Valve's Gabe Newell imagines “editing” personalities with future headsets - Ars Technica

In a Monday interview with New Zealand's 1 News, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell finally began teasing a more intriguing level of BCI interaction: one that changes the state of your brain.

"Our ability to create experiences in people's brains, that aren't mediated through their meat peripherals [e.g., fingers, eyes], will be better than is [currently] possible," Newell asserts as part of his latest 12-minute video interview.

Later, he claims that "the real world will seem flat, colorless, and blurry compared to the experiences that you'll be able to create in people's brains.".

But he also has a sales-pitch example of how mainstream acceptance could begin: with brain-control apps, whose interfaces resemble modern phone apps, for boosts like easier sleep.

"Sleep will become an app you run, where you input, 'I need this much sleep, this much REM,'" Newell says.

Newell mentions Valve's work on synthetic hands as a collaboration with other researchers, then adds, "As soon as you do that, you say, 'Oh, can you give people a tentacle?' Then you think, 'Oh, brains were never designed to have tentacles,' but it turns out, brains are really flexible." Why Newell immediately jumped to tentacles as a fantasy appendage is beyond us, but, hey.

During this surface-level interview, however, Newell is careful not to estimate when such brain-input manipulation might ever come to bear on the market.

The juicier parts of the interview are the much more forward-looking ones, where Newell goes so far as to hint at playing God.

You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes were created by this low-cost bidder who didn't care about failure rates and RMAs.

If modern-day handlers of your financial and personal data screw that up, Newell points out, "they'll drive consumer acceptance off a cliff." And he also doesn't envision a world where everyone feels required to use BCIs, just like modern-day life doesn't necessarily require smartphones.