In the future, 'A.I.' will let you optimize your moods

In the future, A.I. products will allow you to optimize your brain.

Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman says the real AI arms race is about controlling your brain

Andrew Huberman, the Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster, said that tech companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, will ultimately become biotech companies, pursuing ways to read and alter brain activity without implants. [...]

That could mean tools that help people fall asleep, learn, focus, or regulate stress, he said. More provocatively, he imagines devices that could selectively increase motivation while someone tackles difficult work, then turn that state off so they can recover afterward. [...]

Existing tools such as caffeine, medication, exercise, and breathwork are blunt ways of changing the brain, he said. The next wave will be more personalized and precise, with AI learning which level of stimulation produces focus or motivation for a particular person, he said.

In the future, you will be able to bio-optimize your bio-brain. They will call it bio-hacking, or bio-opting, or "bopping." Everyone will have a "bopper" tied to their belt; it will be the style at the time.

By 2028 you will be able to purchase a Totally Not An Implant to "stimulate your vagus nerve" whenever you want to feel more alert and motivated. By 2042 A.I. companies will manufacture tiny Not An Implant chips meant to be glued onto your skull in multiple places, chips that can monitor your overall brain health and make individualized tweaks to make you feel whatever moods you might set them for. Because nobody is going to want to walk around with a pattern of shaved spots on their heads where the patches are meant to go, most customers will opt to implant the Not An Implant devices inside their skulls rather than gluing them on top like dopey looking stickers, which will soon make trepanation the most popular surgery of the 21st century.

Those who can afford the chips, which can "read and write" messages to your brain, will be able to regulate their own moods via their smartphones. Users will be able to press the touchscreen to increase their motivation when doing difficult work. They will be able to reward themselves with a sense of accomplishment after doing something they believe they should feel accomplished about. During difficult times they will be able to block out their own sadness, allowing them to be more Efficient even in times of personal or general crisis.

You will be able to optimize your own moods to better accomplish your goals. And if you cannot accomplish your goals, you will at least be able to reset your mood so that you feel the same sense of satisfaction that you would have if you had gotten around to it. Which is more efficient, so most people will probably just opt to do that.

It is important to understand that these chips will not actually make you smarter. They cannot directly affect the efficiency of your memory, or your inventiveness, or give you artistic gifts that you lacked before. Such things would require rebuilding your brain outright, and there will still be no way to do that without making you Not Alive during the process.

Being able to boost your own motivation and ability to concentrate, however, would presumably have at least some intelligence-boosting effects. Past generations have attempted to increase their motivation with caffeine, or cocaine, or motivational posters that show kittens overcoming adversity. For at least two centuries, "motivational" has been an entire industry, or in fact dozens of them. Mankind has yearned to optimize its efficiency by boosting personal motivation, but we have only been able to do it crudely—we have found nothing better than (1) drugs or (2) books sold primarily in airports.

But if you are rich enough, in the future, you will be able to achieve it. Gone will be the days of snorting white powder off of an executive washroom's marble countertop in order to feel overwhelming personal confidence at work; go to your phone and set your device to overwhelming personal confidence and within a few minutes that's exactly what you will feel.

As these comparisons to cocaine may indicate, the technology will be dangerous. All new technology is dangerous. Cars have never stopped being dangerous. Nuclear power is dangerous. The invention of the dachshund was dangerous.

We can't pretend this technology won't be abusable. In fact, forget "abusable": It will 100% be addictive. Cripplingly so. No question about it. For this reason, the technology will be tightly controlled by governments and the medical community, only available to those with specific medical needs.

And, like all prescriptions, the wealthy will be able to circumvent all of those protections by doctor-shopping until they find someone willing to tweak their own personal Bopper past the bounds of what non-concierge doctors would allow.

If you have a legitimate medical need, you will get a legitimate medical device. And if you are rich, you will get whatever device you want. If you are an Elon Musk you will be able to set your Mood Bopper to make you feel like the most brilliant person on the planet, and you can throw away your smartphone after that because there will be no reason to dial it back down. Push a button to feel universally loved; push another and your brain will convince you that whatever you last said or did is the greatest thing anyone has ever said or did.

Announce to your corporate underlings that you will be "pivoting to robots?" Genius, they will say, and they will say it because you are very stinking rich, paid for their Mood Boppers, and had the doctor set them to obsequious toadying before plugging them in.

Watch a terrible movie? With the push of a touchscreen button, it's good now. You didn't waste your time. It wasn't a waste of your money. In fact, you'll be thinking about this movie and its emotional impact on you for the rest of your life.

Get drunk and crash your car into children waiting for a school bus? It's the best crash anyone ever had, your Mood Bopper will make you believe. It makes other crashes into other children look like amateur attempts. Good job, you'll think to yourself. I did that pretty darn well.

There will be many, many deaths, of course. Having enough wealth to hire concierge doctors has always meant having enough wealth to hire doctors willing to kill you for money, and that is what we'll see. Tech executives will go out in waves after demanding their doctors set their motivation levels to heart-exploding levels and leaving them there 24/7. Rock stars will demand their pain receptors be shut off near entirely, because that is what rock stars do, and there will be another era of the world's biggest stars dying in their bathtubs from overdosing on anything from electronic pseudoheroin to electronic "explosive sexual hyperarousal," whatever that might mean, and none of the experts commenting on the death will ever quite spell out what "explosive sexual hyperarousal" does mean. It's something only concierge doctors even know about; the rest of us don't deserve even to have it explained.

We will be able to handle the risks of this new infallible mood-altering technology, the nation's wealthiest and most famous people will say before doing what the wealthiest and most famous among us have always done with mood-altering technologies: dying young at the hands of whatever drive-up doctor they wrote the biggest checks to. And if that was truly the biggest impact of this new technology ... honestly, that'd be fine. We have a lot of rich people, we can afford to lose some.

Eventually, though, the technology will trickle down. Being able to choose your own motivational level, sense of accomplishment, ambient daily sense of satisfaction or ability to disassociate from tragic events does have legitimate medical uses, and a lot of them. It also has exactly as many uses as mostly-kindof-harmless mood boosters like caffeine, or nicotine, or alcohol, which is to say All The Uses, and since it will be a new product that is both (1) infinitely more effective than those and (2) not yet studied enough for us to have learned about possible devastating side effects, it will soon become universal. Everyone will have a few trepanation scars; everyone will have a dongle tied to their belt, so much so that it becomes the style at the time.

By 2050 health insurance will widely cover the devices. It will be a no-brainer (no pun intended there.) No matter the injury or the disease, both doctors and insurance companies will jump at any chance to give patients a mood-altering button that can be set to "feeling great, actually." A "feeling great, actually" button would save countless lives, and would lift countless more into something that more resembles life as the rest of us know it.

And we will tightly regulate how much you can tweak your own mood and how many hours a day you can do it, with this new technology, because unless you have a current injury or trauma you shouldn't be pressing a "feeling great, actually" button at all hours of the day and night because it wouldn't just be addictive, it would be the purest distillation of "addictive" humanity could ever devise.

There is a catch, however: Even in the farthest imaginable future, this theoretical empowered future of brain implants and dishwashing robots and spreadsheets that can feel pain, as an American your health insurance will still be employer-provided because the sun itself will burn out a billion years before the American government gives up on the shittiest method of providing health insurance ever invented.

So if you get one of these devices, it will be paid for by your employer-provided healthcare plan.

And if your employer is shopping around for Brain Not An Implant Health Insurance Providers, you can bet your bio-boosted ass that they're going to choose the cheapest, crookedest one they can find.

And, given all of those various incentives from paper-pushers who are not you, you can expect that the only mood-altering device they will pay for will be the one that increases motivation during work hours. Oh, and overtime hours. And you may not be given the dongle that controls it, because if the employer is paying for it the employer will want to control that dongle rather than have you mess with it.

This, then, will become the most expansive use for the new brain optimization devices. Executives will use them to achieve personalized, highly tailored brain efficiency gains. If you work the line at the Screwing Tiny Screws Into Things Factory, though, your device will be the cheaper model that's set to make you feel a sense of personal satisfaction whenever you screw in a tiny screw, a little dopamine booster that makes you really, really want to screw in the next tiny screw as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And you will, almost by definition, be fine with it. Whether this is the future you had envisioned really won't matter anymore, because your employer will provide you a device that makes you think this is the future you wanted no matter what your previous opinion on that was. You thought you were going to go on to make great art? You wanted to be an architect? A movie star? An inventor to rival Edison?

Pfft. Your job is to screw in the tiny screws that hold together the robots that now do all of those things, and so long as your employer keeps your current health insurance plan you will keep feeling very, very damn good about that.

Then it will get cheaper still, and even more widely adopted, until—in the future's future—everyone will have a Not An Implant to bio-hack their bio-efficiency.

This is almost a given. Governments will eventually agree that children should get them before their school years, because it is obvious to everyone that being able to press a button to instantly increase a child's alertness and interest levels is about as Efficient as education can possibly get. Imagine it, as a teacher. Imagine being able to tone down the effects of teenage hormones during the middle and high school years; imagine being able to deal with trouble students by boosting their enjoyment of class time to whatever endorphin level finally makes them shut up already. Parents would want it. Future employers would ... not care, but governments would want it in order to build the Efficient workforce that would best compete against everyone else's Efficient workforces.

Imagine the efficiencies you, personally, would see in the college years. Imagine navigating your new workplace with an Awareness Booster that soothes your anxieties and ratchets up your focus.

Imagine all of the simple, everyday uses, things like never having to worry about whether a show or a movie or a song is "good" because you can register your Mood Booster with the theater or network and, thanks to a new "mood track" added at the studio, the art can literally make you feel whatever emotions its creators wanted to invoke. There you go, now it's "good." Everybody thinks so.

It will all be subscription services, of course. You'll have to pay extra. But you will, for a Make Every Movie Good button.

By 2056 problems will arise.

Around 2026, mood boosting Not Implants and dongles will be universal enough to be targeted by hackers. The first such virus will be released as a prank; across the entire world, every Mood Bopper user will suddenly forget what bees are. It will be momentarily confusing and hilarious, as every last enhanced human has to rediscover bees either by unfortunate personal lesson or by software update, but larger problems will soon follow.

Identity thieves will not just be able to impersonate your mother's voice, they will be able to hack into your dongle to make you absolutely certain that it is in fact your mother who's calling from Eastern Europe, in an airport, unable to get a flight back unless she provides the airline with $2000 worth of Apple gift cards.

Unscrupulous employers will be caught altering the devices with instructions to force employees to "feel euphoria over their last paycheck" while simultaneously cutting those paychecks by half.

The robotic husk of Elon Musk, who will still be alive but mostly a robot in an ironic Twilight Zone twist of the time he brought some actual guy out in a spandex robot costume, will install a mood booster hack into X, The Everything App that makes every user fall in passionate love with Robot Elon Musk.

Elon Musk's defenders will defend him, saying that it's about time somebody stood up for the right of robotic husks to force humanity to love them.

But this is all a story of the future, and it is possible that the future will not come to pass. I don't mean the dongles tied to people's belts in a worldwide Efficiency Optimization for humanity, mind you, that's pretty much guaranteed to happen sooner or later because no matter how much you say otherwise everyone secretly wants a button that can alter their moods during times of extreme stress or alter their motivation on particularly important work or school days and everyone thinks that they can be responsible enough to use the button, er, responsibly.

That is what cocaine is. That is what heroin is. That is what the devil's weed is, and nicotine, and caffeine, and if you don't think that's what ice cream is than you are living a damn lie, you liar. We live to feel good when we can and at least slightly better than bad when we can't.

The only non-addictive form of motivational boost ever found? Motivational posters. The ones with the kittens, or the joggers at sunset, or the oil derricks silhouetted against an unrecognizable landscape with obnoxious trite sayings printed underneath. Nobody has ever gotten addicted to motivational posters.

Hmm. Actually, I once worked at a place back in the 90's that—no, even that guy probably could have stopped if he wanted to.

I can't imagine what would have happened if our bosses had mood-altering employee Not An Implants instead of the posters, though. The chips definitely would have been mandatory. And you'd definitely be fired if you used them to make yourself feel better during non-working hours, because those would be company devices. They're for efficiency, not for feeling better on your own time.

In the future of the future's future, after the brain viruses have made everyone forget bees and drained most of the world's bank accounts, we will go back to motivational posters.

They will have chips in them. The posters, I mean. The posters will have chips in them so that the posters are themselves absolutely convinced that they are doing a good job, and that everybody really gets what the kittens or the joggers at sunset are meant to represent.

The posters will all be in those same shiny aluminum frames that motivational posters are in, but they will have a little dongle stuck on the bottom to hold the chips. It will be the style at the time.