They found a new way to spend $252 million. It wasn’t on rent for the people living in cardboard boxes under the freeway, and it wasn’t on better wine for the dying, and it certainly wasn’t on fixing the potholes that rattle the teeth out of your head when you drive down Western Avenue.
No. They gave it to a guy named Altman so he can figure out how to climb inside your head without opening the door.
I was reading about this on a piece of paper that looked like it had been chewed on by a rat. It’s this company called “Merge Labs.” The name alone makes me want to go to sleep for three days. “The Merge.” It sounds like a bad traffic accident on the 405, metal grinding on metal, glass shattering, people screaming. But that’s not what they mean. They mean they want to mix us up with the machines. They call it a “hybrid consciousness.”
Listen, I have enough trouble with the consciousness I have right now. I wake up in the morning and I look at my shoes and I wonder who put them there. I look at the walls and I wonder why they are yellow. My brain is a loud, crowded room full of people arguing about things that happened twenty years ago. And now these fellows, these billionaires with soft hands and expensive haircuts, they want to pour a computer in there too? Like adding turpentine to a glass of beer. It doesn’t make the beer better. It just kills you faster.
The story goes that this Merge outfit is different from the other guy, Musk. Musk, he’s the one who wants to drill a hole in your skull and drop a chip in there like he’s playing pachinko. He’s got that look in his eye like a man who never lost a bet, which means he’s due for a bad one. But this new crowd, they say, “No, no, we are the polite ones. We don’t drill. We use ultrasound.”
Ultrasound.
They want to hum at your brain. They want to vibrate your thoughts until they line up straight. They say they are going to use “molecules” to connect with your neurons. It sounds invisible. It sounds painless. That’s how they always get you. The landlord smiles when he hands you the eviction notice. The woman tells you she loves you right before she takes the car and the cat. Now the machine is going to tickle your brain cells with sound waves and tell you it’s for your own good.
They say they want an interface that is “equal parts biology, device, and AI.”
I look at my typewriter. It is a device. It sits there. It waits. If I don’t hit the keys, it doesn’t say a word. It doesn’t judge me. It doesn’t try to predict what I’m going to say. If I want to write about a three-legged dog, I write about a three-legged dog. The typewriter doesn’t gently nudge me and suggest that perhaps a four-legged dog would be more marketable. It doesn’t try to “merge” with me. We are separate. It is the machine, I am the man. That is the only way this works.
But these new machines, these “AI operating systems” they talk about, they want to interpret intent. That’s the line that got me. “Interpret intent.”
Imagine that. You are sitting there, maybe thinking about a woman you saw on the bus, or maybe you are thinking about how much you hate your boss, or maybe you are just thinking about a ham sandwich. And the machine is there, swimming in your blood, listening to the hum, trying to figure out if you want to work harder or if you want to quit.
If they make a machine that can truly interpret human intent, it’s going to blow a fuse in ten seconds. Human intent is a sewer. It is a glorious, dark, confused sewer. We want to be good and we want to be bad at the same time. We want to save the world and we want to watch it burn just to see the colors. If you hook a computer up to that, the poor thing is going to start crying. It’s going to ask for a drink.
They claim this is going to help paralyzed people move arms. That’s the hook. That’s always the hook. They dangle the miracle in front of you. “Look, the blind will see! The lame will walk!” And sure, that’s beautiful. If a man can’t move and you give him his hand back, you are a saint. But they don’t stop there. They never stop there. $252 million isn’t charity. It’s an investment.
They want a return.
And the return is going to be the guy working the assembly line who can’t move his hands fast enough, so they put a headset on him that “modulates” his brain to make him faster. The return is the secretary who gets tired at 2 p.m., so the ultrasound pings her neurons and suddenly she’s fresh as a daisy, typing until her fingers bleed, smiling that vacant smile.
They talk about “noisy signals.” They say the brain has “noisy signals” and the AI will fix that.
The noise is the best part. The noise is where the jazz happens. The noise is where the poetry comes from. It’s the static between the stations where you hear the real ghosts. They want to clean it up. They want to sanitize the human mind. They want us to be reliable.
Reliable. Like a toaster. Like a lawnmower.
I see they have a competitor, another company called Synchron. They are sticking things in the blood vessels now. They snake it up through the veins like a plumber clearing a drain. And they are working with the chip makers. Everyone is partnering up. The money is moving in a circle, faster and faster, a whirlwind of cash and promises.
They say, “in the future these systems might be able to perform more complex tasks with the help of AI.”
Complex tasks.
You know what a complex task is? getting out of bed when you have a hangover and the rent is due and you’re out of coffee. That is a complex task. You think a machine knows how to handle that? A machine knows 1 and 0. It knows yes and no. It doesn’t know “maybe” and it doesn’t know “I can’t do this anymore” and it certainly doesn’t know how to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
This Altman guy, he’s written about this “merge.” He thinks it’s destiny. He thinks we are just the caterpillar and the machine is the butterfly. He thinks we are incomplete.
I look at my cat. She is sleeping on the rug. She accepts herself completely. She doesn’t want to merge with the vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t want to interface with the can opener. She just wants the can opened. She is smart. She knows where the line is drawn.
We are the only species stupid enough to want to stop being what we are. We are so terrified of being human, of being fragile, of dying, that we will pay a quarter of a billion dollars to a man who promises to turn us into calculators.
And the kicker is, they think this is progress. They think because they can do it, they should do it. They have all these big brains, these scientists, these researchers. I see the names: Shapiro, Aflalo, Norman. They probably have degrees that cost more than my lifetime earnings. They sit in white rooms and look at screens and they think they are gods.
But they are just mechanics. They are mechanics of the soul, and they don’t even believe in the soul. They think the brain is just wet wiring. They think if they tune the frequency right, if they adjust the blood flow, if they filter the noise, they will create a better human.
A better human.
I’ve met a lot of humans. I’ve met them in drunk tanks and in factories and at the racetrack. The best ones were the broken ones. The ones who had cracks in them where the light shined through. The ones who made mistakes. The ones who were “noisy.”
You take a man, and you connect him to a “scientific foundation model,” and you guide his thoughts with ultrasound, and you interpret his intent with an algorithm… you don’t have a man anymore. You have a meat puppet. You have a biological terminal.
Maybe that’s what they want. It’s easier to manage. A meat puppet doesn’t organize a strike. A meat puppet doesn’t come in late because he was up all night arguing with his girlfriend. A meat puppet doesn’t write poems about the crushing weight of existence.
It’s efficient. That’s the word they love. Efficiency.
I remember working a job once where the foreman stood behind me with a stopwatch. He clicked it every time I moved a box. Click. Click. Click. It drove me mad. I wanted to turn around and swallow the stopwatch.
Now, the stopwatch will be inside your head. You won’t even hear the click. You’ll just feel a little buzz, a little “correction,” a little modulation. You’ll think, “Oh, I should work faster.” You’ll think it’s your idea.
That’s the horror of it. They want to take away the one thing we have left: the privacy of our own skull. The place where we can curse the world without anyone hearing. The place where we can dream about running away to Mexico. If they take that, if they “merge” that with their network, we are done.
I’ll stick with the old technology. I’ll stick with the radio that plays Brahms and sizzles when the thunder comes. I’ll stick with the typewriter that jams when I type too fast. I’ll stick with the cheap red wine that gives me a headache, because at least it’s my headache. I earned it. I bought it.
They can keep their $252 million. They can keep their ultrasound. They can keep their high-bandwidth interfaces.
I’m going to go to the track. I’m going to bet on a horse with a bad leg and a worse attitude. I’m going to watch it run. And if it loses, it loses. It doesn’t need an AI to tell it why. It just runs because it’s a horse.
And I’m just a man. And that’s already enough trouble for one lifetime. We don’t need to merge with anything. We just need to figure out how to stand each other for five minutes without screaming.
But they won’t listen. The money is too big. The toys are too shiny. They’ll build their machine-men. They’ll tune the brains. They’ll create a world of silent, efficient, smiling hybrids.
And somewhere, in a dark room, a last real human will be struggling to open a bottle of wine with shaking hands, and he will be the most beautiful thing on earth.
Source: OpenAI Invests in Sam Altman’s New Brain-Tech Startup Merge Labs