Fancied some hot neural-machine interfacing action but not totally sold on a chip buried in your head by Neuralink’s slightly (completely) terrifying robosurgeon and its nightmarish needle? Then good old Zuck’ and Meta have something for you.
It’s a wristband that tracks hand and finger movements by detecting the neural electrical signals passing through the nerves in your arm using an entirely non-invasive technique called electromyography. Sounds much more friendly? Yes. And yet no.
Meta showed off the device as an experimental prototype back in 2021. Now Meta CEO Mark Zuckerbergsays the company is working on bringing it to market.
“We’ve been working on this for a while, it’s not a one year project. But we’re quite a few years into it and we’re close to having something, to having a product in the next few years,” Zuckerberg revealed in an interview on the Morning Brew Daily
Now, if you’re thinking, so what, this is just a fancy way to move a mouse pointer or game controller… not so fast.
Inevitably, Meta’s vision is much more profound than that, for better and worse.
“I don’t mean like a chip that you jack into your brain,” he says, “I wouldn’t want to use version one of that.” Uh huh.
According to His Zuckness, our nervous system has lots of spare bandwidth such that we can use its signaling to send control inputs without necessarily making significant physical movements.
