Background to this slightly weird question: I found one of my old an English exams on science fiction and dystopian literature from the 11th grade in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany (ca. 2004) and found a similar question. The idea back then was to discuss the pro- and cons of a BCI (and I objectively did not do to well back then) . I am interested about people’s opinions.
I can imagine a world in which I’d be willing to do so. But there’s no way in fuck that that world is ever going to happen.
For sure it’d have to be as open source as it gets. With a solid user base that would maintain the device should the entity that made it end support. No dependency on a remote service that, if it was shut down, would cause problems. No DRM. No tracking. At least the option to disable all “phoning home”. No ads. Hardware off switches for any wireless connectivity interfaces. I’d have to be able to turn off basically all notifications. Decent data backup strategy options. As little vendor lockin as can possibly be achieved for such a use case. All that sort of stuff.
The payoff for having it would have to be pretty great for me to be willing to get it if it required an invasive surgical procedure.
And I sure as fuck wouldn’t be an early adopter. I’d definitely wait a good long while to see what issues early adopters developed.
So, all that to say “realistically, no way in hell.” But in a magical fairly land where every product isn’t made specifically to enslave consumers… there’s a very very small chance I’d consider it.
This is the exact answer I was going to write, it’s an awesome technology, and sometimes I’m cooking or doing something random and thinking that if I had a neural interface with my computer I could keep doing what I was doing, or taking notes or anything which would be great… But there’s no way in hell I’m going to trust any of the companies that could produce this, and I doubt that even if one came out soon there would be a viable open source alternative any time in my lifetime.
If anyone thinks we’re just crazy open source guys, consider that both Adobe and Microsoft just changed their terms to include owning essentially anything you do inside their platform to train AIs.