The Goals of Neurotechnology

Unfortunately, from a PR standpoint, neurotechnology doesn’t have a single, intuitive goal like climate tech, longevity research, or to a lesser extent artificial intelligence.

Instead the state of neurotech is like the early days of personal computing (god help us). There are so many possible use cases that it’s hard to make a succinct argument for its importance.

So in lieu of a succinct argument, here’s an unprioritized list of possible neurotech applications. Hopefully it’ll help people appreciate that neurotech is about more than controlling their phones with their brains.

Note: I’m not endorsing all these goals as desirable. There are a lot I personally wouldn’t want. Going for completeness here.

• Neurological disease
  • Cure Alzheimer’s
  • Cure ALS, MD, MS, MG
  • Cure epilepsy
  • Cure migraine
  • Cure Parkinson’s and tremor
  • Cure deafness and blindness
  • Cure paralysis
• Neuropsychiatric disorders
  • Cure chronic pain
  • Cure depression
  • Cure anxiety disorders
  • Cure dissociative disorders
  • Cure bipolar disorder
  • Cure PTSD
  • Cure communication disorders
  • Cure addiction and substance-abuse disorders
  • Cure schizophrenia
  • Cure visual and auditory hallucination
  • Cure amnesia and dementia
  • Cure insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, and other sleep disorders
  • Cure eating disorders
  • Cure OCD
  • Cure personality disorders
  • Cure jet lag
  • Early diagnosis and monitoring of all the above
• Being your best self
  • Dialable moods, à la the Penfield Mood Organ
  • Identify, break out of, and deprogram negative thought loops or “attractor states”
    • E.g. break the self-fulfilling depression symptom of not wanting to seek treatment for depression
  • Perfect therapy: identify the precise root psychological causes of whatever is ailing you
    • Super-CBT/IFS
    • And as a corollary, know exactly how much you are making progress
  • Selective amnesia/salience of memories
    • Forget your favorite book and read it again for the first time
    • Never forget names
  • Customizable personality traits
    • Empathy, introversion, extraversion, big 5, etc.
    • Might have to be combined with augmented memory to avoid getting taken advantage of
    • Could be sharable: spend a day with the personality of someone you admire
  • Install and uninstall motivations, habits, or aversions
    • Like hypnosis but 1000x more effective
  • Flow on-demand
    • Set focus on specific tasks for specific amounts of time
  • Remove your discount rate
    • Right before making a decision, immediately feel the pleasure or pain you’ll eventually feel upon making a good or bad decision.
  • Augmented self-awareness
    • Pattern matching: “The last time your brain activity looked like this, here’s what you wrote about it/here’s what was going on.”
    • Fully honest introspection
      • E.g. a full annoyance audit for your daily life
  • Arbitrary control of time perception
    • “Fast-forward” through boring tasks
    • Moments of eternity have interesting implications for utilitarianism…
  • Any good thing you can do with DBS
• New Qualia
  • Designer synesthesia
    • Multiplex arbitrary combinations of sensory or cognitive processes
  • Controlled activation of specific subsets of psychedelic/psychoactive experience
  • Perfect or anticipatory neurofeedback
    • E.g. A mirror that reflected what you were going to do before you did it
  • Lucid-dreaming on-demand
  • Give the non-verbal parts of your mind the ability to communicate
  • Give yourself new senses, as arbitrary as sensing technology allows
    • E.g. give yourself dog-level smell abilities
    • For ML practitioners: perception and control in high-dimensional vector spaces
  • Perfect memory replay
    • Sharable feelings or memories that you could give to friends
  • Record your dreams
  • Experience being someone with opposing political or ethical views
  • Matrix-level VR
    • Perhaps via the cranial and peripheral nerves
    • A great option for virtual training, e.g. surgery
  • Uploading consciousness to new hardware
• Augmentation
  • BCI (brain-computer interface)
    • Control an exoskeleton
    • Control a completely different body
    • Control a computer interface
    • Connect to external databases and datastreams
      • A key design choice will be how to tell the user when a thought is from the computer vs. from the brain
  • “I know kung fu” and other accelerated learning
    • Or perhaps learn while asleep
  • Safe control over energy level
  • Warnings when mood or mind starts to shift out-of-bounds
    • I.e. summoning conscious control whenever it fades away
  • Force mood or mind out-of-bounds
    • Enhance creativity
    • Break Einstellung effect
  • Sleep on command, for exact durations of time
  • Perfect sleep quality
  • Jhana on tap
  • Perfect talent/skill assessment and progress tracking
  • Animal communication
    • Underrated. Could tell us a lot about animal suffering. Especially for animals that don’t express their feelings as much as humans.
    • Is someone doing a neurotech-for-dogs play?
  • Splitting consciousness
    • Temporary callosotomy: have your left and right hands do two fully independent tasks simultaneously
    • Firewall your judgment: fully believe one side of a debate is correct and write an argument for that position, and then fully switch beliefs to the opposing side and repeat
    • Make better probabilistic estimates via single-person wisdom of the crowd
  • Perfect lie detection
    • Know when you’re lying to yourself
    • Can (voluntarily!) certify to others that you’re telling the truth
  • Brain merging
    • Directly share experience with others
• Experiments
  • Functional localization experiments
    • Generalized Wada test
    • The Phineas Gage experience would be a fun exhibit at a science museum
  • Make p-zombies
    • Manipulate the circuitry involved in sleepwalking and memory formation to let people act “normally” but without conscious experience
  • Try whatever the latest AI alignment methods are in vivo
    • E.g. OpenAI Microscope on organoids, C. elegans, or your own brain
  • Substrate dependence
    • Gradually replace parts of brain with a model
      • Anesthetize small region of cortex or cerebellum, surround with microelectrode array, try to mimic I/O behavior to the point where the person can’t tell the difference. Expand the anesthetized area and repeat.
    • Same experiment but where you spread out the processor through space and time, à la Permutation City

Thanks to Milan Griffes and Quintin Frerichs for brainstorming.

Have feedback? Find a mistake? Please let me know!