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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: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday July 20 2019, @02:54PM
I like the attitude of 'better trapped in a difficult puzzle then outright gone'. Easy to say now though....
The reason why I think it is worth having your undies in a bunch over what may seem like something 10 years out, is that there is a pretty strong current in the wrong direction. Sure some of us may succeed in making and using technology that doesn't betray us, but if everyone in your neighborhood is just going home and plugging into technology that does betray them(like with phones now), that's going to affect the world in a bad dangerous way.
Ten years ago I thought something like, 'surely intel would not be so silly as to put obvious backdoors into their equipment and will protect their brand' but now that I know this is exactly what IME is and there have been a dozen proven demonstrated attacks, the basis we have going forward is bad. This is happening at every layer, people in singapore have to worry malaysians are putting bugs in their IOT crockpots and creating a secure network refrigrator is apparently considered nearly as difficult as interplanetary travel.
So when Musk starts talking about the neurolink, or Bozos says the best way he can think to contribute is by building spaceships, plus ai nanotech genetic(or is it genetic ai nanotech?) weapons being worked on night and day by a dozen teams in a dozen countries, when apparently we can't even account for ticks, I say, why are we spending so many resources on these problems when we know all we're building is monsters that are going to get loose.
If we can't treat this planet well enough not to cause idk mass extinctions, aren't the impulses to colonize and make the perfect weapon misguided? I guess I'm saying I'm not going to worship wealthy tech titans no matter what they do, I'm actually going to be extremely judgemental and actually consider the idea that if I had that much money I might be able do something smarter with it than some of these projects and would have some chance of doing it morally. Which musk may have but bozos does not have. Someone has to hold their feet to the fire on every question or something nightmarish will weasel in.
This path of letting the excesses of capitalism define the edge of human exploration is bad, for a lot of the same reasons that resources are mis-allocated for hair regeneration, but primarily because these are the same forces that are already rolling 4 sided die against the chance of actual human extinction. I'm not a luddite, I think that we are experiencing a mania where til now because things have worked basically ok for a lot of people, trust is being handed out for much more risky changes.
And since it looks to me like we are being ruled by sociopaths and that journalism is in crisis(wall street times, nyt and washpo being silent on epstein for a decade, cnn giving trump free airtime) any new technology at this point is going to involve the loss of my rights and the risk of the people around me losing their minds. And being controlled even more by the republican party/cult, the zionist cult, the chinese ccp cult, and who knows what else.
So why not pipe up a little while I still have the chance and see if I am the only one who feels this way.
What if a riot for the anti-aging drug is what kills you? Even if it looks futile or like all I can do is sit on the sidelines, I have decided at least I am going to contribute my best voice of reason to the situation, and at the moment this is it. Without trust and freedom we are just building a prison or worse. And some people out there are definitely trying hard to build the prison or worse so they will probably achieve their goal if everyone just goes with the flow or wants and sees what happens.