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I’m reluctant to use the phrase “iPhone moment for brain surgery” in the first sentence here, but Elon Musk and the team at Neuralink are ready to demonstrate the progress the company has made over the past year or so. Friday and I am delighted.
First, it has been said that the company will announce that human trials are scheduled to begin this year at the event and that’s a big deal. I’ll understand why in a moment.
And second: Musk has confirmed that the event will feature a live demonstration of neuron firing. This is what I am referring to when I talk about an iPhone time for brain surgery.
Neuralink was founded with one goal, Musk recently reiterated in an interview with Axios: “Neuralink’s long-term aspiration would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.
The big idea here is for Neuralink to build a brain-computer interface (BCI), a robot to surgically install it, and all of the components needed to facilitate direct communication between computers and our brain.
Neuralink’s BCI is invasive, it must be implanted in the skull so that tiny wires can be inserted directly into the brain. According to a research article published by the company last year:
We have built networks of small flexible electrode “wires”, with up to 3,072 electrodes per network distributed over 96 wires. We also built a neurosurgical robot capable of inserting six wires (192 electrodes) per minute.
Each wire can be individually inserted into the brain with micrometric precision to avoid surface vascularity and target specific brain regions. The electrode array is packaged in a small implantable device that contains custom chips for low-power on-board amplification and digitization: the 3072 channel package occupies less than (23 × 18.5 × 2) mm3.
A single USB-C cable provides full bandwidth data streaming from the device, recording from all channels simultaneously.
You read that right: Neuralink will literally put a USB-C cord in or on your head. Don’t get too excited about using a fast charger to get a full night’s sleep in just 30 minutes, because that’s not the kind of connectivity we’re looking at. Although the details are not yet clear, it is assumed that the USB-C cable connects the internal device to an external laptop which sends and receives external signals. However, when it comes to a Musk inspired gadget. who knows? His cars have external speakers that play snake fart and jazz sounds.
What we do know is that Musk is pushing the device through regulators as a medical device modeled after other similar BCIs. These are typically used to provide intracranial stimulation or other modulating medical treatments to the brain.
Neuralink’s plans involve similar abilities. Musk said the device would be able to “solve” a number of brain, nervous system and mental ailments. He claimed he would successfully treat everything from strokes to Alztheimer and even made questionable claims that it could rule out autism spectrum disorder.
[Read: Elon Musk says Neuralink can ‘solve’ autism with a brain chip. We call BS]
Musk is known to have made grandiose statements and then failed to deliver (remember when he invented the tunnel and called it the future of transportation? Or when he said there would be a million self-driving taxis. on the road by the end of 2020?). But it is different. At least, I hope it is, because Neuralink could be a big deal for humanity if it played straight with us.
Neuralink represents the first daring steps towards transhumanism for our species. If you really want to cut things down, think of BCIs as the computer maker started installing in cars in the 1990s. There was a time, a long time ago, when you took your car to a mechanic and they got it. diagnosed as a human doctor making a home visit. They listen to him, maybe drive him around the block, and eventually start taking things apart to see if they can confirm their suspected diagnosis.
With computers, a myriad of mechanical and electrical problems can be diagnosed by simply connecting the car to a workstation. A BCI could offer humans similar detection capabilities. Imagine if you could diagnose health issues that require anecdotal evidence – like headaches and other neurological pain – through direct, real-time analysis of brain activity. It would be a game changer for anyone who has ever had a migraine.
This is all interesting, but none of this is new. Scientists have worked hard to create a BCI suitable for medical purposes for decades. The reason Neuralink’s event is, potentially, so exciting is that it represents the first time that a serious organization has attempted to bring invasive BCI out of the medical field and into the consumer sector. in general.
Make no mistake, Musk’s vision for Neuralink makes it clear that this device is for everyone. The obvious non-medical benefits include things like unlocking and opening doors with your mind or sending and receiving text messages as thoughts. These may seem like technologies from the distant future, but the truth is that the ability to do these things has been around for some time. Neuralink works on the hard parts: designing scalable software and hardware and doing surgery to implement it as much as possible an outpatient clockwork procedure.
The real benefits, which is exciting, have more to do with data collection than with telepathy. A BCI capable of translating brain activity in real time with enough bandwidth to stream could theoretically make mental health issues as easy to diagnose and treat as physical injuries. Imagine if the mental health equivalent of a wrist sprain – say, a mildly traumatic experience – could be accurately diagnosed and treated in such a way that progress and improvements could be coded and monitored.
In any case, the sky is the limit. A working BCI may or may not bridge the gap between us and all the fictitious supercomputers that Musk and the other heralds of AI-doom think are going to make humans their pets. But it would be nice to have such a clear picture of our own brain as we do with a 2002 Ford Taurus. If someone can convince the powers that be and the general public that a BCI is a good idea, it’s Elon Musk.
The idea of a true human-AI symbiosis sounds scary, but here’s the technology: you are already a human-AI hybrid. You use apps for everything. Computers tell you when to wake up, what email to read, how to spell difficult words, and which lane you should be on the freeway. You accept all of these directions – most of which are controlled by machine learning algorithms – because it’s easier than doing it all the hard way.
Now imagine controlling everything in your home and office with your mind as you bask in the glow of your new healthy mental state. We can all worry about the implications of privacy and horror storylines another day, right?
We’re not sure exactly what time on Friday or on what platform the event will take place, but in the meantime, stay tuned. @neuralink and @Elon Musk on Twitter.
Progress update August 28
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2020
Published August 24, 2020 – 18:52 UTC
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