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Musk's Newest Startup is Venturing into a Series of Hard Problems:
Tonight [Tuesday, July 16, 2019], Elon Musk has scheduled an event where he intends to unveil his plans for Neuralink, a startup company he announced back in 2017, then went silent on. If you go to the Neuralink website now, all you'll find is a vague description of its goal to develop an "ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." These interfaces have been under development for a while, typically under the monicker of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. And, while there have been some notable successes in the academic-research world, there's a notable lack of products on the market.
The slow progress comes, in part, because a successful BCI has to tackle multiple hard problems and, in part, because the regulatory and market conditions are challenging. Ahead of tonight's announcement, we'll take a look at all of these and then see how Musk and the people who advise him have decided to tackle them.
[...] An effective BCI means figuring out how to get the nervous system to communicate with digital hardware. Doing so requires solving three problems, which I'll call reading, coding, and feedback. We'll go through each of these below.
[...] The first step in a BCI is to figure out what the brain is up to, which requires reading neural activity. While there have been some successes doing this non-invasively using functional MRI, this is generally too blunt an instrument. It doesn't have the resolution to pick out what small populations of cells are doing and so can only give a very approximate reading of the brain. As a result, we're forced to go with the alternative: invasive methods, specifically implanting electrodes.
[...] Once we can listen in on nerves, we have to figure out what they're saying. Digital systems expect their data to be in an ordered series of voltage changes. Nerves don't quite work that way. Instead, they send a series of pulses; information is encoded in the frequency, intensity, and duration of these pulse trains, in an extremely analog fashion. While this might seem manageable, there's no single code for the entire brain. A series of pulses coming from the visual centers will mean something completely different from the pulses sent by the hippocampus while it's recalling a memory.
[...] One possible aid in all of this is that we don't necessarily need to get things exactly right. The brain is a remarkably flexible organ, one that can re-learn how to control muscles after having suffered damage from things like a stroke. It's possible that we only need to get the coding reasonably close, and then the brain will adapt to give the BCI the inputs it needs to accomplish a task.
Also at NYT, The Verge, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:27PM (3 children)
It's not that we have to have it plug into your brain, but that's the location that gets you the most bang for your buck. To give you a practical example, close your eyes and have someone tap the skin on the top of your forearm. If you are like most people you have a sensory resolution of about an area the size of a quarter. If you wanted to stitch in a BCI to your forearm then you need to cover a big area to get enough nerve "pixels" to do something cool. You have more resolution connecting to nerves in your spine, but they are inside a difficult-to-repair bone conduit. You have fantastic resolution connecting to nerves in your mouth, but then your kit is going to get doused in food several times per day. On your hands you have good resolution, but then the kit is in the way.
There is a risk to developing brainpal or neuretics technology, and we'll need a ground-up rethink of security before I'd plug into the internet with one. Still, the possibilities are pretty awesome.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday July 18 2019, @01:21AM (2 children)
Do the same with the surface of your head, and I expect that it'll be similarly bad. Our head doesn't need fine-scale touch resolution, just like our forearm.
We've got thousands of nerve endings in our hands which are the extension of nerves from our arms. These are used for fine motor control, touch, damage detection, and probably a few other things we don't know about. Should be plenty for a small 8-bit interface (i.e. keyboard), or similar.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 18 2019, @01:29AM (1 child)
The end of your penis has even more nerves than your fingers.
I'm not suggesting anything, just pointing it out. You can draw your own conclusions.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday July 18 2019, @04:59AM
Sure, if you're going for maximum number of usable nerves per unit area, the penis, brain, tongue, or maybe even fingertips would be a reasonable place. But I think that the arm (or maybe back of the hand) has enough, is somewhat practical, and is a lot less of an issue if it gets damaged.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]