Taken the wrong path? U.S. polls show that Americans don't want brain chips. Last week, entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that his company, Neuralink, a company trying to develop brain implants to reconcile the connection between the brain and technology, had implanted a product in a human test subject.
A recent YouGov poll shows that interest in this type of device will be limited by skepticism about its potential, but the technology does have a healthy legion of fans among sci-fi fans. The poll was conducted between January 30 and February 1, 2024, with a total of 1,000 respondents participating, with a margin of error of 39。The results of the survey show that only 8% of respondents would consider implanting a computer chip in their brains if the technology had passed the experimental stage and gone commercially for sale. The poll found that 82 percent of respondents probably won't or definitely won't, and 10 percent didn't make a decision. There was little interest from potential test subjects: only 2% of respondents"Definitely"Will consider in"within the next year"A computer chip is implanted in the brain, which is below the margin of error of the poll. Overall, only 5% of respondents would consider microchipping in the next year. Men are more than three times more likely than women (13% vs. 4%) to eventually receive commercially produced brain chips. Democrats and independents are twice as likely as Republicans to consider this technique (10% vs. 5%). In science fiction literature, the idea of altering or ** a person's brain to gain great psychic powers has been around for a long time. Admittedly, this is often a cautionary tale against self-defeating the foundations of human cognition, but it does have some fictional precedents, from the psycho in Dune to the tragic success of Flowers for Algernon. Familiarity with these texts is often associated with an increased demand for brain chips. If the chip was commercially produced and no longer experimental, 8% of respondents would be willing to buy it, compared to 19% of respondents who had read titles such as Ender's Game. In fact, if there's a group of people that neuralink is interested in, it's basically"Someone who claims to have read Frank Herbert's Dune"。All in all, 19% of respondents who said they had read Dune would buy a commercially available brain chip, and 11% who said they had read Dune would buy it this year. Somewhat disturbingly, 13% of those surveyed who said they had read "Flowers for Algernon" (an iconic short story about a catastrophic brain implant surgery**) were still interested in chips, which is the closest we got to real life"Don't cause torture"situation. 2024 Book of Answers