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Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor, Starfish Neuroscience, is expecting its first brain chip this year
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- Authors
- Sean Hollister
- Published
- May 23 2025
- Word count
- 624 words
They mention Parkinson's disease, so it sounds like the company is targeting medical uses first, not gaming. Thank god, I'm waiting on Valve's Deckard VR device, but I'm not ready for brain implants yet!
I couldn't help but remember that Black Mirror episode from the latest season, with the brain implant. I won't spoil any more than that, but it's crazy relatable, and simultaneously hilarious and depressingly believable
Given the current state of user autonomy and expected software behaviour getting a brain implamt for anything other than urgent medical reasons would be pure insanity on the part of the user.
30 years from now, "Yeah my implant has been enshittified for years now, but it's too expensive to remove, so I just try to ignore the brain ads."
You should watch the referenced Black Mirror ep if you haven’t already… be prepared for everything to be 100% predictable but still 100% depressing
I thought that episode was so well done and absolutely chilling. Probably my favorite of the season, and possibly the series.
I still have to watch that series as a whole, I've never seen a single episode.
Agreed. It sounds weird to say, but Valve would actually be the #1 company I trust to responsibly create a brain implant. Their hardware (and almost all of their software) has always been very good-quality, and they have a very long history of putting the customer first.
I'm still not going to beta-test something like this--wait for the reviews--but I would expect their stuff to be much more enshittification-resistant than products from any other company I can think of.
Brain implant are already a thing, lookup "deep brain stimulation" for some spectacular before/after video of patients with Parkinson's. As far as corporation goes, it's made by your garden variety multinational medical company.
This was my immediate thought. Competition in general is good, but competition against particularly entrenched corporations is even better.
I haven't seen that episode, but there are earlier Black Mirror episodes where people are forced to watch advertisements. That's a commonly stated fear from implants, is that it will put ads in your brain. That is probably going to happen, but instead of making you watch a video, it will just give you a craving for a specific product.
If it makes you feel better, there’s effectively zero chance this will be possible in any foreseeable timeline. The brain is just too complicated. A deep brain implant could maybe give you generic craving - it could certainly make you hungrier, for instance. But a specific product? No way. Not unless we understand the brain so well that we’re effectively no longer human. (Because if science is advanced enough for us to make a brain implant that causes you to crave a specific product, it’s also advanced enough for us to do stuff like build new brains or retreat entirely into virtual worlds.)
The ability to create a generic craving would be enough. The implant could be told by other methods what food the user buys and eats, e.g. wireless connection to a server owned by a data tracking company.
Then the implant could make the user always feel hungry unless they buy a specific brand of food or go to a specific fast food chain. Eventually you would have enough of a Pavlov response that the implanted craving isn't even necessary anymore.
My mom was just diagnosed with Parkinson's... I don't think she would ever get a chip in her brain but it would be nice to have some more hope for the future
We have Parkinson's in the family, my sympathies to you and mom. Gonna be asking the doctors if my family member is a good candidate for adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation electrodes.
I agree, that Black Mirror episode was insanely depressing, especially because of how I could see it truly happen.
Nope, I'll never let someone stick a microchip in me, even if it is Lord Gaben himself. Nope nope nope nada.
I can think of a few reasons why I would. My mom died of a nerve degradation disorder. If I end up with the same disease later in life I would take a brainchip if it would mean I could have cybernetics that would let me walk, use my arms, breathe, swallow, etc. Even if it only worked for 5 years before it enshittened to the point it stopped working, that would be 5 more years of capability I wouldn't have had.
It's unclear to me how the two products compare despite the text. Here is what the article says about Neuralink's N1:
Emphasis mine.
But the listed Starfish chip isn't described by electrodes or threads, closest seems to be this line:
So how do the chips actually compare given the information on the whole N1 implant rather than its chips?
It reads like the Starfish design would allow for more areas of the brain to have a unified implant and allow for a wider variety of treatments. Sounds pretty neat.
I assume this is a typo but it's not actually clear which of the two companies you're talking about here as a result!
Thanks for pointing it out, I meant the new Starfish design
So that's where all the money I payed to Steam went.