I know the internet lives the guy but no. Just no.

Some people are starting to wake up to the fact that the guy is just another libertarian billionaire, he just happens to be in charge of a company that made a product people love enough to give them monopolistic powers.

Edit: these people aren't in this thread

Edit 2: first edit was from when the votes on that comment were at -8, happy to see that for once one of my comments on this subject ends up in the positives

Might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I don't really see a problem with brain implants. I wouldn't put anything in my brain in a thousand years, but if someone's willing to accept the risks, why not? They have the potential to significantly improve quality of life for many people.

At some point in humanity's future, I assume that it will be a thing and be widespread. Just too many potential benefits to having high-bandwidth links to the brain not to eventually do it.

But it's a path with a lot of hurdles along the way, and risks.

Beyond expanding the brain’s functions it can fix things like some forms of blindness

You’re not wrong, the downvoters are just sad because you are right. Just takes one personality shift from Gabe to turn him from beloved figurehead to shitty billionaire and being reminded of that sucks.

If I lived in, say, Iain Banks's post-scarcity anarcho-communist utopia The Culture , I'd get a neural lace in a heartbeat. But living in this capitalist dystopia that most of us does, I don't trust corporations to not use this sort of technology for domination over the populace.

For perspectives on how it might go (general vibes, not the same technology) I recommend HYPER-REALITY (6 mins short film) or David Brin's Existence novel.

It's exactly like AI. Could the technology be useful were it to be used in service of goals that would serve humanity? Absolutely. Will it be used by billionaires in a way that will be harmful to most people in order to further entrench their power? Most definitely.

"Someone might abuse it" is a reasonable concern. "Therefore nobody should be allowed to use it" is not a reasonable answer to that concern, IMO. We'd never have anything with that approach.

If you just pay attention more than the average person you quickly realize that he's already a shitty billionaire.

Steam underage gambling profits him directly.

He owns a yacht collection while his clients can't afford to own the place they live in. How's that for an environmental impact?

His reaction to George Floyd's murder wasn't that Valve should release a statement as he considered that problematic (source ), instead he gave each employee 10k to spend however they felt like. Where I used to work we used to call that a "shut the fuck up". Employees are complaining about something? Here's 10k each for them to shut the fuck up. Hell, they could spend that money to finance far right groups if they wanted, Newell didn't care!

Women employees with managerial positions at Valve? What women employees?

Valve takes a 30% cut but Newell is a billionaire, which means they could afford to take a much smaller cut, he could have hundreds of millions instead and the devs could have more money in their pockets.

Another problem is abandonment. When the company goes under or the device becomes outdated and they no longer want to support it the device can't be easily removed. If the device was fixing a disability, the person's disability will be reinstated.

It could become the standard in time, like smartphones. I can easily see it becoming the norm, making it more expensive and difficult to use a normal smartphone instead of some brain implant, much like how "dumbphones" are coming back as overpriced and gimmicky. Maybe they pullsomething similar to the "green bubble" like apple did, alienating people without implants.

I suspect we will end up in a situation where you have a "mount" that is connected to your brain. The mount is able to be serviced by any company in the field, because it is standard. From there, you have the actual chips which are going to be relatively easy to install and remove, eventually you might even be able to do so at your house. This allows competition while allowing being consumer friendly.

As for the disability side of things, it just means that when your chip is no longer serviced you easily swap it for another companies whose are.

My piercings are against God but technoligarchs think they will convince those people brain chips you can swap out on the fly are okay. lol

Anyways I’ll take one brain chip here in like 5 years.

"has long toyed with the idea that your brain should be more connected to your PC"

seems like billionaires' wet dream to be honest

I'm not trying to convince anyone. I well aware of where the tech will be in 30 years and I am getting one. If anyone else has a problem with it, they can wait until then to do their surprise pikachu face when the tech ends up being awesome, exactly how AI is going. LLMs are basically useless, but outside of those AI even in it's modern incarnation is wildly inpressive, and will only get moreso.

10 years ago no one believed me when i told them about the LLMs we currently have. It was around that time I realised that the public makes sweeping generalizations about tech when 99% of them don't understand the tech, the math, or even that something being present in nature means its replicable, because nature can replicate it(and therefore so can humans). That last one seems to be a huge disconnect in peoples cognitive abilites.

Edit: also anyone who tells you anything about your piercings in a disrespectful light can go suck an egg, they don't live in your body. I realize im autistic but the fact that people try that shit and then other people are susceptable to that sort of societal pressure is wild to me. I do what I want, when I want, however I want. People call me weird and I openly ridicule them for thinking their opinion holds any sway over me. You try to shame me, and I will shame you for your massively inflated ego that you think has power over me.

This is a very important concern. Tech companies already exert entirely too much power over society through smart phones and their accompanying apps. The damage they would do with direct access to your neurons is incalculable.

The only thing that comforts me is that I firmly expect that society as we know it will entirely collapse before this technology can really be capitalized. It's not a very comforting expectation, but it somehow bothers me less than the idea of techno-fascist corporate feudal states taking control of everyone's thoughts.

There's a lot to be said for the scale of damage that can be done with something, especially relative to the effort needed to do that damage.

These days tech companies are doing enormous damage to people's brains (saturating our dopamine receptors to the point that many people have depression and executive dysfunction) to turn us all into consumption machines that can only find happiness by consuming content and buying commercial products and services.

Imagine how much more harm they'll do when they have direct access to our neurons, without even LED pixels as a buffer in between.

So regulate the uses of the technology. Don't ban it outright.

Those companies are doing their manipulation currently by using the Internet and social media, should the Internet and social media be banned outright? We're using social media to discuss this right now, that discussion should be suppressed?