Mental control
The military made it easier than ever before to solve combat missions, distancing itself from the consequences of the war. When combat drones were first introduced, operators could sit quietly somewhere in an office in the United States and drop bombs in the Middle East.
Today one operator can do it with the power of thought - it doesn't even require any action with his hands.
Earlier this month, DARPA's research arm unveiled a project they've been working on since 2015: a technology that enables one person to fly multiple planes or drones at the same time.
“Today, brain signals can be used to fly … not just one aircraft, but three aircraft of the same type,” said Justin Sanchez, director of biological technology at DARPA, as reported by Defense One.
Sanchez's team has achieved some success over the years. Back in 2016, a volunteer test subject equipped with an implanted brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to fly a plane in a flight simulator while holding two more planes in service - all with just his thoughts, a DARPA biological technology spokesman told Futurism …
A DARPA spokesman told the publication that because this BCI uses electrodes implanted in the sensory and motor cortex of the brain, the experiments were limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is, the people running these simulators already had electrodes in their brains, or at least they had reasons for surgery.
To try to figure out how to make this technology more accessible without surgically placing a metal probe in the human brain, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. They plan to create a device with similar capabilities, but it will look more like an encephalographic helmet, which the pilot can take off after completing a combat mission.
Promotional video:
“The proposed N3 system will be a tool that the user will receive to complete a mission and then can put aside,” said N3 chief Al Emondi. "I don't like comparisons to joysticks or keyboards, because they don't reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they are useful for explaining the basic concept of interface with computers."
Sergey Lukavsky