There are interesting reactions on StumbleUpon to my “Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams” article from early last year. I’ve obviously been scaring some people, which is always interesting.

In the article, I said, “By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety”, and then went on to talk about how the device could even be used to control your dreams. I originally wrote about drilling tiny holes in the skull to introduce electrodes, but now I mentioned the recent advance of wireless brain activation devices using light-sensitive nanoparticles. Another piece of info that came out since I wrote the original was this press release on Physorg titled “Dreams may no longer be secret with Japan computer screen”.

Some people were intimidated or cautious of the idea:

“freaky, to say the least”

“I love my dreams and don’t want anyone messing with them! Imagine people having the potential to manipulate you with your innermost desires and insecurities… If nothing else remains sacred, our dreams should.”

“would be interesting, but could definitely be abused…”

Others had foundational philosophical objections:

“Although I found the writer’s conjunctures interesting, this is just wrong on so many levels. Dreams serve as the conduit between mind, body and spirit. A profound and mysterious process we don’t fully understand but without which we will go mad and eventually die. They are not meant to be reduced to mere bits and bytes, played back at leisure.”

What was the most interesting to me was the awe that some readers felt that dreams are really just neural activation patterns in our brain, entirely susceptible to one day being recorded and controlled.

You don’t have to be a visionary futurist to see that brain-computer interfaces are continuing to advance, and that everything we experience consists of a unique neural activation pattern, nothing more. Even after The Matrix popularized this familiar concept, some people are still having a difficult time coming to terms with it.

But the world gets more scientific as time goes on, and fewer people view dreams in a mystical, pseudoscientific light. Like everything else, they are virtual, but correspond to precise electrical states in the brain. These states will be viewed and manipulated in ever-increasing detail. No molecular nanotechnology is necessary — though that would throw the doors open to such technologies in an abrupt and intimidating way. We have to be careful about how we tread, though forcing such care upon a world full of profit-motivated hardware and software developers seems difficult if not impossible. Lack of care is the default state.

Dreams are pretty cool, even though I seem to have mildly irritating or neutral ones just as often if not more than explicitly good or impressive ones. Maybe I could solve that problem with a brain-computer interface, one day.

George Dvorsky once pointed out that sleep might be one of those things that we won’t care to abandon even if we gain the technology to do so. “I ain’t givin’ up on sleep”, he said. In that article, he said, “I wish some of my dreams could be made into movies”. The subject of my Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams article was that very topic — I predicted that there would be “dream celebrities” — people who freely upload their dreams for others to examine, followed by a positive reception. People might lead double lives — boring accountant by day, world-famous lucid dreamer by night. Some people might even get paid for their dreams.

Can you imagine handing out a business card, “Archibald McGee, Dreamer”? The sexiness of a rock star pales by comparison. The new media of the mid-to-late 21st century (if we survive, and that’s a big if) will be us showering each other with the full extent of our imaginations. Not mediated by words or instruments or the limitations of human speech. Just straight, direct imagination, from my neurons to yours. By these standards, at the present time we barely even know each other.

I want to experience genius first-hand to the extent that it is possible — feel the inner sensations of a Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, or Bill Gates. Some geniuses seem consistently crabby and frustrated at the less intelligent people around them — what would it be like to feel that way? Though the BCI could not transfer you the knowledge of geniuses, it might be able to simulate their emotional states and the visual content of their mental imagery. Such BCI devices might be rudimentary windows into intelligence enhancement.

Still, like some others, such as Peter Voss, I think that self-improving AGI will arrive before we achieve such sophisticated brain-computer interfaces. So we will have to confront that before going anywhere else. That confrontation could leave us splattered against the wall, unless we are very careful in the way we go about designing the motivational system of said “AGI”.