AI Library
The Double Structure of Digital Sovereignty
Europe’s Departure from Palantir and the Chains of American Big Tech
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This is a record of 2026, when European intelligence agencies and defense ministries began removing analytics tools from America’s Palantir. It covers the replacement decisions made by France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the Netherlands Ministry of Defense; the incident in which US export controls severed an ally’s ac…
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 2. The History and Evolution of BCI Technology
Brain Readers: Neuralink and the Final Human Revolution
Chapter 2. The History and Evolution of BCI Technology
Kim Kyung-jin
A. Hans Berger's First Discovery of Brainwaves (EEG) in 1924
One spring day in 1893, a young man in the German cavalry fell from his horse during a training exercise. His body rolled beneath the hooves of horses pulling artillery cannons. Death was inches away. That evening, having survived by what seemed like a miracle, Hans Berger received a telegram from his family home. It was from his sister, hundreds of kilometers away. "I feel something has happened to Hans; please check on him." She had sensed something terrible at the exact moment of the accident. Twenty-year-old Berger could not dismiss this as coincidence. He became convinced that some invisible physical energy flowed between human minds. His quest to find the substance of telepathy would, thirty years later, change the course of human history in a direction no one expected.
Berger enrolled at the University of Berlin hoping to become an astronomer, but dropped out after a single semester. After finishing his military service, he turned to medicine. He became a psychiatrist at the University of Jena and tried every method he could think of to find the physical basis of "psychic energy." He measured blood flow in patients' scalps. He took scalp temperature readings. Nothing worked. Then he came across a paper by Richard Caton of England, who had detected faint electrical signals on the brain surfaces of dogs and rabbits. Berger's eyes lit up. If the brain produces electricity, and if that electricity can be measured, could we not read human thoughts?
The decisive moment came on July 6, 1924, in a cramped, dark laboratory at Jena University Hospital. Before Berger lay a seventeen-year-old boy. The patient had undergone surgery to remove part of his skull due to a suspected brain tumor. Berger carefully placed electrodes made of silver foil onto the boy's scalp.
The electrodes were connected to a galvanometer borrowed from Siemens. The room was so quiet that even breathing felt intrusive. Any external vibration could interfere with the readings. The galvanometer needle began to tremble. The oscillations were faint but regular. Berger felt as if his heart had stopped.
It was not a mechanical error. It was not external noise. It was an electrical rhythm the human brain was generating on its own. Berger verified this phenomenon through thousands of repeated experiments. When subjects closed their eyes and relaxed, a regular wave appeared at roughly ten cycles per second. When they opened their eyes or engaged in mental activity, this wave disappeared and was replaced by a faster, more irregular rhythm. Berger named the first "alpha waves" and the second "beta waves." The brain was not a static lump of tissue. It was a dynamic organ, constantly performing an electrical dance that shifted with every change in state.
Yet Berger hesitated to share his discovery with the world. He was a timid perfectionist. He feared ridicule from his colleagues. The claim that "electricity comes from the brain"
was enough to get a person dismissed as a lunatic in the academic circles of the time. Berger kept his discovery secret for a full five years.
He finally published his paper "On the Electroencephalogram of Man" in 1929. His fears proved justified. The paper was either ignored or met with open skepticism.
The turning point came in 1934. British physiologists Edgar Adrian and Bryan Matthews replicated Berger's experiments and confirmed their accuracy. Adrian was a 1932 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. His endorsement instantly elevated Berger's discovery into the canon of established science. In 1937, an international conference officially recognized Berger's achievement. The electroencephalogram (EEG) launched a revolution in neurological medicine, from diagnosing epilepsy and studying sleep stages to locating brain tumors.
Berger's personal life ended in tragedy. Conflicts with the Nazi regime, deteriorating health, and deepening depression consumed him. Forced into retirement in 1938, he could no longer pursue his brainwave research. On June 1, 1941, Hans Berger took his own life. He had spent decades searching for telepathy, but what he found was something far more powerful: a window into the brain's activity that required no opening of the skull. The chorus of 86 billion neurons that Neuralink's engineers are now trying to decode began on the other side of that very window.
On July 6, 2024, the global neuroscience community commemorated the 100th anniversary of Berger's first brainwave recording. The International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology (IFCN) marked the occasion by publishing a special review surveying the past, present, and future of EEG and related neurophysiological technologies. The faint trembling of a needle that Berger observed in that dark laboratory a century ago was the overture to an era in which paralyzed patients control computers with their thoughts, blind people see through artificial eyes, and depression patients reclaim their lives through brain stimulation.
B. Jacques Vidal's BCI Concept and Early Animal Experiments in the 1970s
If Hans Berger discovered how to "hear" the brain's voice, Jacques Vidal in the 1970s imagined how to "command" machines with that voice. This was no idle fantasy. It was a challenge thrown at science in the form of a question.
In 1973, Jacques J. Vidal, a computer science professor at UCLA, published a paper in the Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering. "Toward Direct Brain-Computer Communication." In this paper, Vidal introduced the term "Brain-Computer Interface" into academic literature for the first time in history. He posed a direct question: "Can observable electrical signals from the brain be used as information carriers to control a computer or external device without any muscle involvement?" This became known as "Vidal's Challenge."
Vidal was born in Liege, Belgium, and studied electrical engineering. After earning his doctorate at the University of Paris, he moved to the United States in 1963 and joined UCLA's School of Engineering. He became one of the founding members of the computer science department. In 1970, Vidal spent a sabbatical at the UCLA Brain Research Institute studying the vestibular system in mammals. His curiosity soon expanded to a larger question. If the brain generates electrical signals, could those signals be translated into commands a computer can understand? And if that were possible, could a paralyzed person move a wheelchair or control a prosthetic limb with thought alone?
The 1970s, when Vidal's vision emerged, was an era when computers filled entire rooms. They were giant calculators slower than today's smartphones. In that era, he designed an experiment to move a cursor by reading brainwaves. In 1977, Vidal's team succeeded in moving a cursor on a computer screen using Visual Evoked Potentials. When a subject gazed at a specific point on the screen, the visual stimulus triggered a distinct pattern of electrical signals in the brain. The computer interpreted these patterns and moved the cursor in the corresponding direction. The speed was slow and the equipment was enormous, but this was one of the first systematic attempts to control a machine using brain signals alone, without any muscle involvement.
Vidal stressed a key principle. A BCI is not just a device that reads signals; it is a "closed-loop learning system." The user watches feedback and adjusts their own brain activity, while the computer adapts to the user's patterns. The brain learns the machine, and the machine learns the brain. This two-way adaptation. The principle remains the foundation of every BCI system today, fifty years later.
While Vidal was laying the conceptual groundwork, other researchers were proving BCI's biological feasibility through animal experiments. In 1969, Eberhard Fetz of the University of Washington published a remarkable result. He implanted an electrode capable of measuring single-neuron activity into a monkey's motor cortex.
Every time that neuron fired, the monkey received a banana-flavored pellet as a reward. The neuron's activity level was also converted into sound and played back to the monkey.
The results were astonishing. The monkey quickly learned how to deliberately activate one specific cell in its brain. Without moving its arm, driven solely by the desire for a pellet, it increased the firing rate of that particular neuron. The experiment proved that operant conditioning works at the level of individual brain cells. If an animal can learn to control its own brain signals through training, so can a human. This was the decisive evidence that BCI is biologically viable.
Around the same time, Jose Delgado at Yale University performed an even more dramatic experiment. He implanted electrodes in the brain of a bull in a bullfighting ring and stopped the charging animal with the press of a single button on a radio transmitter. Demonstrated publicly in 1963, this experiment showed in vivid terms that an animal's behavior could be controlled through brain stimulation. It also ignited public fears about "mind control."
These efforts in the 1970s gave rise to the two major branches of BCI technology that exist today. Vidal's EEG-based approach became the prototype for non-invasive BCI, while the implant-based approaches of Fetz and Delgado became the roots of invasive BCI. Limited computing power at the time kept these ideas from developing into practical technology. But the questions they asked and the seeds they planted would come roaring back to life thirty years later, as technology caught up.
Vidal passed away in 2018. During the years after his retirement from UCLA, when he remained as a professor emeritus, BCI grew from a science fiction concept into an industry attracting billions of dollars in investment. A sentence he wrote in 1973 still holds true today: "The long-range implications of such a system can only be speculated upon at the present time." But one thing Vidal foresaw has clearly come to pass. The brain and the computer have begun speaking the same language.
C. The Arrival of BrainGate and the Utah Array in 2004
On July 3, 2001, the annual fireworks celebration was underway in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Twenty-two-year-old Matthew Nagle was about to leave the beach with friends. Then a fight broke out. Nagle tried to help a friend and was stabbed in the neck with a hunting knife. His spinal cord was severed. From that moment on, he could feel nothing below his neck. He was a quadriplegic. The life of a young man who had been a star football player in high school was changed completely.
Three years later, on June 22, 2004, Nagle lay on an operating table at Rhode Island Hospital. Neurosurgeon Gerhard Friehs opened his skull. The target was the motor cortex in the right frontal lobe, the area responsible for arm movement.
The surgical team implanted a small chip. Four millimeters by four millimeters. Smaller than a baby aspirin. On its surface stood 100 tiny needles packed closely together. Resembling the teeth of a comb, these needles penetrated about 1.5 millimeters into the brain's cortex, where they could capture the electrical signals fired by nearby neurons. This was the Utah Array.
The Utah Array was a device developed by Professor Richard Normann at the University of Utah in the early 1990s. Its design was reportedly inspired by Utah's desert landscape. The 100 electrodes rising from a silicon substrate resembled cactus spines when viewed from a distance. If earlier EEG technology was like standing outside a stadium and listening to the roar of the crowd, the Utah Array was like walking inside and eavesdropping on 100 players' conversations simultaneously. It could directly record the firing of individual neurons or small clusters of neurons.
After surgery, a metal connector called a 'pedestal' protruded from Nagle's skull. A thick cable ran from this connector to a massive signal-processing computer. The sight called to mind the movie The Matrix. But for Nagle, it was an umbilical cord of hope.
In August 2004, the first experiment began. A technician on the research team spoke to Nagle: 'Imagine moving your hand to the left.' Nagle imagined it. A crackling sound came through the computer speakers. It was the sound of neurons firing. The cursor on the screen moved to the left. Nagle said, 'Not bad.' His brain had issued a command directly to the computer.
Over the following months, Nagle made remarkable progress. Using thought alone, he moved a computer cursor to open emails. He changed TV channels and adjusted the volume. He drew simple pictures. He played Pong. He controlled a robotic prosthetic hand, opening and closing it. In an interview he said, 'I can't put it into words. I just used my brain. I thought, "Cursor, go to the upper right," and it went. Now I can control the whole screen. This is going to give me independence.' The project, led by Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, was called BrainGate. In 2006, the results were published in Nature. Media outlets around the world rushed to cover the story. The BBC headline read, 'Brain chip reads man's thoughts.' The study proved three important facts. First, even years after spinal cord injury has paralyzed the body, the brain's motor cortex still generates movement commands. Second, information carrying 'intention' can be decoded in real time from complex brain signals. Third, invasive BCI can be safely applied to humans.
The limitations, however, were clear. The Utah Array was a rigid structure of silicon needles, while the brain was soft, jelly-like tissue. Every time the brain shifted slightly inside the skull, the stiff electrodes scratched the brain tissue. Over time, immune responses formed scar tissue around the electrodes, and signal quality deteriorated. Patients also had to live with a thick cable attached to their heads. The risk of infection was ever-present. The system could not be used outside the laboratory.
Matthew Nagle died on July 24, 2007. The cause was sepsis. Per FDA regulations, the BrainGate device was removed roughly a year later. He had suffered from depression and reportedly experienced suicidal thoughts. Yet the data he left behind became the backbone of every BCI algorithm in use today. BrainGate was the 'Kitty Hawk moment' of BCI history. Like the Wright brothers' first flight, it was the instant when the impossible became possible.
The BrainGate project continued as BrainGate2. In 2011, a female patient successfully controlled a computer cursor for 1,000 days after receiving her implant. In 2012, footage was released of two quadriplegic patients controlling a robotic arm with thought alone, picking up a coffee bottle and drinking through a straw. In 2021, the BrainGate team became the first to wirelessly transmit brain signals to a computer. It was the first step toward breaking free from the shackle of cables plugged into the skull.
For nearly 20 years, the Utah Array reigned as the 'gold standard' of BCI research. But its limitations, rigidity and wired connection, gave latecomers an opening for innovation. Elon Musk's Neuralink started from exactly this point: 'More flexible, more channels, wireless.' BrainGate opened the door, and Neuralink walked through it, dreaming of a mass-produced, everyday BCI implant rolling off a factory line.
D. The Explosive Growth of BCI Clinical Trials in the 2020s
In the early hours of January 29, 2024, a historic moment unfolded in the operating room of a hospital near Phoenix. Noland Arbaugh, 29 years old. Eight years earlier, a diving accident had broken his neck and taken all sensation below his shoulders. The surgical robot R1 inserted 64 electrode threads into his brain through a coin-sized hole drilled in his skull. A total of 1,024 microelectrodes sat on threads thinner than a human hair. When the surgery was over, a coin-sized chip called the N1 was seated in his skull. Nothing was visible from the outside. It was the first brain implant ever placed in a human by Elon Musk's Neuralink.
This scene captures the explosive growth of the BCI field in the 2020s. As the decade began, BCI broke out of the ivory tower of university labs and became a fiercely contested battleground in Silicon Valley. The shift echoed the PC revolution of the 1980s or the dawn of the smartphone era in the 2000s. Technology maturation and capital investment had crossed a tipping point.
After surgery, Arbaugh began controlling a computer cursor with thought alone. He played chess. He played Mario Kart. Once he played Civilization VI for eight hours straight. When he livestreamed on X (formerly Twitter), hundreds of thousands of people around the world watched. Although some electrode threads retracted from the brain early on, presenting a technical setback, the Neuralink team overcame the problem by improving their software algorithms. As of June 2025, Neuralink announced it had implanted chips in five patients. Musk mentioned that the first patient, Arbaugh, could soon receive 'an upgrade or dual implant.'
Neuralink was not the only player. In 2021, a company called Synchron beat it to FDA clinical trial approval. Their approach was the opposite of Neuralink's. Instead of opening the skull, they threaded a mesh electrode called the Stentrode through the jugular vein and into the brain's blood vessels. The procedure was as straightforward as a cardiac stent placement. Because it did not penetrate brain tissue directly, it was safer and recovery was faster. As of 2025, Synchron has implanted Stentrodes in 10 patients in the United States and Australia, the highest number for any single BCI company. Patients controlled iPads with their thoughts from home, shopping online and sending text messages.
In June 2023, Precision Neuroscience also began its first human clinical trial. Founded by Benjamin Rapoport, a Neuralink co-founder, the company developed a method of laying thin film electrodes on the brain's surface without piercing the brain. Their device, called Layer 7, was half the thickness of a human hair. It could be slid onto the brain's surface through a tiny slit in the skull.
In November 2025, Paradromics received FDA approval for clinical trials. The company's Connexus BCI integrates 421 electrodes with a wireless transmitter and aims to restore speech for paralyzed patients. That same June, in collaboration with a University of Michigan research team, Paradromics performed its first human recording from the brain of an epilepsy surgery patient.
China was catching up fast. In 2024, China registered 31 BCI-related clinical trials, triple the number from 2023. In June 2025, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced it had begun human clinical trials of an invasive BCI device, making China the second country in the world to do so after the United States.
A patient who had lost all four limbs in an electrical accident was playing video games with his thoughts within weeks of training. Some assessments had placed Chinese BCI technology eight years behind the United States, but analysts now say the gap has narrowed to within three years.
What made the explosive growth of the 2020s possible? Four factors converged at once.
First, hardware innovation. Smaller electrodes, more channels, wireless transmission, designs built for long-term implantation. Neuralink's N1 chip packed 1,024 electrodes into a coin-sized device. That was a different order of bandwidth from the Utah Array's 100.
Second, advances in surgical technique. Neuralink's R1 robot inserted electrodes with a precision impossible for the human hand, threading them past blood vessels. Synchron's endovascular approach eliminated the fear of open-skull surgery.
Third, progress in artificial intelligence. Deep-learning-based decoding algorithms could now interpret intention in real time while tolerating fluctuations in brain signals. In 2023, a Stanford research team succeeded in converting brain signals to text at a rate exceeding 62 words per minute.
Fourth, regulation and capital. The FDA's Breakthrough Device designation accelerated the approval process. Neuralink raised over $650 million, and Morgan Stanley valued the BCI market at $400 billion.
MIT Technology Review reported in April 2025: 'About 25 BCI implant clinical trials are currently underway. Fewer than 100 people on Earth have lived with an implant in their brain for months or years. Yet the technology has taken several steps toward real, practical applications.' Blackrock Neurotech has implanted devices in more than 40 patients, and its longest-running patient has used a BCI for over nine years, evidence of the technology's long-term durability.
The dark room where Hans Berger conducted his secret experiments alone in 1924 has become a vast stage the whole world is watching. The 2020s will be recorded as the era when humanity began hacking its own brain to overcome disease and, beyond that, to redefine the limits of what it means to be human. But this explosive growth is not a matter of numbers alone. Brain data privacy, neurorights, the risk of military misuse: these changes demand a new social contract. Technology is racing ahead; law and ethics are trailing behind. How do we close this gap? That is the question the 2020s pose to us.
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.