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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: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 17 2019, @11:07AM (3 children)
Well, there's the Neuralink cover story: help out paralyzed patients with a brain-computer interface. Maybe you don't need to put wires in the brain in that case. Maybe you don't really need a computer at all. [soylentnews.org]
Then there's the real mission: connect the human brain directly to computer(s) to create a superintelligent (or at least supercapable) human. In this case, you want every cool ability you've ever seen in the movies. Like the implant/interface should be able to access your vision in real time and turn you into a martial arts or parkour master with zero training, with superhuman reflexes. You should have access to Matrix-style neural VR. You try to recall some fact, look at a complex math problem on a piece of paper, etc. and the answer just comes to you as if Wikidata [wikidata.org] and Wolfram Alpha [wolframalpha.com] are natural extensions of your brain. Obviously, it acts as a Babel fish, using lip reading to help predict words as they are spoken, translate in real time, and replace what you would have heard with the equivalent in your language.
Neuralink ties in with another Musk venture, OpenAI. Apparently, they share the same building [wikipedia.org]. Here is the real purpose of Neuralink, in Musk's own words:
Elon Musk Wants to Create Human-A.I. Link and "Make Everyone Hyper-Smart" [inverse.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:52PM (1 child)
With my physique and fitness level, I'd have lousy return on martial arts or parkour instantly gained knowledge. Skeleton, muscles, nerves, senses and brain are components of integral system which must be trained as whole, or something will break. I would do one trick and drop exhausted, or would break a bone, snap a tendon, spring muscle, lose balance, ... OTOH, if I have able other components of the system, it is very likely that I already have been having these mental abilities involved.
Likewise, if you don't know where to begin your quest nor how to eliminate irrelevant, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, or whatever, will just hose your thoughts down with noise.
My point is: if that is the intent, then it is misplaced and the problem is ill-understood. If this technology is at all possible, it will not deliver on its promise, even though it is given that there would be some gain in studying brain activity more closely.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:06PM
I'm just providing some examples. You can come up with your own examples if you're up to it. Nobody can accurately guess what would be possible if Neuralink's augmented humans vs. strong AI scenario comes to pass. It's post-Singularity stuff.
Neuralink for quadriplegics and other paralyzed people is just a way to make the research look less like mad science. They get their foot in the door, wires in the skull.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:45PM
Then there's the real mission: Scam money from stupid investors
FTFY