Is Google Planning A Microchip For People's Brains?

Damien Gayle, dailymail.co.uk |

Online advertising giant Google’s new wearable accessories are merely a stepping stone to its ultimate ambition – a microchip which can be embedded in users’ brains.

The company, which uses its search, email and other services to funnel personalised advertising to users, is currently trialling prototypes of its Glass device, which is worn like a pair of glasses.

But Google is staking its future on a new service which will use the information it holds on registered users to automatically predict their search needs and present them with the data they want.

The ultimate ambition is to literally get inside users’ heads: using search queries to read their thoughts and then fulfilling their data needs by sending results directly to microchips implanted into people’s brains.

Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Search told The Independent that the sinister-sounding vision is far from a sci-fi fantasy and that research had already begun with such chips to help disabled people steer their wheelchairs.

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Nevertheless, Google sees its future in leveraging the the wealth of information it holds on its users to present them with ever more personalised services.

Glass is merely a part of the company’s wider information ecosystem, which it intends to exploit with a new service called Google Now, which will present users with a series of bespoke ‘cards’ as they log on.

They will tell users the local weather, any problems they might face on their commute to work, details of meetings harvested from their Gmail accounts, their favourite sports teams latest results, and so on.

The service is based on what Google calls its Knowledge Graph, a vast store of information which, The Independent reports, is growing at an ‘exponential rate’.

Just a year after the project’s launch, Knowledge Graph is said to hold 18billion facts on around 570million subjects.

The next step, Mr Gomes explained, is for this knowledge to be ‘present everywhere’.

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