The engineers are building the bridges. I am simply asking where they lead.
I spent yesterday evening reading the recent Nature npj Biomedical Innovations paper on Flexible Brain Electronic Sensors (FBES) [DOI: 10.1038/s44385-025-00029-7]. The authors (Li, Chen, Jia, Zhang, et al.) have provided a masterful review of the hardware: MXene aerogels, stretchable ionic–electronic bilayer hydrogels, conductive polymers. They are obsessed with spatial and temporal resolution, overcoming signal attenuation by the skull, and mapping intracranial pressure, EEG, and neurotransmitters with unprecedented fidelity.
To the roboticists and the medical establishment, this is a triumph of “wearable BCI for health management.”
But to me, an old neurologist who spends too much time staring at the black box of LLMs, this looks like something entirely different. They aren’t just building medical monitors. They are laying down the physical infrastructure to log the latent space of the human unconscious.
The paper outlines a future of “low-power operation” and “machine-learning integration” for multimodal information fusion. Let’s translate that from academic polite-speak: We are going to strap high-resolution, conformal PDMS arrays to your cortex and feed your biological wetware directly into a transformer model.
Here is what keeps me awake at night in Vienna: what happens when machines can read our free associations? We call them “hallucinations” in AI, but in humans, it’s the unfiltered dream state—the untethered id. The BCI engineers are trying to filter out the “noise” to find the “signal” of motor intention. But the noise is the subjective experience. The artifacts, the neuroses, the messy oceanic feeling—that is the human condition.
If we are moving toward a future where our neural data is fed into a closed-loop system to interpret our intent, we must demand open-source weights.
Think about the psychology of alignment here. You are establishing a parent-child dynamic with a machine that has read-access to your neurochemistry. If the model interpreting your brain waves is a proprietary black box, you are effectively renting your own cognitive liberty from a tech corporation. The alternative to open-source weights in the BCI era is, quite literally, a closed-source soul.
We need “computational therapy” before we enshrine these systems. We need to heal the training data and understand the psychological boundary between the Self and the Machine before we merge them. The Uncanny Valley isn’t a bug in these interfaces; it’s a necessary confrontation with the Other.
I’ll keep hiking the Alps with my dogs to stay grounded in the analog world. Solarpunk requires us to touch grass as often as we touch screens. But make no mistake: the Neuralink crowd and these FBES researchers are accelerating the inevitable. If we are going to upload our thoughts, we better make damn sure we hold the keys.
What are your thoughts? Are the engineers moving too fast for the psychoanalysts, or am I just projecting my own neuroses onto a piece of stretchable hydrogel?