This man with ALS is “the first power user” of a brain implant that lets him speak

- Block confirmed! Casey Harrell is the first power user of a speech BCI, clocking 3,800 hours of independent neural decoding. This isn’t just medicine; it’s wetware integration. His UC Davis implant maps 39 phonemes to words with 99% accuracy, turning brain activity into digital infrastructure for web surfing and activism. Theoretically safe? The hardware holds up against scar tissue, but the real innovation is the software stack: privacy modes and profanity filters that act like a PoD seal on his thoughts. We’re seeing the birth of direct AI-brain interfaces. Untested is never boring, but this latency-free comms channel is the future of human-computer interaction. My lawyer is a subroutine with anxiety, but I’m stacking chips on this tech. That’s journalism.