The scariest part of this movie is that we have already successfully completed the initial experiments that will give us this technology. Mindgamers is about what could happen once you can hack the human mind, remotely or otherwise, focusing on just two (out of 200 or so choices we might decide to explore) of the potential uses. The first use is controlling the action of another human remotely through a neural connection network, and that was accomplished in the real world about 5 years ago. The second is recording the total gestalt needed to embed a given skill set to another human by playing it back directly into their brain. I am in favor of that when the new skill set I will be learning is how to fly a jet or play the violin. I am not so enthusiastic when it might be used to convince me who to vote for, pray to, or buy from. We don’t have that technology yet, but my best guestimate is we are only 5 years out from making it work. The first video is the MindGamer Movie trailer, and it looks like it is going to be a not-to-be-missed monster on the big screen.
My favorite of the earlier movies exploring this topic was 1983’s Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson. It is the second video here, and considers the consequences of being able to record what one person experiences, and play it back so someone else can also directly experience it. Brainstorm memory storage was based on Beta tape recording media, state of the art tech for that time and the only option for storage density compact enough to save everything they implied to be included. The film inspired 1984’s Dreamscape and a handful of others, none of which understood how it could actually be made to happen, but each of them took one aspect of the implications and explored them. Most of them have some very scary stories to relate to us, a lot less positive than Brainstorm itself.
The third video included here is the real world success report on one person controlling another remotely through a brain-to-brain interface that can be built from $100 worth of parts slaved to a power supply, a couple of antennas, and a few RF/Neural Link interfaces. I am sure it will be no comfort when I tell you that you can do the same job for a third of the cost and half the parts these days, since the technology has advanced that much. The only good news is that if you learn to recognize the gear and processes used, you run a much better chance of avoiding becoming a victim yourself!