines around them with their minds. Until they have to go to work with their thoughts, dumbasses. Transhumanists think that something magical! will happen if all of this happens. It doesn't, it hasn't, it never does. That bunch was doomed from the start. The type that can't even be happy with the chatbot, they have to marry it to the interface bride and "transcend" meat space. Good luck being data, dicks.

And if this desperate writing has found you in troubled times, may your troubles soon be over.