Pretend time travel is real. Now go back to 1980 and hand your parents your current iPhone. The moment you pinch-zoom a photo, they would spring to the kitchen, wrap you in tinfoil, and call NASA. Now jump to the 1700s and drive a Lamborghini past Benjamin Franklin’s house. The man who discovered electricity would drop his kite and chase you down with a notebook and quill. Within weeks, he’d propose a new national creed: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of… whatever that shiny demon wagon was.” These outlandish scenarios raise the question: what future technology would our feeble 21st-century minds be incapable of comprehending? I have found one promising candidate: Merge Labs, a neurotechnology company co-owned by Sam Altman.

Sam Altman, best known as the CEO of OpenAI, built his career by betting early on technologies that would reshape the world. He is also a major investor in Merge Labs, a company that aims to build a non-surgical brain interface. While the exact funding details are private, it is Altman’s investment—rather than the material amount itself—that signals something important: he believes that neurotechnology will be the next paradigm shift after artificial intelligence.

Merge Labs is often described as Altman’s counter to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, but this comparison undersells the company’s ambition. While Neuralink installs an N1 implant, roughly the diameter of a coin, flush within the skull, Merge Labs will eliminate the invasive surgery. Instead of inserting hardware, Merge Labs uses gene therapy to encourage the brain’s neurons to become more sensitive to ultrasound radiation. Pairing this gene therapy with a wearable component strapped to the side of the head, Merge Labs will create a device capable of reading thoughts. Not only that, but the ultrasound brain computer interface device will be able to communicate back to you.

Merge Labs’ technology is poised to reshape medicine before it reshapes society at large. Patients with paralysis, epilepsy, neurodegenerative diseases, and sensory impairments could, instead of relying on invasive implants, gain hands-free communication. Individuals with mobility impairments could interact with digital devices using only their thoughts – specifically, the electrical and mechanical signals produced by neurons. These applications are not unreasonably speculative; they are the low-hanging fruit of a system that can read neural signals without drilling into the skull. Merge Labs’ innovation looks more like a medical breakthrough than it does science fiction.

The long-term consequences, however, would extend far beyond medicine. If Merge Labs succeeds in creating a scalable, non-surgical neural interface, the boundary between human cognition and digital devices will begin to irreparably blur, and because the same interface that reads a thought can also transmit it, the technology would not only connect people to devices but potentially allow minds to directly interact with each other. Cognitive enhancement, once relegated to speculative fiction, could become a commercial reality. Imagine learning Boxing and Shakespeare simply through uploads, with no schooling necessary. Accelerated learning, real-time language translation, and “mental apps” would cease being fantasies and become for-purchase products. Communication would fundamentally change: instead of typing and speaking, individuals could share thoughts, emotions, and complex ideas, brain-to-brain, via a new medium. Economically, such a technology would be as disruptive as the internet or a smartphone, including the same widespread network effects. As more people adopt neural interfaces, the collective pool of knowledge and experiences will expand rapidly, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of adoption. The long-term impact is not confined to the medical sector; the technology will redefine what it means to think and communicate. The shift is especially radical considering humanity’s long reliance on text-based communication. From cave markings to printed books, humans have always articulated and transposed messages through written symbols. A direct neural interface would break millennia of precedent. 

Yet the same capabilities that excite speculators also make the technology deeply unsettling. A technology that can read neural activity raises unprecedented questions: Does the person using the neurotech own the data generated by their brain? Can it be stored? Can it be analyzed and sold? Could the government demand brain data surveillance in the pursuit of safety and productivity? Even if the technology is secure, the mere possibility of brain data surveillance challenges long-standing assumptions about the sanctity and privacy of thought. Traditional privacy law and the Fourth Amendment are built around protecting what people say and do. Merge Labs would force society to apply privacy law to people’s very thoughts. The ethical stakes are gargantuan, and the consequences of a misstep could be irreversible.

The challenge, then, is civic. Democracies will need to articulate clear boundaries around neural data, just as America once did at its founding regarding speech, search, and surveillance. Public oversight, independent auditing, and strong whistleblower protection could potentially ensure that the first generation of BCI serves people rather than exploiting them. Preparing now does not guarantee safety, but failing to prepare guarantees vulnerability – vulnerability to corporate misuse, government overreach, and the commodification of thought. But beneath the policy debate lies a more intimate reckoning: people will have to decide for themselves whether they want technology to sit at the intersection of their thoughts and the world, or whether such power should remain confined to extreme medical necessities.

Merge Labs represents both the promise and the simultaneous peril of technological progress. Just as an iPhone would bewilder a parent in 1980 and a Lamborghini would scandalize Ben Franklin, a mature, non-surgical brain interface would force our generation to confront ideas that feel impossible today. The technology promises the potential to restore lost abilities and expand human cognition, but it also threatens to expose the last private space we have: the mind. Whether Merge Labs becomes the next great leap forward or the next ethical crisis depends on what boundaries we draw around it. If history can teach us anything, it is that the future arrives long before we as a species are ready for it.