Are brain-computer interfaces a potential solution to safety problems?

It's not completely clear exactly what 'merging' with AI would imply, but it doesn't seem like a way to get around the alignment problem. If the AI system is aligned, and wants to do what humans want, then having direct access to human brains could provide a lot of information about human values and goals very quickly and efficiently, and thus be helpful for better alignment. Although, a smart AI system could also get almost all of this information without a brain-computer interface, through conversation, observation etc, though much slower. On the other hand if the system is not aligned, and doesn't fundamentally want humans to get what we want, then extra information about how human minds work doesn't help and only makes the problem worse. Allowing a misaligned AGI direct access to your brain hardware is a bad idea for obvious reasons.