Yesterday, I came across this CNBC article discussing a brain implant company. The article is about Palantir co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel who has invested in a company that places computer chips into people’s heads to help improve their life in some fashion.
Brain-Computer Interfaces
The article explains, brain-computer interfaces (BCI),
Measuring just a few millimeters, BCIs are designed to enable humans to do things they couldn’t previously do; Blackrock and Neuralink are targeting their first products at people with limited movement and other disabilities.
As we can read, the aim of the product right now is to help people with disabilities.
“There are human patients using our implants and technology already to accomplish things directly with their minds that were unimaginable 10 years ago,” said Gerhardt, who met his electrical engineer co-founder Florian Solzbacher at boarding school in Wales three decades ago.
Sounds good for those who are disabled.
“To enable people to walk, talk, see, hear and feel again is a massive market, as unfortunately 1.7% of the U.S. population, or around 5.4 million people in the U.S., are living with some form of paralysis,” he said.
Sounds better.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to walk, talk, see, hear, and feel again if they had the ability to do that?
For me, this draws a fine line though. Reproducing an ability that was lost with technology is what technology is all about. Making our lives easier or benefiting from it in some, dare I say, natural way.
Now this is where it gets scary.
Transhumanism
“I am confident that in less than 20 years’ time, we will all have a BCI,” he said. “The ultimate potential of this technology is to be a fundamental input-output device used by all of us, unlocking truly astonishing use cases and abilities — such as superhuman memory augmentation or telepathic communication. It is impossible today to imagine what the future will look like, but I believe Blackrock will be the one to take us there.”
Now that right there. That describes an entirely new purpose for these brain-computer interfaces. What we just read describes transhumanism which seeks to augment the human body with machines in order to make it, better.
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That is an absolutely dangerous road to travel down.
Imagine a world where this becomes possible. Society would break down even more than we can imagine. There would be classes of people who have brain-computer implants, and those who do not. Those with implants would be able to function better, faster, and more efficient than those without implants.
It would render natural people, obsolete.
The People Are One
We can envision a world where only those with implants have skilled jobs and those without are second class citizens. God never intended such a lifestyle for His people. Though I do believe God told us, things like this would be possible when He said at the Tower of Babel,
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Genesis 11:6
Mankind is essentially one today, just like at the Tower of Babel thousands of years ago. Only today, our knowledge has far exceeded anything in human history, (Daniel 12:4). We can instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere with a device in the palm of our hand.
We can defy the laws of gravity through flight and space travel transporting ourselves across the globe in previously unimaginable time. We have come along way, yet the more progress we make, the more we seem to drift away from God. The more progress we make, the more we entertain the thought that we can be gods ourselves.
Ironically, that is exactly what Satan told Eve in the Garden of Eden, (Genesis 3:5). As the old adage goes, history repeats itself, (Ecclesiastes 1:9).