Chinese scientists claim a monkey successfully moved a robot arm with his brain signals using their brain implant. While China is notorious for inventing or exaggerating technological accomplishments, if true, such brain chip technology could be very dangerous in the hands of the devious and dictatorial Chinese Communist Party. After all, the CCP is infamous for weaponizing tech against both their own people and their enemies.
China practices “civil-military fusion,” which means that everything in the economic and tech spheres is accessible to the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). All companies and research entities in China are subject to oversight from and are answerable to the CCP. Thus, no technological advance in China is fully private or separate from the government. In fact, in the case of this brain chip, the PLA was directly and openly involved in the research. That means, if the Chinese researchers are telling the truth, the genocidal and tyrannical CCP and its PLA army have access to technology allowing them to control robots with a brain chip. That’s terrifying.
While I am not an expert on brain chips, and therefore cannot predict exactly how the CCP might use such tech, it can’t be anything good. After all, the CCP consistently weaponizes existing technologies both to enforce their censorship and surveillance regime at home, and to spy on and subvert governments and people abroad.
The UK Daily Mail reported May 9 on the reported but unverified development of a brain implant that allowed a monkey to control a robot arm with his mind. The EEG sensor is reportedly attached “through interventional surgery” to “the wall of monkey brain vessels and can collect intracranial EEG signals without craniotomy.” Brain chips such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, in contrast, are implanted through craniotomy into the brain directly.
Researchers at Nankai University shared the announcement on May 5, praising it as a breakthrough that will improve the lives of people with disabilities.
The brain-computer transforms electroencephalogram (EEG) signals into the animal’s control instructions to navigate the machine with food attached.
The trial was led by the team of Professor Duan Feng of Nankai University and jointly completed with the General Hospital of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (301 Hospital) and Shanghai Xinwei Medical Technology Co., Ltd,’ the announcement reads.
It’s all very well to celebrate this as an aid for disabled people, but the CCP uses tech for many nefarious purposes, including oppressing, surveilling, forcibly sterilizing, and killing Uyghurs and political and religious dissidents. It also uses tech to track down and punish individuals who critique the CCP regime. Robots and other tech were essential, too, in enforcing the CCP’s nightmarish and destructive CCP lockdowns. Brain implants could facilitate such oppression.
Fox News China expert Gordon Chang recently told MRC Free Speech America that the CCP wants to rule the world, and it sees control of sophisticated technology as an essential part of achieving that goal.