The Pentagon is flirting with the idea of humans controlling machines with their minds.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of the Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military, is choosing teams that will create a “neural interface” that would let troops connect to military systems using their brainwaves and also have the systems transmit back information directly to users’ brains.
As nextgov.com reports, “The Next-Generation Non-Surgical Neurotechnology, or N3, program aims to combine the speed and processing power of computers with humans’ ability to adapt to complex situations, DARPA said. In other words, the technology would let people control, feel and interact with a remote machine as though it were a part of their own body.”
Al Emondi, the program manager at DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, told nextgov.com, “From the first time a human carved a rock into a blade or formed a spear, humans have been creating tools to help them interact with the world around them. The tools we use have grown more sophisticated over time … but these still require some form of physical control interface—touch, motion or voice. What neural interfaces promise is a richer, more powerful and more natural experience in which our brains effectively become the tool.”
DARPA has already created a prosthetic limb which allows disabled veterans to control it using an electrode implanted in their brain.
The N3 program is testing non-invasive interfaces outside the body and interfaces used by swallowing different chemical compounds to help external sensors connect to the brain.
Emondi offered a scenario in which a pilot could coordinate a fleet of drones with their thoughts; he also imagined troops using their brains to manipulate a remotely deployed robot.
Nextgov.com writes:
He added cybersecurity specialists could even connect to the system to monitor different parts of a computer network with their physical bodies. Depending on how the interface is designed, that specialist might “hear” a cyberattack when it happens or “feel” it in the part of their body that corresponds to a section of the network.
The teams working on the project have four years to create a working neural interface.