Facebook Believes Machine-Brain Interface Is The Future Of Social Media

Despite the fact that it is already in practically every aspect of modern life, Facebook wants to occupy a place in the one place that users still have some privacy; their brains. The social network is working on an interface technology that will allow machines to communicate directly with the brain. In order to assuage fears among users of ethics violations, Facebook will also create a panel to keep the technology in check.

Facebook made the announcement on Wednesday during the F8 Developers conference, Gizmodo reports, where the company’s R&D head Regina Dugan showcased how they literally want to read their users’ minds. This would allow people to do things like typing without a keyboard or click on buttons without a mouse. Dugan told the crowd that they hope to advance the technology to a point where users can type up to 100 words a minute.

“That’s five times faster than you can type on your smartphone, and it’s straight from your brain,” Dugan explained. “Your brain activity contains more information than what a word sounds like and how it’s spelled; it also contains semantic information of what those words mean.”

Scrapping the need for physical or virtual keyboards in favor of direct-to-brain interface has been considered an inevitable eventuality by many scientists, mostly because it falls directly in line with the natural progression that human development follows. It’s convenient, caters to the lazier side of people, and generates quite a bit of buzz.

On the other hand, this kind of technology does involve Facebook having direct access to the brain, which might make a lot of people uncomfortable to even think about. This is why the social network will be creating something called an Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) panel to oversee the mind-reading feature, TechCrunch reports.

The panel will supposedly work with independent and government review boards in order to make sure that no ethics violations occur. Whether or not this is the case, however, is questionable considering Facebook’s history of privacy issues.