“Sharing your thoughts” takes on new meaning as Facebook and Elon Musk dive into your neurons.

Hello Backchannel folk, Steven here.

In a 2004 conversation I had with Google’s cofounders, Larry Page was talking about his vision for the future of search. “Eventually you’ll have the implant,” he told me, “where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.” The remark became notorious, used frequently by reporters and cultural critics as evidence that the ambitions of Google’s founders — and indeed of Silicon Valley in general — would not stop short of a scenario where our very consciousness is plugged into some commercial enterprise’s operating system. The only consolation for those horrified commentators was that the concept was outlandish and impractical, safely consigned to the realm of science fiction.

No more. Last week at Facebook’s F8 conference, former DARPA head Regina Dugan, who leads its research group called Building 8, revealed that Facebook was working on a Brain Machine Interface (BMI) project. Yes, Facebook, whose goal is to connect everyone in the world to its network, now is exploring how to navigate the ultimate last mile problem — the gap between your brain and the keyboard. And for good measure Dugan talked about her group’s work on a second project that could eliminate the screen by communicating text messages through your skin.

After her keynote, I met with Dugan and the respective product heads of the brain and skin projects. Based on the DARPA model of hiring scientists for two-year sprints to determine viability of ambitious projects, Dugan hired Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Mark Chevillet to work on a system that would transfer brain signals to text. Using noninvasive optical light sensors, Facebook could analyze the neuro-signature of words that a user consciously directs to the “pre-speech” brain region — basically a launch pad for what someone wants to say or write — and then produce it on a computer screen or file, at a rate of 100 words a minute.

My own unconnected mind would have been reeling more had I not been sensing that BMI work was creeping up to a tipping point as of late. A few months ago, I did an on-stage interview and then hung out a bit with Bryan Johnson. He’s an entrepreneur (he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million) who founded Kernel, a company planning to develop tiny chips that could be implanted in a brain (a “neuroprosthetic”) and mess with the way that neurons signal each other. Originally it would help improve the cognitive functions of those suffering from dementia and other disorders. Ultimately, though, Johnson sees his product as augmenting the brains of healthy people. Since AI and deep learning are accelerating the cognition of machines so quickly, why not do the same for our brains, he argues.

Not long after that, our current Visionary-In-Chief Elon Musk announced his own BMI scheme, called Neuralink. Last week, via a long post on writer Tim Urban’s Wait But Why website, he revealed more details. As with Johnson’s Kernel, Musk is working on an implant that at first would help people with brain impairments such as stroke. Ultimately, however, Musk sees these as something that everyone would want. Again like Johnson, Musk views brain augmentation as a way that humans can compete with AI. As for the weirdness factor, Musk says that we fail to admit how much we are already kind of cyborgs. “You’re already a different creature than you would have been 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” he said to Wait But Why. “I think people — they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.”

So this is getting real. For the last year people have been babbling about the conversational interface. BMI trumps this initiative. This new interface doesn’t require us to even speak. Or look up from our screen.

Weirdly, the rationale that Dugan offered for her BMI project was that it would solve the problem of our appearing rude when we interrupt social contact by peering at our screens, a complaint her mother voiced to her. Which brings up a question: Is it really more polite to carry on a conversation with Mom while busily dispatching emails via brainwave?

Dugan says that she won’t be fazed if some people freak out about this. As someone who’s worked on emergent technology for a long time, she says that it’s best to concentrate on the work, confident that it will ultimately result in improving our lives. She uses the Human Genome Project as an example of an initiative that unsettled people at first, but now is accepted as something that will produce huge value. She also vows that Facebook will have some sort of ethics framework to make sure the work doesn’t violate privacy or become misused.

Still, I wonder. If by, say, 2025, we can accurately interpret the brain patterns of words in the regions where people consciously intend the thoughts to be shared, who’s to say that by 2040 or so, we won’t get good at shooting optical beams at your skull to figure out what you’re really thinking? It’s been more than 50 years since Bob Dylan wrote, “If my thought-dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” Sharpen the blades!

That’s the dark scenario. The rosier version is that we all become super-brains or at the least super-brain communicators. And I mean all of us — if most people are zooming around with Lamborghini intelligence, you certainly don’t want to be left behind in a Model T.

In any case, we may one day look back at this week as the beginning of the Brain Machine Interface era. Please mark this down. Or, if you are conducting a search for this declaration a few years from now, you can just think the query. Just like Larry Page said.