What Comes After AI Is Built Into Everything?

The voice in your head is not yours.

It’s an advertisement urging you to buy a drink from the nearby vending machine. By now, you’ve learned to ignore them. The messages are annoying, but it’s a small price to pay for the convenience.

After the dust settled and AI was everywhere, this new technology is what came next. It came to be called ‘bio-neural access’. The kids call it ‘BINA’. The slogan is “BINA by now”.

 

Two Technology Breakthroughs

BINA is made possible by two technology breakthroughs. 

The first is biological computation. Strands of DNA and custom-made proteins are used to store and manipulate data. Chemical and electrical impulses serve as input and output.

Biological computing is a millennium technology; the first toggle switch was created in e coli in 2000. By 2013, a team created the biological equivalent of a transistor, or as they called it, a transcriptor.  

The second breakthrough comes in the form of computer-neural interfaces, that is, computers that interact directly with the brain. First generation interfaces translate thoughts into computer commands, allowing people to control computers with their minds. We can turn on the lights or drive a car just by thinking about it.

Second generation interfaces tackle the much more difficult task of sending signals directly to the brain. By 2024, researchers had developed computer controlled cockroaches that could navigate a maze. Human brains, though, are much more complex. Human neural stimulation is limited to simulating input to the senses.

 

I Smell Burnt Toast

There was a time every Canadian was familiar with the story. “I smell burnt toast.” By applying stimulation directly to the brain, Wilder Penfield triggered sensory responses, and used this to find and treat parts of the brain responsible for epileptic seizures.

BINA does the same thing on a much larger, more complex, and less destructive scale. Bioneural circuits link directly with human neurons and, applying arrays of neural stimulations, trigger sensations that for all intents and purposes are indistinguishable from real experiences.

People would describe the BINA audio experience as very similar to listening to music using high quality ear pods. The sound feels like it’s in your head. It doesn’t feel like you’re creating the music yourself, but it doesn’t exactly feel like it’s outside yourself either. Nobody else can hear it, of course.

A voice feels like a voice, as though someone very close to you is talking to you. Not whispering, but not loud either. It’s not your voice, at least, not always (some mods of BINA can generate self-talk, to help reinforce positive feelings, goals and values).

 

The BINA Experience

Bio-neural access is limited to the senses; that’s the only place human brains are sufficiently similar to each other to allow an external technology to work reliably. So BINA can’t directly change or generate false beliefs or memories. It’s not like being programmed to learn something; you can’t just download a new language or program yourself to fly a helicopter.

But the senses offer a wide range of experiences. Watching a video can become a multi-sensory experience, with what you see and hear augmented with smells, motions, touch. BIMA can simulate the effect of brain chemistry on our feelings, impacting moods and emotions.

With BIMA, we can project our experiences to external objects and environments. This is similar to the phantom limb syndrome; you are able to feel things that aren’t part of your body. A bulldozer operator can use BINA to feel the dirt being scraped by the shovel. A surgeon can feel micro-interactions between the scalpel and the flesh.

The killer app, though, is interactive BINA, that is, using BINA to communicate with each other. The first and simplest example is the BINA discussion board, where instead of reading and writing text, we ‘hear’ what others have ‘spoken’ in their messages. Advanced forms allow people to share other sensations and even full experiences of their activities and adventures.

 

Learning to Feel

To the surprise of some, but not others, BINA doesn’t improve learning on its own. The experience of having a person teach you mathematics is not improved by internalizing the sensation and delivering it by machine. In some cases, the learning experience is actually degraded, as the machine never captures the nuances of learning the way a human teacher would. 

At the same time, to experience and especially to interact using BINA requires a range of completely new skills. At a minimum, for example, people need to learn to discern generated experiences from what’s really happening. Using BINA could actually be dangerous if you’re reacting to things that aren’t there.

As well, there is a need for new skills related to discernment and mindfulness. These are especially important in interactive modes, where we want to be careful to shape the experience before sending it. It’s a bit like learning to think before you speak, though after a generation of social media it has become a lost art.

As BINA experiences become more complex, users must master intentionality and comprehension, that is, they need to learn what these feelings signify or represent. This is something we do naturally as humans with human senses; we just ‘know’ that we’re seeing objects and people and such. But BINA experiences are not natural, and so we have to learn to ‘construct’ new realities from them.

Finally, there are widespread concerns about the ethical and responsible use of BINA but individually and collectively. It’s easy to lose oneself in BINA or to develop a ‘BINA addition’. Living in a dream world is harmful physically and psychologically. Sending BINA messages to others involves a range of new risks: advertising must be limited in capability, sending disruptive messages (like jump scares) is prohibited. Wider harms like misinformation, false experiences, and manipulation are harder to legislate, which underlies the need for BINA skills.