Of course, the benefit to paralyzed, or persons otherwise locked tightly in the straitjacket of their own skull, of technologies to communicate directly from the human brain to machines or to other human beings is undeniable. The potential to expand the range of human experience through directly experiencing the thoughts and emotions of others is, also, of course, great. Next weekend being Super Bowl Sunday, I can’t help but think how cool it would be to experience the game through the eyes of Peyton Manning, or Russell Wilson. How amazing would a concert or an orchestra be if experienced likewise in this way?

Still, one need not necessarily be a professional dystopian and unbudgeable cassandra to come up with all kinds of quite frightening scenarios that might arise through the erosion of boundaries between human minds, all one needs to do is pay attention to less sanguine developments of the latest iteration of a once believed to be utopian technology, that is, the Internet and the social Web, to get an idea of some of the possible dangers.

The Internet was at one time prophesied to user in a golden age of transparency and democratic governance, and promised the empowerment of individuals and small companies. Its legacy, at least at this juncture, is much more mixed. There is little disputing that the Internet and its successor mobile technologies have vastly improved our lives, yet it is also the case that these technologies have led to an explosion in the activities of surveillance and control, by nefarious individuals and criminal groups, corporations and the state. Nicolelis’ vision of eroded boundaries between human minds is but the logical conclusion of the trend towards transparency. Given how recently we’ve been burned by techno-utopianism in precisely this area a little skepticism is certainly in order.

The first question that might arise is whether direct brain-to-brain communication (especially when invasive technologies are required) will ever out-compete the kinds of mediated mind-to-mind technology we have had for quite sometime time, that is, both spoken and written language. Except in very special circumstances, not all of them good, language seem to retain its advantages over direct brain-to-brain communication, and, in cases where the advantage of language over such direct communication are used it be may be less of a gain in communicative capacity than a signal that normalcy has broken down.

Couples in the first rush of new love may want to fuse their minds for a time, but a couple that been together for decades? Seems less likely, though there might be cases of pathological jealousy or smothering control bordering on abuse when one half of a couple would demand such a thing. The communion with fellow human beings offered by religion might gain something from the ability of individuals to bridge the chasm that separates them from others, but such technologies would also be a “godsend” for fanatics and cultists. I can not decide whether a mega-church such as Yoido Full Gospel Church in a world where Nicolelis’ brain-nets are possible would represent a blessed leap in human empathetic capacity or a curse.

Nicolelis seems to assume that the capacity to form brain-nets will result in some kind of idealized and global neural version of FaceBook, but human history seems to show that communication technology is just as often used to hermetically seal group off from group and becomes a weapon in the primary human moral dilemma ,which is not the separation of individual from individual, so much as the rivalry between different groups. We seem unable to exit ourselves from such rivalry even when the stakes are merely imagined- as many of us will do next Sunday, and has Nicolelis himself should have known from his beloved soccer where the rivalry expressed in violent play has a tendency to slip into violent riots in the real world.

Direct brain-to-brain communication would seem to have real advantages over language when persons are joined together in teams acting as a unit in response to a rapidly changing situation. Groups such as fire-fighters. By far the greatest value of such capacities would be found in small military units such as Platoons, members who are already bonded in a close experiential and deep emotional bond, as in on display in the documentary- Restrepo. Whatever their virtuous courage, armed bands killing one another are about as far as you can get from the global kumbaya of Nicolelis’ brain-net.

If such technologies were non-invasive, would they be used by employers to monitor the absence of sustained attention while on the job? What of poor dissidents under the thumb of a madman like Kim Jong Un .Imagine such technologies in the hands of a pimp, or even, the kinds of slave owners who, despite our obliviousness, still exist.

One of the problems with the transparency paradigm, and the new craze for an “Internet of things” where everything in the environment of an individual is transformed into Web connected computers is the fact that anything that is a computer, by that very fact, becomes hackable. If someone is worried about their digital data being sucked up and sold on an elaborate black market, about webcams being used as spying tools, if one has concern that connecting one’s home to the web might make one vulnerable, how much more so should be worried if our very thoughts could be hacked? The opportunities for abuse seem legion.

Everything is shaped by personal experience. Nicolelis whose views of the collective mind were forged by the crowds that overthrew the Brazilian military dictatorship and his beloved soccer games. But the crowd is not always wise. I being a person who has always valued solitude and time with individuals and small groups over the electric energy of crowds have no interest in being part of a hive mind to any degree more than the limited extent I might be said to already be in such a mind by writing a piece such as this.

It is a sad fact, but nonetheless true, that should anything like Nicolelis’ brain-net ever be created it can not be under the assumptions of the innate goodness of everyone. As our experience with the Internet should have taught us, an open system with even a minority of bad actors leads to a world of constant headaches and sometimes what amount to very real dangers.