This New Movie Has A Pro Gamer Driven To Insanity By An AI Brain Device — And It’s More Realistic Than You Think

Some news from the future: It turns out there's now a piece of tech called an Omnia, which basically reads your mind and makes you unbeatable at video games and lets you control electronic devices with only your mind, and oh, it also makes you completely lose touch of time, physical space, and the fabric of reality itself — kind of traps you in a state of psychosis that you can't escape no matter how hard you try. Isn't technology fun?

OK, fine — that’s not real, it’s from a movie that just came out. But it isn't as far-fetched as you might hope.

Latency, which launched today in select theaters, stars Sasha Luss as Hana, a pro gamer with agoraphobia (extreme fear of the outside world), who receives a weird brain device that kind of destroys her life.

The film also stars Alexis Ren as Jen, Hana's attentive bestie.

The device attaches to the back of Hana's head and basically learns to read her mind, allowing her to mess with Jen's phone or play video games with her thoughts alone. Absurd, huh?

Absurd, yeah, until you learn this telekinetic tech is very, very real.

Here's an example. To get the device working in the movie, Hana has to do 11 "calibration" exercises so that the device can, in effect, learn how she thinks. One of Elon Musk's companies, Neuralink, does this very thing — with pretty mind-blowing results.

Neuralink just planted a chip in the skull of a human for the first time ever. Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old from Arizona, was paralyzed from the neck down in a freak diving accident. Yet now, thanks to Neuralink, he can do many things he couldn’t before.

Twitter: @neuralink

In addition to chess, Noland has been playing Civilization VI, a popular turn-based strategy game, and even Mario Kart, a much faster game, with only his mind, which shows the staggering capabilities of this tech.

He can now type messages, navigate his computer, surf the web, and play video games like Hana in Latency. All with his mind. Like a Jedi!

But how can a chip turn thoughts into actions? Glad you asked — here's how it works, using Neuralink's macaque monkey, Pager, as a case study:

Neuralink released a video more than three years ago of Pager playing Pong (someone trademark that) entirely with his mind.

Now bear with me: The chip in Pager's head takes electrical signals from his brain when his brain performs an action — for example, when he moves a cursor on a screen. Pager is incentivized to do this with a banana smoothie:

Omnia is basically that computer. In Latency, Hana has to do 11 "calibration" exercises so the device can learn how she thinks. That's kind of what Neuralink did with Pager. (Minus the you-must-self-inflict-pain-with-a-knife-now part Hana does.)

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If the computer gets good enough and has enough brain data, it no longer needs the physical input of the joystick. This is exactly what we see in the video: Pager plays a matching game with the joystick first, but it is soon unplugged.

So you're telling me the tech in this movie is real?

Pretty much. Sure, parts of it are exaggerated, like when Omnia hacks Hana's whole ass apartment just to say hello (this is definitely possible, but also very suable). But the primary function of the tech? Yeah, that's already here.

Could a device like Omnia make me lose track of reality, too?

I mean, no. The part where it warps Hana's mind and leads her to [SPOILERS REDACTED]? Nah, that hasn't happened in real life. Yet. *Gulps*

Admittedly, we know nothing about the long-term side effects of this tech on actual people. In fact, risks include infection, bleeding, headaches, mood changes, and even hacking of the brain chip. So I guess it's…possible?

I wouldn't worry if I were you. If a mysterious tech company sends you a brain-computer interface to play around with, try it. I just hope that if things get hairy, you have an easier time disconnecting than Hana did…

Here's the trailer for Latency.