Overwrought criticism. Yes, we’re at that wildly imaginative stage where a small & hard step down a long road of undeveloped technology gives rise to hopes of what the end of that decades-hence goal will achieve. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and doesn’t mean we’ll give up tablets for brain implants next year. Yes those leading the way give impassioned speeches about what might come of their work - that’s ok, really.
The article doesn't at all suggest we shouldn't try, and explicitly points out that there will likely be a lot of benefits to science and neurosurgery due to this influx in funding.
The point is to remind us that all of the hype around this is just that: hype.
Notice, for the first few minutes of that video, it shows a mounting degree of credibility on the part of Nueralink as PhDs with expertise on relevant topics are noted, but then quite abruptly the tone shifts and it plays a comedy sketch [1]. Why? Apply common sense and skepticism to that question and you will be enlightened. I'll give you a hint: common sense does not indicate, like the YouTube channel implies, that the richest person in the world gets there by providing absolutely no value to the rooms he enters. In order to have that implication a resort to a different rhetorical technique than that of reason is necessary. The creator of the video understood this and employed such a technique.
The video tries to argue that Elon Musk is trying to steal credit for founding the company [2]. He doesn't actually quote Elon Musk when he accuses him of stealing credit. Why does he circle text on Wikipedia rather than quote Elon Musk? If you go to the Wikipedia article and check the citations for that claim you will discover Elon Musk does not state the thing which the liar in the video states that he claims. Why does he lie about what Elon Musk actually said? Apply common sense and skepticism to that question and you will be enlightened. I'll give you a hint: he is working backward from a narrative, not forward from the facts.
Alternatively, want to do a long bet for $10k that in 10 years Musk will still be a millionaire despite the contents of the video you linked? Void of bet in the event that some other cause leads to misfortune.
The video may be a bit off but doesn't change who Musk [1] is. Arrogantly dictating his way around like a child will eventually result in push back. Maybe not in the US or China but the Germans don't play the same game. [2]
That new link is pretty pathetic as a justification for derision. I'll take one and only example because if I did as many as I could do I would come across as an apologist when really your sources are just absolute garbage. They are full of straw men and fallacies. Don't get me wrong - you can point to one that is reasonable. It's just that as a wall of argument that is full of garbage is a gish gallop. It's a technique of rhetoric not reason. So I'm not going to treat your sources as something I should be reasonable with, since they are unworthy of the effort.
> 2,291 days since Elon Musk tweeted tat Tesla was developing a charger that automatically connects to cars. (12/31/2014)
> "We are actually working on a charger that automatically moves out from the wall & connects like a solid metal snake. For realz."
> https://elonmusk.today/#snake-charger
Here is the metal snake charger it claims doesn't exist:
You aren't a prophet schueller. You don't know what will happen in the future. Neither do I. What you can do is reason as effectively as possible with the highest quality information you can obtain.
The information source that you are using isn't high quality. This is obvious, but I'll explain why in more detail.
First off, you are right. Obviously the site intends the meaning that you gave.
Making up a different claim other than the one he said is stupid to do. With just the claim that 2 = 1 you can prove that you are the pope in two steps. The set of you and the pope is two people. 2 = 1, therefore the set of you and the pope is actually one people. Therefore you are the pope. This childish game of choosing what you believe rather than believing what is true is pointless.
Everything is provable, so the entire worldview is justifiable and anyone who can make you angry at something has control of your opinion and you can prove whatever you set out to prove.
For that reason, it is important to understand reality as it is rather than reality as you think it is. You don't get to make up whatever meaning you like for words if you want to be rational. If you are going to assume a meaning, it is wise to choose the most charitable possible reading, because otherwise you aren't grounded in evidence. This isn't just the principal of loving your neighbor as yourself - though it is that too. It goes deeper in a mathematical sense.
If there are two readings, one of which is supported by evidence, but the other isn't, but you choose to read the meaning which isn't supported by the evidence than you are making a calculated decision to use the reading which has less evidence supporting it. Your beliefs aren't justified by evidence. So they aren't rooted in a wellspring of truth.
The site does choose to be ungrounded from the truth. It doesn't choose the most charitable reading of his statement. It restates instead something he didn't say. Something which has less evidence backing it than another reading of what he said which was absolutely true with strong evidence backing the interpretation.
We know that there is a more charitable reading, because he claimed they were working on something and that thing which they claimed to have worked on is shown to exist. Working on something doesn't imply that it becomes massively adopted. If it did, that would imply that most people in all of reality have never worked a day in their life. Someone who spent all of their life in hard labor, according to your definition for what work is, would not have worked even once - they, after all, didn't get mass adoption of whatever it was they worked on.
So the twisting of the words isn't right. It requires distortion. It requires reaching. It isn't as supported by the evidence. It is wrong.
Yet the site chose to use that wrong interpretation. It gave you a source of information about Elon Musk, but it gave you one which wasn't rooted in the evidence. It wasn't written for your reason, but for your emotion. It is intended to provoke emotion, which is why it reads like it does. It isn't intended to be read rationally, because wisdom despises lies.
In forming your opinions atop this information source, you're not thinking based on the evidence, but based on emotion. It doesn't matter how clever you are - and I'm sure you're clever. The information you're using is faulty. It may lead you to correct conclusions despite itself, but it doesn't have a strong logical justification for doing so.
Therefore, the information source is quite obviously one you should disavow and avoid if your goal is to make good and profitable decisions.
Keep in mind, this doesn't mean you are wrong. You could be right - it just won't be because of the information source you used, which is quit soundly refuted.
It might be hard for you to stomach this refutation, because I only refuted one, but try this. Go to the site and try to see if you can find a place where the site says "Elon said use X to buy Y" when in fact the quoted text means "after Y would gain X". This exists, but in finding it for yourself you'll learn more about the validity of your information source than I could ever hope to teach you.
Afterward, think on the emotional connotation of the restatement. Ask yourself questions like why they chose to restate things so as to produce a falsehood. Then ask yourself about Elon's text in that arrangement. There are lessons about good communication within it and it directly corresponds with mathematics.
Why does the information source choose to turn something which has deep mathematical truth justifying it were the claims to be true with something which is obviously non-casual?
It isn't just wrong. It is obviously wrong. Everyone knows cause and effect.
They do it anyway. They get it wrong, despite it being obviously wrong.
Why? The answer of course is because doing so works. They hooked you, didn't they?
Or at least, it seems to work. Truly, it doesn't, and the fact that it doesn't is probably best explained by someone other than me: read Plato. In particular read the dialogue in which the professor of rhetoric and Colt talk with Socartese about what it is that rhetoric is. He wrote about sites like the one you are using thousands of years ago.
Of course Musk will still be a millionaire at least, but I'd take that $10k best that we won't have fully autonomous driving or any consumer brain integration in 10 years with mass adoption.
It is obvious that he isn't going to crash and burn hard - to you. So forcing you to reconcile with the inability to take a bet that is in accordance with your stated predictions has no value - it doesn't force you to confront the fact that you don't believe what you are saying with enough conviction to act on it and it doesn't force the audience to recognize it either.
Asking me to take a bet that doesn't match with my stated predictions isn't as reasonable. Why should I bet on something that I never claimed would happen? That said - I'm already invested in long positions in various AI & robotics companies. You can bet against my actual beliefs by taking positions which would benefit you if those companies aren't the future.
> I doubt we will have accurate, mind-reading consumer devices in the near future
I'm not sure Neuralink would disagree. Their first applications are medical, not consumer mind-reading. They're open about their bigger vision being farther away.
> Neuroscience is far from understanding how the mind works — much less having the ability to decode it.
We don't necessarily have to understand everything about the brain to communicate with it. And we'll learn a lot in the process.
> a neurotech device would have to add significant value for a consumer to get one implanted in her skull.
Again, I don't think Neuralink would disagree. I guess the disagreement is in whether an implant could provide that significant value. And nobody really knows yet, of course. A lot depends on how well the brain can adapt to a new form of I/O.
> Consumer brain-recording devices have been on the market for roughly 15 years
Yeah but the technology is totally different and quite lame honestly. Existing devices have fundamental limitations that are not shared by an actual brain implant. Not a strong argument IMO.
> Helmets and other headgear face an uphill battle to adoption
The external hardware for an implant can get pretty small. Much less obtrusive than the given example of Google Glass.
> It may be more taxing to control a device with a BCI than without it
Pure speculation at this point.
Honestly it is wise to be skeptical. But mostly I am skeptical of the timeline, not the eventual usefulness of the product. Neuralink is likely too early, but one day useful consumer brain implants will be possible.
It's so far out in the future that numerous other advances may make the entirety of the approach useless.
For example, maybe computers get so smart our need to interact with them diminishes and we interact with them rather passively.
Maybe the opposite happens and we need even tighter coupling leading to a genetic engineering solution or a nanobot pill solution that crosses the blood brain barrier.
The problem is everything is pure speculation at this point. I do hope they accomplish some of their goals but any business potential seems a total guess.
> Maybe the opposite happens and we need even tighter coupling leading to a genetic engineering solution
You first.
As it happens, neuroscientists have become quite proficient in reading out the activity of large numbers of neurons in recent times. We do whole-brain activity imaging (of fruit flies) routinely in the lab that I work in (albeit not at single-cell resolution). The problem is that these techniques are incredibly invasive. They involve genetically encoded fluorescent protein sensors, surgery and lasers so bright that imaging time is quite limited (because the organism gets cooked).
That approach is never going to work in humans. The genetic engineering alone is enough of a problem, let alone the optical bench (not exactly portable) and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment you need.
And the whole reason that approach became so popular in the first place is because of how limiting electrophysiology is. You can get at best a couple of thousands of neurons with ephys. Certainly not the routine whole-brain imaging that is happening right now in neuro labs around the world.
So there's pretty good reason to be skeptical of neuralink. I don't think you'll ever meet a working neuroscientist who thinks this has any chance of working. What GP is expressing is entirely baseless. Of course neuralink would disagree, they have a profit motive and snake-oil to sell. Ask someone who actually works in the field and you're going to hear a different story.
If what neuralink was doing was actually worth pursuing, HHMI Janelia would be investing in it. They were doing ephys on dragonflies in flight way back on 2014 for gods sake [0]. They've got the chops, and that they're not doing it speaks volumes.
The goals are so ambitious that I think we have to be specific about we're talking about and specific about what won't work. (Because you haven't actually said anything about why it won't work.)
If their first goal is to restore some functionality to severely paralyzed people with less big/bulky and doesn't leave a hole (infection point) in your skull, what won't work about that? Is it the body rejecting the implant? Is it the wires breaking down or migrating out of where they're placed? What is it?
People should always be skeptical of timelines when it comes to Musk's ventures. He is famous for short deadlines, high expectations, and a competitive environment.
There's a TED talk somewhere out there with SpaceX's CEO where this comes up a bunch, and she plays on it very well.
> We don't necessarily have to understand everything about the brain to communicate with it. And we'll learn a lot in the process.
Very true! However, we're still learning a lot about the brain. For instance, astrocytes/glia are still quite understudied despite being ~1/2 of the cells in your brain (maybe). Mostly, this is because they are not very electrically reactive. But they are known to be a pathway for NMDAr recycling as well as surrounding the synapse in certain parts of the brain. This issue of astrocytes is one of thousands that we're still trying to get a grip on. Essentially, we have okay-ish knowledge of large-scale phenomena (~1cm3) and small-scale (synapse, nucleus) behavior, but the middle ground (10's of neurons) is quite hard. Unfortunately, that seems to be were all the magic happens.
> A lot depends on how well the brain can adapt to a new form of I/O.
Typically, it does this via scarring. Making sure the leads are engineered to deal with scarring is the first hurdle. Then you'd need to stimulate only a select few neurons, a feat that is quite difficult (dynamic positioning, heartbeat, discharges, feedback, etc). Not necessarily insurmountable problems, but we're not really sure how to do that compactly with wires. One way is just use light and optogenetics and CLARITY, but then you have to genetically modify a brain and wash it out in situ, which is downright crazy hard.
Hypothetically, if I can hire a PhD candidate and give him a million bucks to tweak the sensors for my brain specifically. Could he or she then make this like a joystick. Is the issue that there's so much variation between people.
No way in hell I'm letting anyone stick something in my brain, I thought there was a wireless way to do this. In a very dystopian way I could imagine shopping centers scanning the brain waves potential customers and taloring ads to them
Neurosurgeons live in a very weird bubble around elective surgery.
I was at a conference where people were debating the merits of non-invasive vs. invasive neural interfaces. A surgeon argued that people would obviously never accept non-invasive ones...ON COSMETIC GROUNDS: EEG caps (and similar) look dorky.
Many people do go to great pains to hide disabilities, but I was (and still am) really skeptical that this totally trumps fears around highly-invasive neurosurgery!
Even though it's an incredibly effective treatment, surgeons are pretty reluctant to do DBS implants on older patients with Parkinson's Disease because of the risks of the surgery itself. That's with a pretty clear medical case too.
Controlling a 2D cursor is a pretty standard task. If you’ve already got an implant, I would be happy to take your million bucks. If not, you’d need an EEG rig first (I’m not going to jail over this!), but it’s still very doable. Wolpaw et al. had 1D EEG controls working 30 years ago.
Again... not saying it’s not possible. Human beings have already played a game COLLABORATIVELY, with only mind to mind communication... this is a philosophical comment on what neuroscience should do, not what it is able to do.
For example, as of this writing, you could have an experimental procedure that results in light sensitive neurons, that when excited by a laser, stop your breathing and remove the sensation of asphyxiation to let you die a painless, playful death.
(Optogenetics, table stakes)
So I think it’s massively important to discuss what should and shouldn’t be done with Neurotech, otherwise with the rate the “throughput” argument is going... aka all of these joystick developments... your life value will be pegged to how many blockchains your mind can mine... enjoy the matrix!
I just don't get this attitude. It's such a sour grapes type of attitude. Either help out, or get out.
It’s called “skepticism”. You read enough history, you realize the charlatans greatly outnumber the geniuses, and you do your due-diligence before you invest, or form some weird cult.
If you read enough history, you realize that people who fail are forgotten, but the people who mock the people who end up succeeding are remembered and humiliated forever.
Some skeptics remain skeptics up until the point that they've been proven blatantly and obviously wrong and people stop accepting their arguments, so for some "skeptics" at least it's more of a stubborn mindset backed by confirmation bias or other issues disconnected from the actual subject matter, rather than sound reasoning.
In this case, however, scepticism is more than warranted.
Just comparing the mission statement of NeuraLink (from their homepage) with the wild claims of their most prominent founder (Musk) should make you stop and think for a second.
The actual goals are quite humble and achievable in the near term. What Musk says on Joe Rogen's podcasts and other public forums, however, is more fiction than science.
Unfortunately most publications focus on the latter and ignore the former and way too many people fall for this and seriously believe that highly invasive and risky brain surgery will become routine in just a couple of years.
We're talking about the same guy who said there could be "1 million full self-driving robo taxis on the road by 2020" during the April 2019 Tesla investor day [0]. The same guy, mind you, who's company two years later, in 2021 told regulatory bodies that their technology is only SAE level-2... [1]
The technical press back then was very sceptical about the claim as well (and it turns out they were right to do so). Autonomous cars are on a whole different level than BCI, though, and there's no breakthrough science required to achieve autonomous cars.
So in light of this I feel that scepticism has its place w.r.t. BCI and outrageous claims (e.g. streaming music directly into the brain or curing neurological diseases) about the near-term abilities and development stage of the technology.
Funny you mention that. First of all, that's nothing new - years ago a simple external EEG was enough for users to move a mouse. Now available as off-the-shelf hardware and with OSS projects to boot [1]
Secondly, nothing that was shown (apart from being far from new, exciting or ground-breaking in any way) was independently verified so we just have to take their word for it...
She's not a skeptic on the value of the technology however , in fact she dismisses any ethical issues it poses. She 's skeptical of the timeline, which is more of a business statement.
Leaving aside that this person was probably in this field before Neuralink and the others, in matters such as these, offering an expert opinion on a market filled with snake oil certainly is helping out. Otherwise we rely on people whose first priority is not truth but profit.
>So what? Stop trying? Give up?
Her suggestion is to exercise skepticism and be realistic about what the actual applications and markets are.
"Leaving aside that this person was probably in this field before Neuralink and the others"
Neuralink founding members:
Max Hodak previously worked on the development of brain-computer interfaces at Duke University.
Matthew MacDougall, Head of Neurosurgery at Neuralink and neurosurgeon at California Pacific Medical Center. He was previously working at Stanford where he worked in labs that implemented and designed brain-computer interfaces.
Vanessa Tolosa, Director of Neural Interfaces. She previously led a neurotechnology team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that worked with a wide variety of technology on technology prostheses that were used in clinical and academic settings.
No--but no one is saying that! Instead, we could dial back on the hype, put our heads down, and get to work.
I work in this field and I have such strong, mixed feelings about companies like these. On the one hand, more interest in the brain and neurotech is great. These are tough problems, and we need new ideas, new tools, and new approaches. The standard academic approach of throwing a few trainees at a problem for a few years each (mostly in isolation), might not be the best way to tackle a problem that ranges from biophysics to psychology (and everything in between: materials science, signal processing, etc).
On the other hand, I worry that excessive hype is going to blow the field up before it gets started. If Elon Musk says he can implant 3000 electrodes that will let you control your iPhone--by next year--why would anyone fund me to do the slower, slogging work that I think will be required to eventually make something like that possible? This isn't just a critique of industry; the same brand of hucksterism shows up in parts of academia too. Throwing cold water on people's hopes and dreams isn't fun, but I think it's important for the long-term health of neuroscience as a field.
Shorter term, companies should also think about who they're attracting with this hype. I'm on the job market (in a very low-key way), and one of my principle requirements is that I want to work somewhere that is serious about the science: I want to build something that will actually work, instead of burning a pile of VC cash chasing hype or, God forbid, Theranos. Many of my colleagues feel the same way.
There is an insane amount of hype, and the expectations are hyper inflated relative to what is realistic and feasible. Uncontrolled hype results in real harm. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
There is nothing wrong with grounding a company's claims/goals against reality. Particularly relevant for any company lead by Elon Musk. His timelines are always wrong. He's been promising FSD is just a year away for the better part of the last decade.
The biggest issue with Neuralink (for consumers) is the basic problem with artificial implants and their side effects.
Teeth implants, knee implants they generate additional risk of low level inflammation in the body over time. Even generally unproblematic silicon breast implants that just hang there have scar tissue and can cause immune system reactions.
Brain surgery is many times riskier. If Neuralink could create way to circumvent all these problems it would be huge breakthrough even without the BCI.
"Consumers have shown time and again that they are reluctant to adopt products that look funny (ahem, Google Glass)."
I think this is misreading Google Glass. People didn't like or want to use Google Glass because there was no "killer app" for them. There was no useful app for Glass at all so far as I am aware. Had Google Glass enabled something new and useful people would have worn it regardless of how different it looked, and because people found use in wearing it we would get used to it.
Headphones are an example of this. Headphones would probably look goofy if you weren't used to seeing them. People wear headphones anyway because headphones deliver something useful to the wearer - private audio.
If I had to wear a silly hat, but in exchange could carry around a meaningful brain-computer interface, I absolutely would, and, assuming "meaningful" in a broad sense, I'm certain huge numbers of people would as well.
Right now people are struggling to make the tech work at all. Worrying about the form factor with which it will be delivered is premature - it can't really do anything yet. Once it's useful it will need a good form factor, but the use will drive adoption, not the other way around.
Exactly, glasses are an even better example. They give you superior vision compared to what you would have naturally so almost everyone who needs them puts up with wearing them and they have even become a fashion trend in themselves by being so omnipresent. If I could have a pair of glasses for my brain that correct for any natural deficiencies then I'd wear the heck out of them, appearances be damned.
I'm sure the Apple Brain Implant will look "cool" and be highly sought after just like their other seemingly-odd gadgets did at the time of their inception (what is this "iPhone" thing?).
The iPhone looked cool, or at least not odd, from the start. AirPods would be a good example though IMO, that dangling "wire that stops after an inch"/earring-looking-thing is still strange to me but has become normal.
I neither use nor am a fan of AirPods but I appreciate the stem design. It clearly defines the orientation and maintains the classic Apple earbud silhouette, providing contrast that emphasizes the lack of wires coming out of it.
> [...] still strange to me but has become normal.
Social proof will do that. Doesn't matter how weird something looks, if the appearance becomes associated with wealth in the public consciousness, people will start thinking it looks cool and coming up with reasons why.
Apple won't release a product like Neuralink themselves until the tech is very mature. If anything went wrong with one and left someone in a brain damaged state it would harm their brand too much. Neural interfaces will come from new companies for a very long time to come.
> I think this is misreading Google Glass. People didn't like or want to use Google Glass because there was no "killer app" for them
I think the other reason why people didn't want to adopt Google Glass, is the stories about other people objecting to people wearing them–primarily because of privacy concerns, that the devices were capable of recording video, and that while a phone camera can record video too, it is somewhat more obvious if someone is doing it with a phone camera than with Google Glass. If a product is going to be a social hassle, if other people and businesses are going to object to your use of it, a lot of people will decide the negative social consequences aren't worth it.
Something like Google Glass specifically targeted to people with disabilities would be more acceptable, because someone using it can always say that it is for their disability, at which point most people would be more forgiving, plus if any business tries to ban it they run the legal and PR risk of being accused of disability discrimination.
Although honestly i thought it was a bullshit argument. You can buy tiny disguised cameras. If someone wanted to creepily record you, they could easily do so and you would never know. They certainly wouldn't use something as ostentatious as google glass.
Google with Glass and Microsoft with Zune have shown that it's not always important to be the first mover if you can't generate hype and nail the user experience. Apple came in and cleaned up the music playing space. Now I suspect they may be about to do the same with AR.
Which Diamond/Rio player was a better product than the iPod at the time it was taking over (~2001)? Apple certainly had good marketing with those multi-coloured dancing adverts ... but the product itself was pretty great.
As much as I hate DRM, it isn't something most consumers care about. The real selling points like the iPod's storage, case, materials, and branding were mainly unmatched for a long time.
Hang on, any Rio? Like the 32MB Rio PMP300? Is there a Rio product that competed directly with the iPod in the era that it took off? Remember that iPods only worked with the Mac (and its tiny market share) until the latter half of 2002 and only really took off in 2003. Rio aka SONICblue went bankrupt in March 2003, they barely competed head to head with Apple in mp3 players for a few months.
Apple Marketing was pretty overwhelming, but I'm afraid the Rio line was already doomed by the time the iPod began to dominate.
Also important to note that while Apple were very successful in music players, there are several successful competitors in that market, such as Sony and Sandisk.
In fact at the peak, the iPod's market share in music players was about the same as what Android has in smartphones today.
Many commenters are rightfully pointing out that my Zune timeline is wildly off. My apologies, I deserve the downvotes on that one - I misremembered and should have checked before posting.
Elon Musk says improving the speed of communication is the killer app. Typing with "meat sticks" is inefficient compared to the speed of thought.
Eventually using it to backup and data mine memories will likely happen, as in Black Mirror.
Using it to filter, annotate, and block parts of reality is also likely. Again, Black Mirror touches on this.
Some have posited the idea of gamifying reality, for all sorts of purposes.
I've often thought realtime logic-checking would be useful. Fact-checking would be more subject to biases in the software and data, but could also be useful.
Eventually the idea is probably that neural prosthetics will be developed that act as entire new brain subsystems.
I'm not sure what timescale Elon thinks this company is on, but even that first point is probably much further away than any new product team at Google could survive for (and no this is not a "Google is ADHD" joke, although that is also kinda true).
Additionally, an implant is pretty damn invasive. So some cute demos or niche consumer applications are not going to cut it.
IMO the two possible paths here are either this will be an R&D money sink for our entire lifetimes (maybe funded by Elon for fun, maybe some government grants, etc.) or they will primarily operate as a medical device company.
The implants they are developing are definitely a tech improvement, so they could realistically improve existing DBS treatments. The company could also work on their own novel DBS paradigms for treatment of specific diseases. A lot of DBS (especially for psychiatric diseases like OCD) is currently rudimentary AND we have a poor understanding of why it even sort of works. But it does clearly work for at least some subset of patients, so there are real avenues for continued development.
If certain lucrative professions, like daytrading, could see an edge from this sort of thing, even of a modest amount, then it would happen no matter how invasive.
Adult content and recreation is likely a very compelling market for a brain interface. It becomes less necessary to go through the usual ceremony (and the complexities that go along) of intimate relationships when you can get the same neurons firing with wetware and whatever payments look like at that time.
imagine being able to talk to GPT-3 in your brain. It would make you superintelligent although without being completely sure that anything it said to you was actually true.
Obviously this isn't going to happen, but imagining it from a scifi perspective - honestly that sounds kind of horrifying to me?
This is a step further, but say we could interface directly with auditory areas to have access to a massive internal library of different sounds. You could play songs on demand, verbatim recall anything that was said to you in the past, etc.
Sounds pretty dope at first, but this kind of thing would likely be developed before future researchers fully understand the entire human brain. So that means they would not really understand how the brain would interface with it, especially across long time scales and a heterogeneous population.
Forget any sort of malicious action, and still God only knows the potential side effects. It could massively fuck with ability to learn over time, cause terrible rumination issues, maybe it could trigger psychosis in high risk individuals, maybe it would fuck up your dreams.
Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems.
Anyway, this mostly reminded me of that Black Mirror episode about the parent watching the kid via a brain implant, which I thought was too heavy handed. There are a ton of ways brain implants could be scary without using the super obvious surveillance angle. Honestly just the "blurring out of bad things" feature would have made for a cooler episode IMO.
> Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems.
We'd definitely have to regulate the shit out of tech then. Going to example of phones - the root problem there isn't that phones are addictive, it's that every aspect of them is controlled by commercial interests that benefit from making them addictive and user-hostile. If we were to create BCI the way smartphones where - where the Googles and Apples of BCI will release a consumption-oriented platform you don't own ("because security!"), that serves primarily to access the Facebooks and Twitters of BCI, in the way the platforms tell you to (again, "because security!") - then it's game over for humanity.
If, however, we allow control over devices and their operations to be held by the user (to the extent it's unprecedented in this industry), and regulate social media like tobacco, alcohol and gambling, then we can reduce this problem to something comparable with alcoholism. Not ideal, but much closer to optimally balancing individual freedom with preventing fully predictable individual failure modes.
Cigarettes used to be a huge problem too, the regulation came after more people started to realize what was going on. Hopefully some regulation of social media companies is coming soon.
Bi-directional interfaces are not necessary for BCI to be useful - I would pay good money for a digital copy of my memories. Just think about how that could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's if they had a library of memories on-demand.
I think real time language translation and speech to text could be a killer app for smart glasses and I’d love to have one when visiting a foreign country.
Also, for people with hearing impairment, I think speech-to-text and maybe even sign-to-speak using the glass would be very helpful for interactions with people who don’t know sign language.(I’m not hearing impaired, so maybe I’m mistaken about this.)
Truly interesting glasses app would be the one to recognise people around you and show quick dossier about them collected from public sources. Unfortunately Google did not build one. That app would truly shake the society.
Take Musk's talk about BCIs the way you take his talk about Mars colonies. But my guess is we'll have the latter before the former is common.
There will be some interesting BCI tech in the next few years but as the author notes, it's going to be very specific and limited, and probably quite expensive.
Who cares, I've seen the pig movement prediction and found it really cool
>> Would I invest my money in it?
Hell no
>> Would I have neurosurgery for no good reason?
Hell no*10
To me this is clearly a longshot product, but I'm very happy that some private citizen is willing to invest his own money into this. If someone stumbles on how to transform thoughts into movement signals or how to encode digital images into optic nerve signals I'm all for it
Even though "neuroscience is far from understanding how the mind works" companies like muse have already brought EEG headsets to market for use cases such as meditation. If neurotech focuses in on use cases where we can already decode useful information from the brain that can't be accessed by other methods, I think there is a huge potential market waiting to be tapped.
Being skeptical about the accuracy of these technologies/feasibility of surgery is valid, but this article reads as pretty cynical rather than just skeptical, haha.
"It takes 20 years to become an overnight success." - Eddie Cantor
SpaceX took nearly fifteen years to become the beast it is and Tesla took eight to increase deliveries from 2,600 to 500,000. Don't underestimate what these companies achieve in the long-term and we are always terrible to predict exponential growth (from pandemics, to EV, to space flights)
spaceX have been getting millions on funding every year since being announced.
just like neuralink.
the huge difference is that spaceX problem was extremely easily to solve by throwing money (6.5B usd) at it. Neuralink, not so much. That's why they spend much more on marketing with neuralink as they did with spaceX... there's no much else to do with the pile.
I think the difference is tackling a pre-existing market. Both cars and space had large existing markets to which Elon could speed up the rate of progress.
There isn't really a market for BCI except for cases of disability. In this case, he has to create the customer demand for a technology that doesn't exist. That's a really tough sell when even if it did work (which is very much in doubt), would require a literal brain surgery. This isn't like scaling up a factory or using modern compute to get a rocket to land itself. It's fundamental research with uncertainties on perhaps every angle.
I would seriously consider getting it depending on the bandwidth. Direct access to web search and an indexed storage system would be having a super power.
Plenty of people get Lasik just to avoid the annoyance of contacts/glasses and eyes are technically part of the brain. Why wouldn't there be a market for BCI when the potential benefit is much greater?
Do you really randomly poking some electrodes into your brain tissue is going to give you enough fidelity to query google. That's all it is, you know. Some wires, randomly placed in tissue. The cells around those wires don't know the TCP/IP protocol or anything
And chips are just some metal and sand, yet we figured out a way to turn them into something very useful. After all, our brains themselves are just "some wires".
And theres a big difference between between a completely controlled environment like a chip and an uncontrolled environment relative to engineering like a brain.
I think your missing the point about what I'm highlighting needs to happen after the wires are inserted into some otherwise unsuspecting tissue that isn't specially adapted for this use case in any particular way.
Yes, the brain is very adaptable though. Consider for example that humans can learn to use neurons in our fingertip to read, via braille. It would be pretty easy even with today's tech to stimulate neurons similarly to braille touch which we know works, provides 125-200 words per minute. With some research there should be ways to increase that bandwidth significantly.
The best answer I can give you is that we don't know it's too early to speculate. Maybe HCI get so good that the actual BCI part adds little value. Like a contact lens and an ear piece may accomplish just as much.
Maybe machines in the future just won't need that much specification. Like we'll give high level goals to robots/computer and interaction will be much more passive. You'll just tell a program to do your taxes or tell a robot to clean the house and it'll get done.
It's possible that we can accomplish most of the benefits of BCI without the brain surgery part. By the time this technology is ready, you may be able to take nano-bot pills once a month and to uninstall, you just stop taking them. Or maybe we'll genetically engineer babies to be born with them.
It's so early that all we can do right now is speculate and there's a lot of reason to believe this one particular company won't succeed.
Most people didn't get Lasik when there still was a risk of permanent damage like blindness or halos. A lot more did when the technology became proven. As someone who underwent the procedure, it also felt like liberating surgery.
Applying similar patterns to Neuralink, the likelihood that a lot of people will jump at the opportunity initially is small. After that, it all depends on how exactly it improves lives (maybe even becomes necessary in some fields?) and how long they can absorb losses until the process is battle-tested enough.
As opposed to Lasik, Neuralink presents much greater risks through surgery and being an implant in the first place. My guess is the value proposition would need to be overwhelming for a lot of people to consider it and fairly strong for enough people to consider it to guarantee profitability.
Actually it peaked in 2000, one year after the FDA approved it in 1999 when 1.4M Americans got it. Now around 700K people get it yearly (1). ~10M people total have gotten Lasik. Around ~165M Americans currently have glasses. About 75% of adults need corrective vision of some sort.
I wouldn't call this widespread adoption. Maybe it's cost, maybe it's the risk of the surgery.
Even discounting everything about the ethics, feasibility, state of our conceptual knowledge of brain function, has anyone demonstrated how a six-figure hardware suite like this https://plexon.com/plexon-systems/ is going to be miniaturized into a smartphone sized device mass produced for consumer purchase in the timetable laid out by Neuralink?
The hardware in that system is from Blackrock Microsystems. You can call them up and buy it right now (if you’ve got the cash...It’s not cheap!) It’s currently intended for research, so you’ll need ethics approval and the decoder isn’t included (but that’s the fun part anyway).
Ripple Neuro sells similar gear (better, even, maybe) and Neuralynx and some smaller companies also have competing products. It’s not in every corner store, but you could have a similar setup this month if you really wanted to.
I did my PhD in this field, I love that Neuralink is doing what they’re doing, but I also agree with this article. Your hands on a keyboard is a fantastic brain computer interface and represent a high bar that an implanted BCI must clear to add value for non-paralyzed people.
Sure, or maybe the window for innovation is too small because of gatekeeping. Accessibility software is notoriously horrible because of this reason, why wouldn't hardware be?
It seems like you're jumping straight to a conspiracy as the explanation, which does not seem supported by any evidence whatsoever.
Why in the world would these supposed Gatekeepers gatekeep away a technology that would provide a massive competitive advantage? Wouldn't they instead do exactly what they've been doing for decades and just buy up this hypothetical new technology? That sure seems to be what Apple is doing; there's an entire wiki page dedicated to Apple acquisitions and what Apple products were derived from it. Why would they suddenly flip into suppressing something better rather than just repeating their standard practice?
Perhaps the more plausible answer is that nobody has come up with an interface that beats the smart phone for the general population?
Well, keyboards are fantastic for programmers and writers who touch type. And of course we don't want to give them up – there's a whole enthusiast community passionate about mechanical switches, pretty keycaps, and ergonomics.
For regular people, it seems that voice is a somewhat important interface these days. "Ok google remind me to buy toilet paper" and so on. And honestly… isn't that already better than implanted magic in some ways? People (who can) naturally communicate with other people using voice, not telepathy.
> "Should we be worried that companies like Facebook, Neuralink, Kernel, and others — helmed by individuals who have previously launched paradigm-shifting technology — are working on capturing data from our brains?"
Who would be dumb enough to implant something from facebook into their brain?!
The difference between moving your eyes and fingers and open brain surgery in terms of both cost and risk render this argument somewhat pointless.
Costly high-risk surgery that might kill or lobotomise you is not very appealing compared to glaring at a screen and moving your fingers for the purpose of sharing meaningless drivel with the world.
Misleading. Neuralink has not shown something impressive , however it's not comparable with consumer supposedly-EEG devices, but with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrainGate .
Those things are still in the basic research stage, and it's been really hard to make them work properly. Neuralink is not even leading in research here, but i don't think they expect to make consumer grade anytime soon either. OTOH, all sorts of multiunnit recordings and optogenetics stimulation is possible today - if you're a mouse.
I wonder why consumer-grade doesnt pursue the more feasible goal of reading from a motor nerve. I wish i could train myself typing by thinking of finger movements.
I think that these aspirations for an electrosilico (pardon my neologisms) interface with the biological brain are a rather outdated nostalgia of the 20th century ninetys.(Vaporwave comes to mind).
Intersecting just 90 sensors with the insane mass of neurons... it seems rather clumsy primitive tech tbh.
If I was about to bet on the future I assume, that aspirations of hybridisation/creolisation/amalgamation of human&machine will happen on the biological register; that this development will go the other way round: from semiconductors to biotechnology. E.g. the brain is a fabulous architecture; damn effective and very low energy consumption at the same time.
Wich makes me think: A substantially useful AI that can immerse with neurological coginition (and not just be a fancier interface that safes you from carrying a calculator around), will probably need A LOT of computational power. Damn these things can't even steer a hand through useful movements while im typing a way in language (which is its own insane technology [1]) with quite some musicality.
What I mean is: Let's assume you could really supply the population with these interfaces and they really work. Who is going to be supplied with her/his own infrastructure of supercomputers running that AI that will merge with her/his cognition?
I don't think that it would be possible to supply even a marginal amount of the population with access to these entitys.
So this amounts to some dream of the (misunderstood version) of the Übermensch, as a caressing of the narcissitic hurt that the being of tekhne inflicts to some.
[1] It has been argued that language speaks. Not only do subjects speak language, but language also speaks subjects. (that's spoken through Heidegger). Thus there is something like a life of lanugage (it makes sense to think about if it is alife). Think of language as an AI.
Consumer neurotech doesn't need to start with Neuralink. Products like Halo (https://www.haloneuro.com/) are stimulating your brain to improve muscle memory, Muse (https://choosemuse.com) is using neurofeedback to improve meditation (and they're getting into sleep tracking).
At SoundMind (https://SoundMind.co), we're building a headband which monitors your sleep state and uses sound (auditory stimulation) to improve your sleep.
Commercial tCDS is a real thing for treatment of depression. There are multiple consumer tCDS devices on the market as well, I won't link to them, because I haven't seen any that I don't believe are snake oil. But the commercial scale devices will get shrunk down to consumer usable size eventually.
This is just the beginning. Consumer neurotech shouldn't mean implanted, just as sight correction doesn't mean lasik (just wear glasses).
I think this skeptic is perhaps too focused on the technology, rather than the use case.
I'm not sure if we'll ever willingly get an neural implant, but let's not throw all of neurotech to mean that small segment of the market.
There is so much hype (“it does everything: makes you stronger, faster, happier, smarter, and better at video games and jazz”) and anti-hype (“it does nothing and it’s all placebo or peripheral stimulation”)[0].
I know about as much about it as anyone and I think that it a) has tons of promise and b) should not be anywhere near anyone but an research participant for the foreseeable future.
Even the commercial versions shouldn't be used outside the lab? A friend is on the board of a commercial tDCS medical company. They don't make the hardware, they just do the stim on patients. I haven't seen the machines, but he says they look like an old school hair helmet from a salon in the 60s.
The hardware itself is very simple: it's just a constant current source with some safety features bolted on. Research-oriented devices look wild, but it's mostly because cable management isn't a huge priority: better to be flexible than look nice!. It's certainly possible to make a good-looking one: Neuroelectrics's looks like a swim cap and Halo sells a baseball-style hat with a brim.
However, the simplicity of the device makes people think its effects will be equally simple. This isn't true.
We don't fully understand what the electric fields do to the brain, and the simple story of "turning the brain up/down" almost certainly doesn't hold up. In most cases, we also don't understand the problem to be solved (e.g., what in the brain is causing your depression--or your bad golf game). Taken together, it's a nightmare: poking at an unknown cause with an unknown effect.
My colleagues and I have been looking at this in monkeys, which we can measure everything from behavioral effects down to the activity of single neurons. It's very exciting and has, I think, a lot of potential, but it blows my mind that people are already selling products. The crazy thing is that the field has been through this hype cycle before in the 1960s-1970s....
Thanks for clarifying and providing more details. We're working with closed loop auditory stimulation for sleep (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02170-3) as well as other similar techniques.
We've been speaking with neurologists here in Australia who are giving us guidance, but if you have any thoughts, I'd be very keen to hear them. Either here, or via email. My address is in my profile.
We did some work on DARPA's RAM REPLAY program, and there was a consortium trying that for "tagging" memories: they'd pair something to be memorized with a sound during (awake) study sessions, and then play the sound to a sleeping participant to reactivate that memory during sleep.
Stephen Simons was the lead from Teledyne; there were also folks from UCR and Endonovo Therapeutics, I think. It sorta seemed to work (here's the paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0002...) , though I remember they ended up needing to build a fancy system to optimize the cue volume so it was loud but not so loud that it woke the participants up.
WOW!!! That's awesome. I've read about that work, and other similar studies. We've had a brief chat with the Australian Navy about some of our tech. It's a fascinating field. We come from CSIRO (Australia's version of DARPA), so have some experience commercializing research. But I think we've been surprised at how bad some of the sleep studies are. :o
I rather liked Neuroware's Nekomimi ears.[1] They were a set of wearable cat ears controlled by an EEG sensor. They could detect at rest, attentive, and surprised states. Popular with cosplayers around 2013.
They worked, more or less. Watching someone play a video game, the ears would show "attentive" while they played a level, and dropped back to rest when they finished. At an anime convention, I saw a group of girls all wearing them. Someone called out the name of one, and her ears popped up. Only hers, not the others.
They were a bit too bulky (4 AAA batteries), the ears were too big, and the forehead sensor wouldn't stay in place. Someone should try that again in a more compact form.
Most of those supposed EEG sensors are just sending the forehead or facial muscles which are quite thick and noisy, electromagnetically. When you focus, you tend to tense your muscles, so these devices work to a limited extent. But they are not EEG, especially without a conductive lubricant to get through the skin.
Why would they need to convince people to get a brain implant, when they can already convince them to just stare at a small screen, which they take with them everywhere, already? It just seems like extra cost and also harder to sell yearly upgrades.
Now, for people with spinal injuries, etc. then this totally seems like a good thing to be investigating.
This whole "our existing i/o bandwidth is too limited" story started by Musk and co is not very well thought out.
Most people cannot think faster than they type or speak, at least coherently. The rapid information transfer with a computer via "thoughts" ignores the fact that a concept of a "car", for example, exists as different neural activity patterns, distributed over different parts of the brain for different people and changes with time. So that would imply the BCI would need to catalog how different all possible concepts are cataloged within an individual, to achieve such "direct thought communication", which would require whole-brain scale recording, something definitely NOT achievable with ephys (as a thought experiment, you'd have to introduce wires whose total volume become significant compare to brain volume).
Further, the act of speaking and typing is also a way to articulate and organize your (abstract) thoughts. If one skips that stage, would the output be meaningful at all?
The limiting communication bandwidth idea is a very fancy marketing message easy for people to hype up on, in typical Elon fashion.
>>Most people cannot think faster than they type or speak, at least coherently.
Likely going to sound quite pretentious - but I definitely can and have been able to do so for as long as I can remember. It's honestly quite annoying as I grow older. I like to think it may directly correlate with the fact I was able to type 160+ WPM on a shitty membrane keyboard at school in the 5th grade quite easily.
But yes, as you said and what I've come to believe... is that most can't.
(disclaimer: I have no knowledge on the subject and purely reason based on naive grounds)
I agree with you that language helps formalize and structure thoughts in an intelligible manner, and I do also have reserves on the hypothesis that one can think much faster than it speaks.
Though, is it completely wrong to assume that a neurolink interface would act like a language?
I mean, you mentioned that it would not be possible to probe the whole brain, which makes sense, but I could imagine that to communicate easily with a neurolink interface, you would somehow need to convert your thoughts to _something_ that is probed and intelligible to the interface, just like you do when you articulate sounds to speak.
For instance, if I just vaguely think of moving my hand, that's a pretty blurry and noisy thought. But when I focus, I can almost physically feel that I am at the very edge of moving it, my sensations in the hand increase, my muscles don't move but I feel like they are ready to at any time.
Surely, thoughts that are the result of a specific focus like this could be more easily probed. In fact, it could also be that your brain would need to "learn" how to properly focus thoughts that work with the interface.
That makes for a much less appealing interface though, because it's not "effortless" to articulate thoughts in a specific manner that an interface can probe.
You are touching on the subject of attention, which is actually extremely important and has a whole field of research (see for example, the hillarious invisible monkey experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html)
There are a lot of things that we ignore or don't register consciously. It is possible to decode items in one's working memory in controlled situations (see for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/).
So I suppose one possible approach would be to hold things in your working memory and have the Neuralink actively decode those. But in that case, as you've pointed out, requires a lot of attention and most likely would rely more heavily on contextual AI to narrow the decoder search space.
The basic premise of my skepticism with the "we need higher bandwidth I/O" statement still stays though -- the bottleneck of human communication is how quickly coherent thoughts can be formed in a way someone else can understand it (output), and how quickly information can be understood (input). For the latter example, you can scan an entire page in less than second. With immense speed reading practice, you can get a "gist" of a page in around that time. But understanding the details in that time is not possible.
I see Neuralink as just a next-gen version of deep brain stimulation where we could have a lot more stimulation nodes than 1 or 2. Just that could be quite exciting as it is already known that targeted electric stimulation in the brain can do a lot of positive things for those who can benefit.
if two people wearing a nueral link can communicate wirelessly somehow----one simple concept YES or NO. and that is all the neuralink can do----you have TELEPATHY. that's how it starts.
heres the thing. why is this so much better than some wifi haptic device not implanted in the brain. ITS NOT.
Weird timing with this article given that Neuralink just released a video of a Monkey playing Pong (and other games) wit his mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCul1sp4hQ
It appears to be "neuralink and others are promising full mind reading and this whole thing is going to fail"
It is similar to the "self-driving argument". People complain and complain about Elon Musk's full-self-driving, yet telsa owners are out on crowded freeways, their cars happily driving them down the center of the lane and judiciously following the car in front. Yes, it probably can't get drive through at mcdonalds, but big whoop.
(also this person has no concept of what "the public" will do - honestly they would probably pay $5k to have alexa beep in their mind when someone's at the door)
Personally I would love a ctrl-labs keyboard, but now with facebook owning them, you know there will be a login requirement.
Keeping the car in the lane doesn't add very much utility at all. You still need to sit there, more or less attentive. Only full self driving would really change things. Driver free cabs, efficient carpools, no need for cite centre parking etc.
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[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadThe point is to remind us that all of the hype around this is just that: hype.
[1] https://youtu.be/BvmA_gQ-95c
(and it's "peddling" as in "selling", not "pedaling" like riding a bike)
The video tries to argue that Elon Musk is trying to steal credit for founding the company [2]. He doesn't actually quote Elon Musk when he accuses him of stealing credit. Why does he circle text on Wikipedia rather than quote Elon Musk? If you go to the Wikipedia article and check the citations for that claim you will discover Elon Musk does not state the thing which the liar in the video states that he claims. Why does he lie about what Elon Musk actually said? Apply common sense and skepticism to that question and you will be enlightened. I'll give you a hint: he is working backward from a narrative, not forward from the facts.
Alternatively, want to do a long bet for $10k that in 10 years Musk will still be a millionaire despite the contents of the video you linked? Void of bet in the event that some other cause leads to misfortune.
[1]: https://youtu.be/BvmA_gQ-95c?t=155 [2]: https://youtu.be/BvmA_gQ-95c?t=185
[1] https://elonmusk.today/
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/elon-musk-tesla-gruenheide...
> 2,291 days since Elon Musk tweeted tat Tesla was developing a charger that automatically connects to cars. (12/31/2014) > "We are actually working on a charger that automatically moves out from the wall & connects like a solid metal snake. For realz." > https://elonmusk.today/#snake-charger
Here is the metal snake charger it claims doesn't exist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWXIZMtxB6Q
I hope you don't own any Tesla shares because that will be a rude awakening in a not to distant future.
The information source that you are using isn't high quality. This is obvious, but I'll explain why in more detail.
First off, you are right. Obviously the site intends the meaning that you gave.
Making up a different claim other than the one he said is stupid to do. With just the claim that 2 = 1 you can prove that you are the pope in two steps. The set of you and the pope is two people. 2 = 1, therefore the set of you and the pope is actually one people. Therefore you are the pope. This childish game of choosing what you believe rather than believing what is true is pointless.
Everything is provable, so the entire worldview is justifiable and anyone who can make you angry at something has control of your opinion and you can prove whatever you set out to prove.
For that reason, it is important to understand reality as it is rather than reality as you think it is. You don't get to make up whatever meaning you like for words if you want to be rational. If you are going to assume a meaning, it is wise to choose the most charitable possible reading, because otherwise you aren't grounded in evidence. This isn't just the principal of loving your neighbor as yourself - though it is that too. It goes deeper in a mathematical sense.
If there are two readings, one of which is supported by evidence, but the other isn't, but you choose to read the meaning which isn't supported by the evidence than you are making a calculated decision to use the reading which has less evidence supporting it. Your beliefs aren't justified by evidence. So they aren't rooted in a wellspring of truth.
The site does choose to be ungrounded from the truth. It doesn't choose the most charitable reading of his statement. It restates instead something he didn't say. Something which has less evidence backing it than another reading of what he said which was absolutely true with strong evidence backing the interpretation.
We know that there is a more charitable reading, because he claimed they were working on something and that thing which they claimed to have worked on is shown to exist. Working on something doesn't imply that it becomes massively adopted. If it did, that would imply that most people in all of reality have never worked a day in their life. Someone who spent all of their life in hard labor, according to your definition for what work is, would not have worked even once - they, after all, didn't get mass adoption of whatever it was they worked on.
So the twisting of the words isn't right. It requires distortion. It requires reaching. It isn't as supported by the evidence. It is wrong.
Yet the site chose to use that wrong interpretation. It gave you a source of information about Elon Musk, but it gave you one which wasn't rooted in the evidence. It wasn't written for your reason, but for your emotion. It is intended to provoke emotion, which is why it reads like it does. It isn't intended to be read rationally, because wisdom despises lies.
In forming your opinions atop this information source, you're not thinking based on the evidence, but based on emotion. It doesn't matter how clever you are - and I'm sure you're clever. The information you're using is faulty. It may lead you to correct conclusions despite itself, but it doesn't have a strong logical justification for doing so.
Therefore, the information source is quite obviously one you should disavow and avoid if your goal is to make good and profitable decisions.
Keep in mind, this doesn't mean you are wrong. You could be right - it just won't be because of the information source you used, which is quit soundly refuted.
Afterward, think on the emotional connotation of the restatement. Ask yourself questions like why they chose to restate things so as to produce a falsehood. Then ask yourself about Elon's text in that arrangement. There are lessons about good communication within it and it directly corresponds with mathematics.
Why does the information source choose to turn something which has deep mathematical truth justifying it were the claims to be true with something which is obviously non-casual?
It isn't just wrong. It is obviously wrong. Everyone knows cause and effect.
They do it anyway. They get it wrong, despite it being obviously wrong.
Why? The answer of course is because doing so works. They hooked you, didn't they?
Or at least, it seems to work. Truly, it doesn't, and the fact that it doesn't is probably best explained by someone other than me: read Plato. In particular read the dialogue in which the professor of rhetoric and Colt talk with Socartese about what it is that rhetoric is. He wrote about sites like the one you are using thousands of years ago.
Asking me to take a bet that doesn't match with my stated predictions isn't as reasonable. Why should I bet on something that I never claimed would happen? That said - I'm already invested in long positions in various AI & robotics companies. You can bet against my actual beliefs by taking positions which would benefit you if those companies aren't the future.
I'm not sure Neuralink would disagree. Their first applications are medical, not consumer mind-reading. They're open about their bigger vision being farther away.
> Neuroscience is far from understanding how the mind works — much less having the ability to decode it.
We don't necessarily have to understand everything about the brain to communicate with it. And we'll learn a lot in the process.
> a neurotech device would have to add significant value for a consumer to get one implanted in her skull.
Again, I don't think Neuralink would disagree. I guess the disagreement is in whether an implant could provide that significant value. And nobody really knows yet, of course. A lot depends on how well the brain can adapt to a new form of I/O.
> Consumer brain-recording devices have been on the market for roughly 15 years
Yeah but the technology is totally different and quite lame honestly. Existing devices have fundamental limitations that are not shared by an actual brain implant. Not a strong argument IMO.
> Helmets and other headgear face an uphill battle to adoption
The external hardware for an implant can get pretty small. Much less obtrusive than the given example of Google Glass.
> It may be more taxing to control a device with a BCI than without it
Pure speculation at this point.
Honestly it is wise to be skeptical. But mostly I am skeptical of the timeline, not the eventual usefulness of the product. Neuralink is likely too early, but one day useful consumer brain implants will be possible.
For example, maybe computers get so smart our need to interact with them diminishes and we interact with them rather passively.
Maybe the opposite happens and we need even tighter coupling leading to a genetic engineering solution or a nanobot pill solution that crosses the blood brain barrier.
The problem is everything is pure speculation at this point. I do hope they accomplish some of their goals but any business potential seems a total guess.
You first.
As it happens, neuroscientists have become quite proficient in reading out the activity of large numbers of neurons in recent times. We do whole-brain activity imaging (of fruit flies) routinely in the lab that I work in (albeit not at single-cell resolution). The problem is that these techniques are incredibly invasive. They involve genetically encoded fluorescent protein sensors, surgery and lasers so bright that imaging time is quite limited (because the organism gets cooked).
That approach is never going to work in humans. The genetic engineering alone is enough of a problem, let alone the optical bench (not exactly portable) and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment you need.
And the whole reason that approach became so popular in the first place is because of how limiting electrophysiology is. You can get at best a couple of thousands of neurons with ephys. Certainly not the routine whole-brain imaging that is happening right now in neuro labs around the world.
So there's pretty good reason to be skeptical of neuralink. I don't think you'll ever meet a working neuroscientist who thinks this has any chance of working. What GP is expressing is entirely baseless. Of course neuralink would disagree, they have a profit motive and snake-oil to sell. Ask someone who actually works in the field and you're going to hear a different story.
If what neuralink was doing was actually worth pursuing, HHMI Janelia would be investing in it. They were doing ephys on dragonflies in flight way back on 2014 for gods sake [0]. They've got the chops, and that they're not doing it speaks volumes.
[0] https://www.janelia.org/news/anthony-leonardo-tracking-drago...
If their first goal is to restore some functionality to severely paralyzed people with less big/bulky and doesn't leave a hole (infection point) in your skull, what won't work about that? Is it the body rejecting the implant? Is it the wires breaking down or migrating out of where they're placed? What is it?
Now you go tell the paraplegics that this work is pointless...
People should always be skeptical of timelines when it comes to Musk's ventures. He is famous for short deadlines, high expectations, and a competitive environment.
There's a TED talk somewhere out there with SpaceX's CEO where this comes up a bunch, and she plays on it very well.
Very true! However, we're still learning a lot about the brain. For instance, astrocytes/glia are still quite understudied despite being ~1/2 of the cells in your brain (maybe). Mostly, this is because they are not very electrically reactive. But they are known to be a pathway for NMDAr recycling as well as surrounding the synapse in certain parts of the brain. This issue of astrocytes is one of thousands that we're still trying to get a grip on. Essentially, we have okay-ish knowledge of large-scale phenomena (~1cm3) and small-scale (synapse, nucleus) behavior, but the middle ground (10's of neurons) is quite hard. Unfortunately, that seems to be were all the magic happens.
> A lot depends on how well the brain can adapt to a new form of I/O.
Typically, it does this via scarring. Making sure the leads are engineered to deal with scarring is the first hurdle. Then you'd need to stimulate only a select few neurons, a feat that is quite difficult (dynamic positioning, heartbeat, discharges, feedback, etc). Not necessarily insurmountable problems, but we're not really sure how to do that compactly with wires. One way is just use light and optogenetics and CLARITY, but then you have to genetically modify a brain and wash it out in situ, which is downright crazy hard.
The mind is not a joystick.
Throughput is not the measurement of a good BCI.
BCI as a term should be abolished.
Someone is going to make something so seemingly simple, but unbelievably meaningful, to rule this space.
There are many ways to get high fidelity 'joystick' level control out of a brain, especially if given one-on-one training.
The problems for Neuralink will be the same with any implant - immune responses and infections - and in a sensitive area no less.
I was at a conference where people were debating the merits of non-invasive vs. invasive neural interfaces. A surgeon argued that people would obviously never accept non-invasive ones...ON COSMETIC GROUNDS: EEG caps (and similar) look dorky.
Many people do go to great pains to hide disabilities, but I was (and still am) really skeptical that this totally trumps fears around highly-invasive neurosurgery!
Hypothetically let's say I'm 90, I'd love to be able to jack into the matrix to play with my grandkids.
Even though it's an incredibly effective treatment, surgeons are pretty reluctant to do DBS implants on older patients with Parkinson's Disease because of the risks of the surgery itself. That's with a pretty clear medical case too.
You haters are literally lying lmao.
For example, as of this writing, you could have an experimental procedure that results in light sensitive neurons, that when excited by a laser, stop your breathing and remove the sensation of asphyxiation to let you die a painless, playful death.
(Optogenetics, table stakes)
So I think it’s massively important to discuss what should and shouldn’t be done with Neurotech, otherwise with the rate the “throughput” argument is going... aka all of these joystick developments... your life value will be pegged to how many blockchains your mind can mine... enjoy the matrix!
So what? Stop trying? Give up? What's the point of this statement? Why is the timeline you personally find realistic relevant to anyone else but you?
I just don't get this attitude. It's such a sour grapes type of attitude. Either help out, or get out.
It’s called “skepticism”. You read enough history, you realize the charlatans greatly outnumber the geniuses, and you do your due-diligence before you invest, or form some weird cult.
Just comparing the mission statement of NeuraLink (from their homepage) with the wild claims of their most prominent founder (Musk) should make you stop and think for a second.
The actual goals are quite humble and achievable in the near term. What Musk says on Joe Rogen's podcasts and other public forums, however, is more fiction than science.
Unfortunately most publications focus on the latter and ignore the former and way too many people fall for this and seriously believe that highly invasive and risky brain surgery will become routine in just a couple of years.
We're talking about the same guy who said there could be "1 million full self-driving robo taxis on the road by 2020" during the April 2019 Tesla investor day [0]. The same guy, mind you, who's company two years later, in 2021 told regulatory bodies that their technology is only SAE level-2... [1]
The technical press back then was very sceptical about the claim as well (and it turns out they were right to do so). Autonomous cars are on a whole different level than BCI, though, and there's no breakthrough science required to achieve autonomous cars.
So in light of this I feel that scepticism has its place w.r.t. BCI and outrageous claims (e.g. streaming music directly into the brain or curing neurological diseases) about the near-term abilities and development stage of the technology.
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/290029-tesla-well-have-f...
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful...
Secondly, nothing that was shown (apart from being far from new, exciting or ground-breaking in any way) was independently verified so we just have to take their word for it...
I am not impressed at all.
[1] https://github.com/monkalynn813/Mindwave_controlling_cursor
Leaving aside that this person was probably in this field before Neuralink and the others, in matters such as these, offering an expert opinion on a market filled with snake oil certainly is helping out. Otherwise we rely on people whose first priority is not truth but profit.
>So what? Stop trying? Give up?
Her suggestion is to exercise skepticism and be realistic about what the actual applications and markets are.
Matthew MacDougall, Head of Neurosurgery at Neuralink and neurosurgeon at California Pacific Medical Center. He was previously working at Stanford where he worked in labs that implemented and designed brain-computer interfaces.
Vanessa Tolosa, Director of Neural Interfaces. She previously led a neurotechnology team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that worked with a wide variety of technology on technology prostheses that were used in clinical and academic settings.
I don't get this attitude. The author is an expert. Can't we learn from her?
I work in this field and I have such strong, mixed feelings about companies like these. On the one hand, more interest in the brain and neurotech is great. These are tough problems, and we need new ideas, new tools, and new approaches. The standard academic approach of throwing a few trainees at a problem for a few years each (mostly in isolation), might not be the best way to tackle a problem that ranges from biophysics to psychology (and everything in between: materials science, signal processing, etc).
On the other hand, I worry that excessive hype is going to blow the field up before it gets started. If Elon Musk says he can implant 3000 electrodes that will let you control your iPhone--by next year--why would anyone fund me to do the slower, slogging work that I think will be required to eventually make something like that possible? This isn't just a critique of industry; the same brand of hucksterism shows up in parts of academia too. Throwing cold water on people's hopes and dreams isn't fun, but I think it's important for the long-term health of neuroscience as a field.
Shorter term, companies should also think about who they're attracting with this hype. I'm on the job market (in a very low-key way), and one of my principle requirements is that I want to work somewhere that is serious about the science: I want to build something that will actually work, instead of burning a pile of VC cash chasing hype or, God forbid, Theranos. Many of my colleagues feel the same way.
There is nothing wrong with grounding a company's claims/goals against reality. Particularly relevant for any company lead by Elon Musk. His timelines are always wrong. He's been promising FSD is just a year away for the better part of the last decade.
Teeth implants, knee implants they generate additional risk of low level inflammation in the body over time. Even generally unproblematic silicon breast implants that just hang there have scar tissue and can cause immune system reactions.
Brain surgery is many times riskier. If Neuralink could create way to circumvent all these problems it would be huge breakthrough even without the BCI.
I think this is misreading Google Glass. People didn't like or want to use Google Glass because there was no "killer app" for them. There was no useful app for Glass at all so far as I am aware. Had Google Glass enabled something new and useful people would have worn it regardless of how different it looked, and because people found use in wearing it we would get used to it.
Headphones are an example of this. Headphones would probably look goofy if you weren't used to seeing them. People wear headphones anyway because headphones deliver something useful to the wearer - private audio.
If I had to wear a silly hat, but in exchange could carry around a meaningful brain-computer interface, I absolutely would, and, assuming "meaningful" in a broad sense, I'm certain huge numbers of people would as well.
Right now people are struggling to make the tech work at all. Worrying about the form factor with which it will be delivered is premature - it can't really do anything yet. Once it's useful it will need a good form factor, but the use will drive adoption, not the other way around.
Social proof will do that. Doesn't matter how weird something looks, if the appearance becomes associated with wealth in the public consciousness, people will start thinking it looks cool and coming up with reasons why.
I think the other reason why people didn't want to adopt Google Glass, is the stories about other people objecting to people wearing them–primarily because of privacy concerns, that the devices were capable of recording video, and that while a phone camera can record video too, it is somewhat more obvious if someone is doing it with a phone camera than with Google Glass. If a product is going to be a social hassle, if other people and businesses are going to object to your use of it, a lot of people will decide the negative social consequences aren't worth it.
Something like Google Glass specifically targeted to people with disabilities would be more acceptable, because someone using it can always say that it is for their disability, at which point most people would be more forgiving, plus if any business tries to ban it they run the legal and PR risk of being accused of disability discrimination.
Although honestly i thought it was a bullshit argument. You can buy tiny disguised cameras. If someone wanted to creepily record you, they could easily do so and you would never know. They certainly wouldn't use something as ostentatious as google glass.
People don't care about things they can't see -- because they can't see them.
But if something is seen, it probably shouldn't have cause to make people worry.
Rio was there first with a better product. Apple had better marketing though and the rest was history.
Rio worked with anything and had no DRM. Any Rio was superior to all early iPods.
Apple Marketing was pretty overwhelming, but I'm afraid the Rio line was already doomed by the time the iPod began to dominate.
In fact at the peak, the iPod's market share in music players was about the same as what Android has in smartphones today.
Right or wrong, constantly pointing a camera at others gives off an air of “I could recording you right now”, and that makes people uncomfortable.
Yeah, there’s a difference between someone having the ability to take pics in their pocket and having a camera pointed at you all the time.
Is it more of a reaction than a logical thing? Maybe.
People have shown time and again they will adopt something they love, no matter how grotesquely bulky, like brick cellphones
Eventually using it to backup and data mine memories will likely happen, as in Black Mirror.
Using it to filter, annotate, and block parts of reality is also likely. Again, Black Mirror touches on this.
Some have posited the idea of gamifying reality, for all sorts of purposes.
I've often thought realtime logic-checking would be useful. Fact-checking would be more subject to biases in the software and data, but could also be useful.
Eventually the idea is probably that neural prosthetics will be developed that act as entire new brain subsystems.
Additionally, an implant is pretty damn invasive. So some cute demos or niche consumer applications are not going to cut it.
IMO the two possible paths here are either this will be an R&D money sink for our entire lifetimes (maybe funded by Elon for fun, maybe some government grants, etc.) or they will primarily operate as a medical device company.
The implants they are developing are definitely a tech improvement, so they could realistically improve existing DBS treatments. The company could also work on their own novel DBS paradigms for treatment of specific diseases. A lot of DBS (especially for psychiatric diseases like OCD) is currently rudimentary AND we have a poor understanding of why it even sort of works. But it does clearly work for at least some subset of patients, so there are real avenues for continued development.
This is a step further, but say we could interface directly with auditory areas to have access to a massive internal library of different sounds. You could play songs on demand, verbatim recall anything that was said to you in the past, etc.
Sounds pretty dope at first, but this kind of thing would likely be developed before future researchers fully understand the entire human brain. So that means they would not really understand how the brain would interface with it, especially across long time scales and a heterogeneous population.
Forget any sort of malicious action, and still God only knows the potential side effects. It could massively fuck with ability to learn over time, cause terrible rumination issues, maybe it could trigger psychosis in high risk individuals, maybe it would fuck up your dreams.
Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems.
Anyway, this mostly reminded me of that Black Mirror episode about the parent watching the kid via a brain implant, which I thought was too heavy handed. There are a ton of ways brain implants could be scary without using the super obvious surveillance angle. Honestly just the "blurring out of bad things" feature would have made for a cooler episode IMO.
We'd definitely have to regulate the shit out of tech then. Going to example of phones - the root problem there isn't that phones are addictive, it's that every aspect of them is controlled by commercial interests that benefit from making them addictive and user-hostile. If we were to create BCI the way smartphones where - where the Googles and Apples of BCI will release a consumption-oriented platform you don't own ("because security!"), that serves primarily to access the Facebooks and Twitters of BCI, in the way the platforms tell you to (again, "because security!") - then it's game over for humanity.
If, however, we allow control over devices and their operations to be held by the user (to the extent it's unprecedented in this industry), and regulate social media like tobacco, alcohol and gambling, then we can reduce this problem to something comparable with alcoholism. Not ideal, but much closer to optimally balancing individual freedom with preventing fully predictable individual failure modes.
Are you envisioning playback on a computer screen?
There will be some interesting BCI tech in the next few years but as the author notes, it's going to be very specific and limited, and probably quite expensive.
>> Would I invest my money in it?
Hell no
>> Would I have neurosurgery for no good reason?
Hell no*10
To me this is clearly a longshot product, but I'm very happy that some private citizen is willing to invest his own money into this. If someone stumbles on how to transform thoughts into movement signals or how to encode digital images into optic nerve signals I'm all for it
Being skeptical about the accuracy of these technologies/feasibility of surgery is valid, but this article reads as pretty cynical rather than just skeptical, haha.
SpaceX took nearly fifteen years to become the beast it is and Tesla took eight to increase deliveries from 2,600 to 500,000. Don't underestimate what these companies achieve in the long-term and we are always terrible to predict exponential growth (from pandemics, to EV, to space flights)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/spacex-falc...
[2]https://www.statista.com/chart/8547/teslas-vehicle-deliverie...
just like neuralink.
the huge difference is that spaceX problem was extremely easily to solve by throwing money (6.5B usd) at it. Neuralink, not so much. That's why they spend much more on marketing with neuralink as they did with spaceX... there's no much else to do with the pile.
There isn't really a market for BCI except for cases of disability. In this case, he has to create the customer demand for a technology that doesn't exist. That's a really tough sell when even if it did work (which is very much in doubt), would require a literal brain surgery. This isn't like scaling up a factory or using modern compute to get a rocket to land itself. It's fundamental research with uncertainties on perhaps every angle.
Plenty of people get Lasik just to avoid the annoyance of contacts/glasses and eyes are technically part of the brain. Why wouldn't there be a market for BCI when the potential benefit is much greater?
I think your missing the point about what I'm highlighting needs to happen after the wires are inserted into some otherwise unsuspecting tissue that isn't specially adapted for this use case in any particular way.
Citation needed
Maybe machines in the future just won't need that much specification. Like we'll give high level goals to robots/computer and interaction will be much more passive. You'll just tell a program to do your taxes or tell a robot to clean the house and it'll get done.
It's possible that we can accomplish most of the benefits of BCI without the brain surgery part. By the time this technology is ready, you may be able to take nano-bot pills once a month and to uninstall, you just stop taking them. Or maybe we'll genetically engineer babies to be born with them.
It's so early that all we can do right now is speculate and there's a lot of reason to believe this one particular company won't succeed.
Applying similar patterns to Neuralink, the likelihood that a lot of people will jump at the opportunity initially is small. After that, it all depends on how exactly it improves lives (maybe even becomes necessary in some fields?) and how long they can absorb losses until the process is battle-tested enough.
As opposed to Lasik, Neuralink presents much greater risks through surgery and being an implant in the first place. My guess is the value proposition would need to be overwhelming for a lot of people to consider it and fairly strong for enough people to consider it to guarantee profitability.
I wouldn't call this widespread adoption. Maybe it's cost, maybe it's the risk of the surgery.
(1) https://www.webmd.com/eye-health/news/20180727/lasik-know-th...
The hardware in that system is from Blackrock Microsystems. You can call them up and buy it right now (if you’ve got the cash...It’s not cheap!) It’s currently intended for research, so you’ll need ethics approval and the decoder isn’t included (but that’s the fun part anyway).
Ripple Neuro sells similar gear (better, even, maybe) and Neuralynx and some smaller companies also have competing products. It’s not in every corner store, but you could have a similar setup this month if you really wanted to.
Sometimes “obviously” inferior solutions are actually local maximums, and finding the global maximum is extremely difficult.
Why in the world would these supposed Gatekeepers gatekeep away a technology that would provide a massive competitive advantage? Wouldn't they instead do exactly what they've been doing for decades and just buy up this hypothetical new technology? That sure seems to be what Apple is doing; there's an entire wiki page dedicated to Apple acquisitions and what Apple products were derived from it. Why would they suddenly flip into suppressing something better rather than just repeating their standard practice?
Perhaps the more plausible answer is that nobody has come up with an interface that beats the smart phone for the general population?
What competition? The disabled are lucky to get a single workable solution.
For regular people, it seems that voice is a somewhat important interface these days. "Ok google remind me to buy toilet paper" and so on. And honestly… isn't that already better than implanted magic in some ways? People (who can) naturally communicate with other people using voice, not telepathy.
Who would be dumb enough to implant something from facebook into their brain?!
Costly high-risk surgery that might kill or lobotomise you is not very appealing compared to glaring at a screen and moving your fingers for the purpose of sharing meaningless drivel with the world.
Those things are still in the basic research stage, and it's been really hard to make them work properly. Neuralink is not even leading in research here, but i don't think they expect to make consumer grade anytime soon either. OTOH, all sorts of multiunnit recordings and optogenetics stimulation is possible today - if you're a mouse.
I wonder why consumer-grade doesnt pursue the more feasible goal of reading from a motor nerve. I wish i could train myself typing by thinking of finger movements.
If I was about to bet on the future I assume, that aspirations of hybridisation/creolisation/amalgamation of human&machine will happen on the biological register; that this development will go the other way round: from semiconductors to biotechnology. E.g. the brain is a fabulous architecture; damn effective and very low energy consumption at the same time.
Wich makes me think: A substantially useful AI that can immerse with neurological coginition (and not just be a fancier interface that safes you from carrying a calculator around), will probably need A LOT of computational power. Damn these things can't even steer a hand through useful movements while im typing a way in language (which is its own insane technology [1]) with quite some musicality.
What I mean is: Let's assume you could really supply the population with these interfaces and they really work. Who is going to be supplied with her/his own infrastructure of supercomputers running that AI that will merge with her/his cognition? I don't think that it would be possible to supply even a marginal amount of the population with access to these entitys. So this amounts to some dream of the (misunderstood version) of the Übermensch, as a caressing of the narcissitic hurt that the being of tekhne inflicts to some.
[1] It has been argued that language speaks. Not only do subjects speak language, but language also speaks subjects. (that's spoken through Heidegger). Thus there is something like a life of lanugage (it makes sense to think about if it is alife). Think of language as an AI.
At SoundMind (https://SoundMind.co), we're building a headband which monitors your sleep state and uses sound (auditory stimulation) to improve your sleep.
Commercial tCDS is a real thing for treatment of depression. There are multiple consumer tCDS devices on the market as well, I won't link to them, because I haven't seen any that I don't believe are snake oil. But the commercial scale devices will get shrunk down to consumer usable size eventually.
This is just the beginning. Consumer neurotech shouldn't mean implanted, just as sight correction doesn't mean lasik (just wear glasses).
I think this skeptic is perhaps too focused on the technology, rather than the use case.
I'm not sure if we'll ever willingly get an neural implant, but let's not throw all of neurotech to mean that small segment of the market.
There is so much hype (“it does everything: makes you stronger, faster, happier, smarter, and better at video games and jazz”) and anti-hype (“it does nothing and it’s all placebo or peripheral stimulation”)[0].
I know about as much about it as anyone and I think that it a) has tons of promise and b) should not be anywhere near anyone but an research participant for the foreseeable future.
However, the simplicity of the device makes people think its effects will be equally simple. This isn't true.
We don't fully understand what the electric fields do to the brain, and the simple story of "turning the brain up/down" almost certainly doesn't hold up. In most cases, we also don't understand the problem to be solved (e.g., what in the brain is causing your depression--or your bad golf game). Taken together, it's a nightmare: poking at an unknown cause with an unknown effect.
My colleagues and I have been looking at this in monkeys, which we can measure everything from behavioral effects down to the activity of single neurons. It's very exciting and has, I think, a lot of potential, but it blows my mind that people are already selling products. The crazy thing is that the field has been through this hype cycle before in the 1960s-1970s....
We've been speaking with neurologists here in Australia who are giving us guidance, but if you have any thoughts, I'd be very keen to hear them. Either here, or via email. My address is in my profile.
Thanks
We did some work on DARPA's RAM REPLAY program, and there was a consortium trying that for "tagging" memories: they'd pair something to be memorized with a sound during (awake) study sessions, and then play the sound to a sleeping participant to reactivate that memory during sleep.
Stephen Simons was the lead from Teledyne; there were also folks from UCR and Endonovo Therapeutics, I think. It sorta seemed to work (here's the paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0002...) , though I remember they ended up needing to build a fancy system to optimize the cue volume so it was loud but not so loud that it woke the participants up.
They worked, more or less. Watching someone play a video game, the ears would show "attentive" while they played a level, and dropped back to rest when they finished. At an anime convention, I saw a group of girls all wearing them. Someone called out the name of one, and her ears popped up. Only hers, not the others.
They were a bit too bulky (4 AAA batteries), the ears were too big, and the forehead sensor wouldn't stay in place. Someone should try that again in a more compact form.
More fun than the quack medical applications.
[1] https://youtu.be/DK41eqO3wW0
Now, for people with spinal injuries, etc. then this totally seems like a good thing to be investigating.
Most people cannot think faster than they type or speak, at least coherently. The rapid information transfer with a computer via "thoughts" ignores the fact that a concept of a "car", for example, exists as different neural activity patterns, distributed over different parts of the brain for different people and changes with time. So that would imply the BCI would need to catalog how different all possible concepts are cataloged within an individual, to achieve such "direct thought communication", which would require whole-brain scale recording, something definitely NOT achievable with ephys (as a thought experiment, you'd have to introduce wires whose total volume become significant compare to brain volume).
Further, the act of speaking and typing is also a way to articulate and organize your (abstract) thoughts. If one skips that stage, would the output be meaningful at all?
The limiting communication bandwidth idea is a very fancy marketing message easy for people to hype up on, in typical Elon fashion.
Likely going to sound quite pretentious - but I definitely can and have been able to do so for as long as I can remember. It's honestly quite annoying as I grow older. I like to think it may directly correlate with the fact I was able to type 160+ WPM on a shitty membrane keyboard at school in the 5th grade quite easily.
But yes, as you said and what I've come to believe... is that most can't.
I am also like you, in the sense that I can think orders of magnitude faster than I can type or speak.
It is bizarre to me that others wouldn't be able to. But now that I think about it, yeah, I think you two might be right.
I agree with you that language helps formalize and structure thoughts in an intelligible manner, and I do also have reserves on the hypothesis that one can think much faster than it speaks.
Though, is it completely wrong to assume that a neurolink interface would act like a language?
I mean, you mentioned that it would not be possible to probe the whole brain, which makes sense, but I could imagine that to communicate easily with a neurolink interface, you would somehow need to convert your thoughts to _something_ that is probed and intelligible to the interface, just like you do when you articulate sounds to speak.
For instance, if I just vaguely think of moving my hand, that's a pretty blurry and noisy thought. But when I focus, I can almost physically feel that I am at the very edge of moving it, my sensations in the hand increase, my muscles don't move but I feel like they are ready to at any time.
Surely, thoughts that are the result of a specific focus like this could be more easily probed. In fact, it could also be that your brain would need to "learn" how to properly focus thoughts that work with the interface.
That makes for a much less appealing interface though, because it's not "effortless" to articulate thoughts in a specific manner that an interface can probe.
There are a lot of things that we ignore or don't register consciously. It is possible to decode items in one's working memory in controlled situations (see for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/).
So I suppose one possible approach would be to hold things in your working memory and have the Neuralink actively decode those. But in that case, as you've pointed out, requires a lot of attention and most likely would rely more heavily on contextual AI to narrow the decoder search space.
The basic premise of my skepticism with the "we need higher bandwidth I/O" statement still stays though -- the bottleneck of human communication is how quickly coherent thoughts can be formed in a way someone else can understand it (output), and how quickly information can be understood (input). For the latter example, you can scan an entire page in less than second. With immense speed reading practice, you can get a "gist" of a page in around that time. But understanding the details in that time is not possible.
heres the thing. why is this so much better than some wifi haptic device not implanted in the brain. ITS NOT.
It appears to be "neuralink and others are promising full mind reading and this whole thing is going to fail"
It is similar to the "self-driving argument". People complain and complain about Elon Musk's full-self-driving, yet telsa owners are out on crowded freeways, their cars happily driving them down the center of the lane and judiciously following the car in front. Yes, it probably can't get drive through at mcdonalds, but big whoop.
(also this person has no concept of what "the public" will do - honestly they would probably pay $5k to have alexa beep in their mind when someone's at the door)
Personally I would love a ctrl-labs keyboard, but now with facebook owning them, you know there will be a login requirement.
What exactly do you gain if you still have to sit in the driver’s seat and can’t look away for more than a moment?
I’d say that’s only a 1% improvement.
Not having to look at all, you could read or work. That’s another 10%.
Not having to even be present opens up a whole world of innovation and societal benefits.