China just approved the world's first commercial brain implant. NEO, a coin-sized BCI from NeuraMatrix and Tsinghua, sits on the membrane around the brain and lets paralysed patients control a glove with their thoughts. Neuralink, meanwhile, is still years from FDA commercial clearance.
Half of what makes this work is AI: hardware reads the signals, models decode them in real time. Which raises the question nobody's pricing in yet: what's the token bill on a brain? Streaming your motor cortex through a decoder all day makes a chatbot subscription look like a rounding error.
And what happens when you hit your monthly cap? "You've reached your usage limit. Your hand will resume grasping on the 8th." Getting dumber because your subscription ran out used to be a metaphor.
Behind the joke, real questions: who owns the data a brain implant collects? Can a government compel access to your neural signals? And when does treating a disability become upselling a healthy brain to the premium tier?