Elon, the monkeys and you: the atrocity of giving up control of our thoughts

We can hate others from the intimacy of our ideas. We are owners of our thoughts and our silences. We have the right not to testify against ourselves and to take advantage of the Fifth Amendment. Some of us think in words and others in images, it seems. But we all take refuge in that hardware that is our brain to criticize the boss, painfully kill that neighbor who doesn't pay the bills, or lust after our neighbor's wife. As long as you do not carry out your homicidal or violent intentions, you are protected by the confidentiality of your mind. And that is very powerful. Thought is so powerful that it guides revolutions, plans hostile takeovers, invents realities such as states and laws, and destabilizes social peace. We have been programmed by religions not to have impure thoughts, to cap our imagination lest the line between intention and act be so fine that we skip it in an Amen-Jesus.

What ruler would not want to know what is going through his citizens' heads, how much we would save in the state budget if we knew the true motivations of people in real time, and how many couple fights would end if when he said Without thinking about anything, you could actually verify that you have the piped music connected. Interesting people would be unmasked by being silent and the police would finally have their pre-crime. Panoptic paradise.

In front of everyone, our thoughts are the warrior's rest, our only personal heritage. We are what happens in our heads, the conscious, the unconscious, our ego and our superego. That's why two recent pieces of news have plunged me into unrest. I had been ruminating on the first since Elon Musk decided to found a company to develop brain-machine devices. I already had a shock when he killed a dozen monkeys in which he had implanted them and, even so, he asked for human volunteers that he seems to have found. Through his Twitter account (I refuse to call him We do not know for sure if the transplant recipient has any disease related to motor skills, but what Musk has promised us is that we will be able to type with our minds on our mobile phone. Anyone who has observed how he has managed the social network this last year will not doubt what will happen to his identity, ideas and secrets if he puts them in the hands of an oligophrenic who has stopped taking medication.

The other news that startled me was the statements made by the director of the Data Protection Agency to this newspaper. Mar España, driven by the legitimate mission of protecting minors from the evils that lurk behind the screens, affirms that “the agency is going to collaborate in the preparation of the bill for the comprehensive protection of minors on the internet with the inclusion of called neurorights. According to experts, young people have a greater vulnerability regarding the impact of technology on their neurodevelopment as their brains are in training.” Let's stop for a moment here, because so much good will, mistaken in its objective and definition, needs clarification. Neurorights (to identity, free will, mental privacy, equitable access and protection against bias) are designed based on neurotechnologies and their more than obvious dangers.

According to the report issued by the Office of Science and Technology of the Congress of Deputies, Advances in neuroscience: applications and ethical implications, Neurotechnology “allows a direct connection between a device and the nervous system (central and peripheral) to record or modify nervous activity. They combine neuroscience with other advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, or virtual reality, to modulate or measure various aspects of brain activity including consciousness and thinking. Is the Spanish data supervisor assuming that children are going to connect a peripheral in the head to enter TikTok, the metaverse (whatever that is) or to hit shots in a video game with the power of their mind, and then we are going to protect them? I prefer to think that the director of the Agency is more on the side of those of us who believe that brains are configured according to what happens to them in their formative years and that we must be on the side of pseudoscientists to ensure that their wiring be the healthy one, not from the side of those who believe that brain-machine technologies have to be a consumer good like smart phones.

Because giving up control of our thoughts seems atrocious to me. If we believe that whoever accesses our brain and collects our neural data is not going to misuse it, they have lived in a different dimension in the last 20 years, they live dumbly in the paradigm of doors and fields, or, what is worse, He has an economic interest in making us commune with millstones. It is foolish to be convinced into recreational, domestic or personal use based on the benevolent or beneficial uses of a technology. Since brain implants can make a quadriplegic walk, we are going to give them to everyone so they can play the game. Fortnite, change TV channels with your mind or answer emails with your thoughts. If climate change does not kill us, comfort will kill us. Wall-e It's not a movie, it's a premonition.

That's why it's sad that a data supervisor or the EU as a whole consider the battle lost and get down to the bureaucratic management of the corpses. The entire scientific community is working on the development of these neurorights mentioned under the assumption that we are going to collect this data, that any resistance to the advancement of science, even if no one has asked for this giant step to be applied to my toaster, is unstoppable and that any resistance is not only futile but a blunder. Neurorights that in a multi-jurisdictional Internet, with limitations of economic, personal and technical knowledge, will not be possible to guarantee. As it already happens. Or is some European data supervisor going to be able to go to China and sanction the largest video game company in the world for collecting the thoughts of our citizens and using them against them?

We already know what the cost of this erroneous thinking is. let's have the courage of the Supreme Court of Chile. There is no need for universal neurorights if we control the manufacture, sale and distribution of brain-machine devices and regulate them as medical devices. Let's use technology in those environments in which they are beneficial to human beings and prohibit their use in those that we know will not be beneficial and that we are incapable of controlling. Because there is no data better protected than that which is not collected and because I want to continue killing people in the privacy of my thoughts.

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