Enhancing the senses to gain superior advantage—this language suggests weaponry. Such capacities could certainly have military applications, Ling acknowledged—“You can weaponize anything, right?”—before he dismissed the idea and returned to the party line: “No, actually, this has to do with increasing a human’s capability” in a way that he compared to military training and civilian education, and justified in economic terms.
“Let’s say I gave you a third arm,” and then a fourth arm—so, two additional hands, he said. “You would be more capable; you would do more things, right?” And if you could control four hands as seamlessly as you’re controlling your current two hands, he continued, “you would actually be doing double the amount of work that you would normally do. It’s as simple as that. You’re increasing your productivity to do whatever you want to do.” I started to picture his vision—working with four arms, four hands—and asked, “Where does it end?”
“It won’t ever end,” Ling said. “I mean, it will constantly get better and better—” His cellphone rang. He took the call, then resumed where he had left off: “What DARPA does is we provide a fundamental tool so that other people can take those tools and do great things with them that we’re not even thinking about.”
Judging by what he said next, however, the number of things that DARPA is thinking about far exceeds what it typically talks about in public. “If a brain can control a robot that looks like a hand,” Ling said, “why can’t it control a robot that looks like a snake? Why can’t that brain control a robot that looks like a big mass of Jell-O, able to get around corners and up and down and through things? I mean, somebody will find an application for that. They couldn’t do it now, because they can’t become that glob, right? But in my world, with their brain now having a direct interface with that glob, that glob is the embodiment of them. So now they’re basically the glob, and they can go do everything a glob can do.”

VI. Gold Rush

DARPA’s developing capabilities still hover at or near a proof-of-concept stage. But that’s close enough to have drawn investment from some of the world’s richest corporations. In 1990, during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, DARPA Director Craig I. Fields lost his job because, according to contemporary news accounts, he intentionally fostered business development with some Silicon Valley companies, and White House officials deemed that inappropriate. Since the administration of the second President Bush, however, such sensitivities have faded.
Over time, DARPA has become something of a farm team for Silicon Valley. Regina Dugan, who was appointed DARPA director by President Barack Obama, went on to head Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, and other former DARPA officials went to work for her there. She then led R&D for the analogous group at Facebook, called Building 8. (She has since left Facebook.)
DARPA’s neurotechnology research has been affected in recent years by corporate poaching. Doug Weber told me that some DARPA researchers have been “scooped up” by companies including Verily, the life-sciences division of Alphabet (the parent company of Google), which, in partnership with the British pharmaceutical conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline, created a company called Galvani Bioelectronics, to bring neuro-modulation devices to market. Galvani calls its business “bioelectric medicine,” which conveys an aura of warmth and trustworthiness. Ted Berger, a University of Southern California biomedical engineer who collaborated with the Wake Forest researchers on their studies of memory transfer in rats, worked as the chief science officer at the neurotechnology company Kernel, which plans to build “advanced neural interfaces to treat disease and dysfunction, illuminate the mechanisms of intelligence, and extend cognition.” Elon Musk has courted DARPA researchers to join his company Neuralink, which is said to be developing an interface known as “neural lace.” Facebook’s Building 8 is working on a neural interface too. In 2017, Regina Dugan said that 60 engineers were at work on a system with the goal of allowing users to type 100 words a minute “directly from your brain.” Geoff Ling is on Building 8’s advisory board.
Talking with Justin Sanchez, I speculated that if he realizes his ambitions, he could change daily life in even more fundamental and lasting ways than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey have. Sanchez blushes easily, and he breaks eye contact when he is uncomfortable, but he did not look away when he heard his name mentioned in such company. Remembering a remark that he had once made about his hope for neurotechnology’s wide adoption, but with “appropriate checks to make sure that it’s done in the right way,” I asked him to talk about what the right way might look like. Did any member of Congress strike him as having good ideas about legal or regulatory structures that might shape an emerging neural-interface industry? He demurred (“DARPA’s mission isn’t to define or even direct those things”) and suggested that, in reality, market forces would do more to shape the evolution of neurotechnology than laws or regulations or deliberate policy choices. What will happen, he said, is that scientists at universities will sell their discoveries or create start-ups. The marketplace will take it from there: “As they develop their companies, and as they develop their products, they’re going to be subject to convincing people that whatever they’re developing makes sense, that it helps people to be a better version of themselves. And that process—that day-to-day development—will ultimately guide where these technologies go. I mean, I think that’s the frank reality of how it ultimately will unfold.”
He seemed entirely untroubled by what may be the most troubling aspect of DARPA’s work: not that it discovers what it discovers, but that the world has, so far, always been ready to buy it.