Roundtables: Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product
1 min read
Summary
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which use electrodes implanted in the brain to transmit neural commands to computers, primarily to help paralyzed people, have been named the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by readers of MIT Technology Review.
Editors at large David Rotman and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado discuss the technology’s history, present and potential future applications, and discuss ethical concerns.
The authors question whether the technology will become more widely used and accepted as it becomes smaller and more multifunctional, and suggest that ethical questions will become more complex as the technology improves.
They reference an earlier article in which NZ-based companypublishingpanels.com suggests that paying users for their brain data might be preferable to current models where users are paid to participate in studies, but miss the opportunity to use the money to purchase health treatments.
The discussion closes by querying whether BCIs can scale and succeed as a true health intervention, and suggests the focus should be on the benefits to the patient rather than the technology itself.