8 ms·

With Neuralink, Elon Musk Promises Human-To-Human Telepathy

43 points by pmcpinto 9y ago

T-A 9y ago
By now everybody probably realizes that Musk's "predictions" are on some kind of relativistic timescale related to Earth's frame by a factor O(10). In 2008, the Falcon Heavy was going to fly "in a couple of years"; with some luck, it will actually fly this summer. Let's be optimistic and call it a factor 9/2 ~ 4. Using the same factor for Neuralink, it will have its first medical device out in 15 years and its first general consumer device in 30 years. The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". I would be willing to bet that Neuralink is shooting for something which won't require that, along the lines of injectable "neural dust" or stents: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n3/full/nbt.3428.html http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n3/full/nbt.3428.html
- drwl 9y ago
  Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) == O(1)
  - T-A 9y ago
    True if you are wearing your mathematician's or computer scientist's hat. If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50". Context usually makes it obvious which one it is.
    - kyzyl 9y ago
      Heh, or perhaps we could say that it's simply a short hand colloquialism for "on the order of 10 years"? ;-) As somebody with physics and engineering degrees, as well as 20 years of CS experience, I'd very much enjoy it if we'd stop perpetuating the idea that nobody without a PhD in CS understands asymptotic complexity.
    - justinpombrio 9y ago
      > If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50". Ahgg, leave this poor notation alone. What has it ever done to you?
      - cygx 9y ago
        What has it ever done to you? Expanding to "of order 10" in spoken language.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Man, I hope the engineers who design the bridges I use paid more attention in their math classes.
      - cygx 9y ago
        Mathematical notation is a language, and its abuse can be justified if it facilitates communication. Even professional mathematicians do so when writing papers: The audience is not an automated theorem prover, but other humans, and we don't throw syntax errors if we encounter an expression that does not conform to a narrow set of formal rules.
      - T-A 9y ago
        I am perplexed by the negativity. This has nothing to do with mathematics, it's about notational conventions. Only knowing about one of them does not make you better at taking limits. If the objection is about context dependence, why is nobody going "Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) is the orthogonal group in ten dimensions".
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  >The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". I would be willing to bet that Neuralink is shooting for something which won't require that, along the lines of injectable "neural dust" or stents: The stent is placed in a blood vessel resting on top of the cortex, this will never be able to give you the resolution required for what we would consider a neural lace. If Neuralink could somehow make "neural dust" that crosses the blood brain barrier and transmits very local recordings then they might be on to something. The dream scenario would be tiny robots that cross the BBB and keep going until they latch onto a neuron.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    That won't help. There are 100 billion neurons in the brain. Even if you decide on a low-bandwidth limited system, you're still looking at somewhere between 1 and 10 billion neurons. The bandwidth is fairly low, but you still need to work out a way to address the individual dust units for both reading and writing. You have to be able to place them fairly accurately. And you also have to make them maintenance-free, or replaceable if they break. None of this is even remotely possible today. It may be possible fifty to a hundred years from now, but by then some other technology may have appeared. I'd guess this approach is going to seem impossibly crude - like trying to build an i7 core out of valves.
    - skummetmaelk 9y ago
      Your cortex contains "only" 20 billion. The mean firing rate of neurons is estimated to be between 1 and 10 Hz. If you wanted to monitor 10% of the cortex you would then need at to handle at most 20 giga events per second. Not so bad after all.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  We knew how to build rockets, we don't have the slightest clue how to hack into the brain and interface with the information in it. I think your time estimate is going to be way off, but I hope it is right!
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    We have lots of ideas how to do that! We're just not very good at it. But placing a more sensitive EEG inside the head and then using stimuli mapping to reverse enough of the signal-information map to read intentional output seems a fine research path. (And we already know you can get some output woth that method.)
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      Placing a more sensitive EEG inside the head isn't anyone's definition of "non-invasive."
- r3bl 9y ago
  > The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". And that article seems to me like a direct response to an article in which Tim dedicated thousands of words trying to explain how intrusive the current methods of scanning the brains are in order to support the claim that Musk is planning on coming up with something little less intrusive than opening a skull. In fact, here's a direct quote from the Wait But Why article: > This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team. I have a strong feeling that the author of this article had a strong feeling about the subject before reading the Wait But Why article and dismissed some of the claims because of his previous opinion. Otherwise, I have a difficulty believing that this was his opinion after spending a considerable amount of time actually consuming the article and its claims.
pokemongoaway 9y ago
Maybe this will help him communicate telepathically how terrestrial transportation in a vacuum tube will be made economical, or even safe...
- pokemongoaway 9y ago
  Ha, so quick on the down votes! If this joke hits such a sore spot, then shouldn't you at least explain why? Last time I checked, critiques like thunderf00t's have not been appropriately addressed.
skummetmaelk 9y ago
It does not even matter if it will be ready in a few years or not. Musk is adding to the hype of brain technology. In the past few weeks I have seen the number of articles, even on HN, about the brain skyrocket. This has been a trend for the past two or so years, but since the announcement of Neuralink it has exploded. Braintech is becoming a topic that people are actually talking about. This will hopefully stimulate people to go out and work on related technology instead of letting it sit in obscurity as it has previously.
- jtraffic 9y ago
  > It does not even matter if it will be ready in a few years or not. Musk is adding to the hype of brain technology. I suspect Musk agrees with you and that his figures have a 30-50 year margin of error. With Hyperloop, he caused a stir and moved on, and now someone else is working on it. I realize that's not a perfect comparison (he never indicated much intention to work on Hyperloop). He often claims that Tesla's main purpose is to get other car manufacturers to act. Musk is good at using leverage, but with social capital instead of financial capital.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    At this point Musk's MO seems rather clear. He realizes that our current societal structures are too prone to corruption and too slow to act before it is too late. So instead of waiting for politicians to force the use of green energy he makes everyone want to drive an electric car. If that fails, he makes sure that, at least some of, humanity can escape to another planet. Now he is tackling the existential problem of AI. I believe this was already touched upon in the waitbutwhy article, but it has obviously been clear for quite a while now and Musk has been rather open about it. He proved himself with Tesla, even though there were extremely close moments. Now he is leveraging the Tony Stark image to make people interested in whatever ideas he throws out there.
    - komali2 9y ago
      I remember way back in highschool there was a kid like this. We had a river that was just utterly disgusting, and there was a group at our school trying to do bake sales and shit to raise money to get it cleaned up, or they once went to city hall to petition the mayor, etc. He joined up and that weekend just... went to the river and started picking up trash. Alone. The next weekend the whole student org came, the weekend after that the local channel 9 showed up, and so on. Within the month the mayor was announcing plans for bringing in a dredger or something, I don't remember all the details, just the lesson I learned - if nobody else is doing it, just fucking do it, others will follow.
ironchief 9y ago
There is a large public knowledge gap in understanding the difference between engineering and science. Neuralink is much more basic R&D science heavy than Tesla and SpaceX are. Both Tesla and SpaceX had decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of research already invested in the R&D. Both had proof of concepts and a well trained work force. This is why Elon was able to "build a spreadsheet of a rocket on his flight back from Russia". Neuralink has none of that. However, I am very happy that someone is putting in the effort because the results so far have been real and impactful.
- aggie 9y ago
  Neuroscience and even brain-computer interfaces have indeed had decades of research and billions (though not hundreds of billions) in funding. As a partial proof of concept, BCI's are already capable of multiple-degree-of-freedom control of prosthetics. And there just so happens to be a glut of PhDs and post-docs in the sciences looking for a way to apply their training. Of course it is true that Neuralink is a much larger leap from the current state of the art than mass production electric vehicles or reusable rocket stages. But is it a larger leap than a million people living on Mars? These ventures have many valuable milestones along the way, even if the ultimate goal proves unreachable.
itburnslikeice 9y ago
So can we experience the scene with Sandra and Stallone in Demolition man in the future or no?
kordless 9y ago
<rant>There is no fucking way I'm getting a neural implant. Musk, Zuck and their likes can go fuck themselves for even daring to put money behind these ideas before working on the larger problem of understanding how the Internet, and then intercommunications it gives our brains, has negatively affected us as a society[1]. Being aware of our brain's weak spots is critical to preserving a rational society. I would extend that to the infrastructure that connects them as well. </rant> [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  but think of the business potential! advertising and propaganda can be streamed right into the brain, no way to block this information, this feature alone must be worth its price in gold.
tsaprailis 9y ago
"So what facts am I missing? What makes it even remotely okay that Musk and Facebook are promising the public telepathy within a few short years?" The author probably didn't read Tim Urban's WBW article[1]. Elon Musk never claimed that we were going to have telepathy n a few short years but rather that he was hoping that he would have some sort of BCI that would also be used by people who don't have some sort of disability. "I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities." "And Mark Zuckerberg gave a timeline of about 25 years. Mark Zuckerberg said: “I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.”" So I think the whole article has a clickbait-y theme, I would expect something more objective from the MIT Technology Review. Finally as the author said Musk has indeed missed the deadlines on his achievements, but nonetheless also he manages to go through with his plans, both with SpaceX and with Tesla. So even though I don't expect the neural lace in "a few short years" I think it will come eventually. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
jfarlow 9y ago
For as much as Musk goes back to 'first principles', I am unclear how, from first principles, a metal electrode can healthily and sustainably interface with a living human cell. From first principles the size, material, sensitivity, and most importantly, energy dissipation and efficiency of metals are incompatible with living tissue in the long run, as far as I know. There might be ways to get around any of the above features, but in doing so you often end up sacrificing exactly the point of the chip (power vs speed, sensitivity vs utility, size vs sensitivity). To my mind the far more reasonable mechanism to interact with living neural tissue is given just a cursory 'in the future' remark in the mentioned essay, optogenetics. If you use light for the transmission of signals you get rid of many of the above issues. But, unlike Facebook's tech, you would actually need direct line-of-sight to the cells. The trouble with optogenetics currently is there is the same delivery problems associated with using CRISPR in a live organism. On the other hand, if you solve that delivery problem, you not only get all the medical benefits of being able to fix mutated genes, but you also get the (from first principles) useful access to optical I/O in the brain. And the fact is that optogentics actually has some significant capabilities even today. It's much more of a bottom-up approach, but that is traditionally the direction Musk has used for his success: http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/sequence_info.html http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/sequence_inf... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mouse+optogenetics https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mouse+optogenet... Rockets and electric cars were invented decades, if not a century before Musk came in and 'redid' the technologies from first principles. In this case he seems to have approached this like a rich man, not a principled engineer - rather than from first principles, more simply, "let just hire lots of smart people". And I don't think the result will be without utility - lots of good things have come from such research groups. But the result of this experiment will look nothing like the commercial success of Tesla or SpaceX. A best-case scenario is a bell-labs investment into a multi-decade long exploration of technology.
djsumdog 9y ago
These claims by Musk and the FB exec are pretty outlandish. Any type of surgery is very high risk. Brain surgery is incredibly dangerous. There's a reason why so few surgeons specialise in it. The article even mentions one of the human trials which used implants was directed at people who were already paralysed. But all that aside, developing sensor technology that could get accurate measures of brain activity in a non-invasive and non-destructive way would be quite a breakthrough (and really the first step to anything more substantial. Until we invent nano-robots, implants will simply be way too dangerous). We have no real idea of how the brain works. It's so vastly different from any machine we've ever designed, filled with redundancy and not only electrical signals, but chemical signals that combine to create all kinds of inputs and feedback. Trying to read our stream of consciousness is not an easy task, as it may not be represented in the brain in a way we could recognise with instruments (or even in one discrete location in the brain at all). Brain research is always amazing, but it also shows just how far humanity is lacking in our own understanding of the world. Advertising/Propaganda, the Stanley Milgram Experiments, conformity experiments all suggest brains may be more deterministic than we care to admit. We have hundreds of thousands of inputs (skin, eyes, internal pain/nerve cells, hearing) and there's no way we could raise twins in a lab and control all those inputs to see if we can get two humans to always do the same thing (ethically). I wonder if we ever do create machines/AI that have connotative abilities and that can understand self-awareness; if they may end up telling us that they (and in turn us) don't actually have the free well we think we do.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Don't start the free will discussion, please, the term is basically meaningless. If you try to define it with sufficient precision to make a conversation about the topic possible you get people who disagree with the definition.
- r3bl 9y ago
  > These claims by Musk and the FB exec are pretty outlandish. Except that those are not claims made by Musk and Zuckerberg. Musk-related, the article says: > He says that within eight to 10 years healthy people could be getting brain implants as new computer interfaces. While in WBW's article Musk's quote is: > I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities. Notice the second part, which this article totally dismisses. That was his optimistic, "if all goes perfect" claim. From the article: > What makes it even remotely okay that Musk and Facebook are promising the public telepathy within a few short years? ...while Zuckerberg's quote is: > I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.
nabla9 9y ago
Best way to improve brain implant technology is to pour the money into the basic research and technology. When they work in medical treatments, other uses can follow. For example: * new way to insert implants into the brain without the risks of seizure, infection, stroke, swelling and eroding wires. * New nonmetallic electrode array implants and wires that don't require removal before using MRI. --- If I had few millions of extra money. I would spend it to figure out how the brain of Caenorhabditis elegans (roundworm) works in detail. The brain of roundworm has been mapped exactly (connectome is known) and we know it's 302 neurons and 8000 synapses well but we still can't understand how it brain works. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/30/simulating-the-brain-sure-thing http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/30/sim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WormBase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WormBase http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  The C. elegans nervous system is completely different from that of higher animals. Its neurons do not even spike.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    And we still don't know how its brain works. Perhaps there's more involved than a connectome and a simple neural model.
  - nabla9 9y ago
    Not completely different, but significantly less complex. There are non-spiking neurons in humans as well. They may have significant role in neuroplasticity.
Animats 9y ago
Musk needs to get back to work. His 2017 task list: - Get Model 3 Tesla in production by mid-summer. (Musk said he'd sleep at the plant to make that happen.) - Launch Falcon Heavy late this year. - Launch Dragon spacecraft in crewed configuration, unmanned. - Catch up on Space-X launch backlog and make some money. (Some customers have canceled because of delays.) - Finish battery factory in Nevada and make some money. - Get Brownsville launch facility ready for 2018 launch. (March drone video: [1] Not much but dirt piles.) - Get self-driving car technology to work. (Vehicles are currently shipping with the hardware, but no software.) That's just this year. For 2018, he's supposed to send people to the moon. Not a good time for the CEO to be doing a new startup. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEFsGRgrvTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEFsGRgrvTc
- komali2 9y ago
  I'll take radical optimism over realistic pessimism any day.
- nabla9 9y ago
  Musk is leveraging constantly. Part of his strategy is using his public personality and track record to lure more investments in. His is using financing as rocket fuel. Either there is a huge explosion or spectacular success. What is admirable in him is that his risk taking is directed towards making new things that provide value even if his business totally collapses and he loses it all personally.
- elevensies 9y ago
  I see Musk as having a Caesar-like role. He commands the army (of execs, engineers, technicians, skilled labor), his job is to decide what to attack. Each of those bullet points probably has 100 to 1000 people actively working on it. I don't think Musk could stop attacking new problems any more than Caesar could relinquish control of the army.
komali2 9y ago
How does this guy have this much energy
- psyc 9y ago
  There are massive positive feedback effects at that level of power and connectedness.
  - komali2 9y ago
    But arguably more massive negative feedback effects. Just look at this comment section, or the stuff the guy gets tweeted at him. Maybe he doesn't read any of that, sure. Still, though, must be exhausting.
mamon 9y ago
And who would like to actually use such device, willingly? It is bad enough that our computers can be hacked, I don't need anyone directly hacking my brain. Not to mention that sometimes you want to just take a break from your spouse's stream of grumbling, "telepathy device" would make that even harder.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I would.
deegles 9y ago
If we had 100% reliable brain to machine interfaces today, I don't think it would change much for the average person. It would be like having a voice assistant with 100% ASR accuracy. Yes, you would be able to use it silently and that would certainly be more convenient, but we have to build better bots/skills to handle that input. Maybe in 25 years we'll get there, and by then brain interfaces will be a natural evolution.
- nabla9 9y ago
  If we had good resolution brain brain machine interfaces, we could use them to modify own our own behavior using biofeedback.
DougN7 9y ago
I'm a huge Elon fan, but it feels like he's jumped the shark on this one.

43 points by pmcpinto 9y ago

T-A 9y ago

By now everybody probably realizes that Musk's "predictions" are on some kind of relativistic timescale related to Earth's frame by a factor O(10). In 2008, the Falcon Heavy was going to fly "in a couple of years"; with some luck, it will actually fly this summer. Let's be optimistic and call it a factor 9/2 ~ 4. Using the same factor for Neuralink, it will have its first medical device out in 15 years and its first general consumer device in 30 years. The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". I would be willing to bet that Neuralink is shooting for something which won't require that, along the lines of injectable "neural dust" or stents: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n3/full/nbt.3428.html http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n3/full/nbt.3428.html

drwl 9y ago
Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) == O(1)
- T-A 9y ago
  True if you are wearing your mathematician's or computer scientist's hat. If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50". Context usually makes it obvious which one it is.
  - kyzyl 9y ago
    Heh, or perhaps we could say that it's simply a short hand colloquialism for "on the order of 10 years"? ;-) As somebody with physics and engineering degrees, as well as 20 years of CS experience, I'd very much enjoy it if we'd stop perpetuating the idea that nobody without a PhD in CS understands asymptotic complexity.
  - justinpombrio 9y ago
    > If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50". Ahgg, leave this poor notation alone. What has it ever done to you?
    - cygx 9y ago
      What has it ever done to you? Expanding to "of order 10" in spoken language.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Man, I hope the engineers who design the bridges I use paid more attention in their math classes.
    - cygx 9y ago
      Mathematical notation is a language, and its abuse can be justified if it facilitates communication. Even professional mathematicians do so when writing papers: The audience is not an automated theorem prover, but other humans, and we don't throw syntax errors if we encounter an expression that does not conform to a narrow set of formal rules.
    - T-A 9y ago
      I am perplexed by the negativity. This has nothing to do with mathematics, it's about notational conventions. Only knowing about one of them does not make you better at taking limits. If the objection is about context dependence, why is nobody going "Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) is the orthogonal group in ten dimensions".
skummetmaelk 9y ago
>The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". I would be willing to bet that Neuralink is shooting for something which won't require that, along the lines of injectable "neural dust" or stents: The stent is placed in a blood vessel resting on top of the cortex, this will never be able to give you the resolution required for what we would consider a neural lace. If Neuralink could somehow make "neural dust" that crosses the blood brain barrier and transmits very local recordings then they might be on to something. The dream scenario would be tiny robots that cross the BBB and keep going until they latch onto a neuron.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  That won't help. There are 100 billion neurons in the brain. Even if you decide on a low-bandwidth limited system, you're still looking at somewhere between 1 and 10 billion neurons. The bandwidth is fairly low, but you still need to work out a way to address the individual dust units for both reading and writing. You have to be able to place them fairly accurately. And you also have to make them maintenance-free, or replaceable if they break. None of this is even remotely possible today. It may be possible fifty to a hundred years from now, but by then some other technology may have appeared. I'd guess this approach is going to seem impossibly crude - like trying to build an i7 core out of valves.
  - skummetmaelk 9y ago
    Your cortex contains "only" 20 billion. The mean firing rate of neurons is estimated to be between 1 and 10 Hz. If you wanted to monitor 10% of the cortex you would then need at to handle at most 20 giga events per second. Not so bad after all.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
We knew how to build rockets, we don't have the slightest clue how to hack into the brain and interface with the information in it. I think your time estimate is going to be way off, but I hope it is right!
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  We have lots of ideas how to do that! We're just not very good at it. But placing a more sensitive EEG inside the head and then using stimuli mapping to reverse enough of the signal-information map to read intentional output seems a fine research path. (And we already know you can get some output woth that method.)
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    Placing a more sensitive EEG inside the head isn't anyone's definition of "non-invasive."
r3bl 9y ago
> The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". And that article seems to me like a direct response to an article in which Tim dedicated thousands of words trying to explain how intrusive the current methods of scanning the brains are in order to support the claim that Musk is planning on coming up with something little less intrusive than opening a skull. In fact, here's a direct quote from the Wait But Why article: > This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team. I have a strong feeling that the author of this article had a strong feeling about the subject before reading the Wait But Why article and dismissed some of the claims because of his previous opinion. Otherwise, I have a difficulty believing that this was his opinion after spending a considerable amount of time actually consuming the article and its claims.

pokemongoaway 9y ago

Maybe this will help him communicate telepathically how terrestrial transportation in a vacuum tube will be made economical, or even safe...

pokemongoaway 9y ago
Ha, so quick on the down votes! If this joke hits such a sore spot, then shouldn't you at least explain why? Last time I checked, critiques like thunderf00t's have not been appropriately addressed.

skummetmaelk 9y ago

It does not even matter if it will be ready in a few years or not. Musk is adding to the hype of brain technology. In the past few weeks I have seen the number of articles, even on HN, about the brain skyrocket. This has been a trend for the past two or so years, but since the announcement of Neuralink it has exploded. Braintech is becoming a topic that people are actually talking about. This will hopefully stimulate people to go out and work on related technology instead of letting it sit in obscurity as it has previously.

jtraffic 9y ago
> It does not even matter if it will be ready in a few years or not. Musk is adding to the hype of brain technology. I suspect Musk agrees with you and that his figures have a 30-50 year margin of error. With Hyperloop, he caused a stir and moved on, and now someone else is working on it. I realize that's not a perfect comparison (he never indicated much intention to work on Hyperloop). He often claims that Tesla's main purpose is to get other car manufacturers to act. Musk is good at using leverage, but with social capital instead of financial capital.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  At this point Musk's MO seems rather clear. He realizes that our current societal structures are too prone to corruption and too slow to act before it is too late. So instead of waiting for politicians to force the use of green energy he makes everyone want to drive an electric car. If that fails, he makes sure that, at least some of, humanity can escape to another planet. Now he is tackling the existential problem of AI. I believe this was already touched upon in the waitbutwhy article, but it has obviously been clear for quite a while now and Musk has been rather open about it. He proved himself with Tesla, even though there were extremely close moments. Now he is leveraging the Tony Stark image to make people interested in whatever ideas he throws out there.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I remember way back in highschool there was a kid like this. We had a river that was just utterly disgusting, and there was a group at our school trying to do bake sales and shit to raise money to get it cleaned up, or they once went to city hall to petition the mayor, etc. He joined up and that weekend just... went to the river and started picking up trash. Alone. The next weekend the whole student org came, the weekend after that the local channel 9 showed up, and so on. Within the month the mayor was announcing plans for bringing in a dredger or something, I don't remember all the details, just the lesson I learned - if nobody else is doing it, just fucking do it, others will follow.

ironchief 9y ago

There is a large public knowledge gap in understanding the difference between engineering and science. Neuralink is much more basic R&D science heavy than Tesla and SpaceX are. Both Tesla and SpaceX had decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of research already invested in the R&D. Both had proof of concepts and a well trained work force. This is why Elon was able to "build a spreadsheet of a rocket on his flight back from Russia". Neuralink has none of that. However, I am very happy that someone is putting in the effort because the results so far have been real and impactful.

aggie 9y ago
Neuroscience and even brain-computer interfaces have indeed had decades of research and billions (though not hundreds of billions) in funding. As a partial proof of concept, BCI's are already capable of multiple-degree-of-freedom control of prosthetics. And there just so happens to be a glut of PhDs and post-docs in the sciences looking for a way to apply their training. Of course it is true that Neuralink is a much larger leap from the current state of the art than mass production electric vehicles or reusable rocket stages. But is it a larger leap than a million people living on Mars? These ventures have many valuable milestones along the way, even if the ultimate goal proves unreachable.

itburnslikeice 9y ago

So can we experience the scene with Sandra and Stallone in Demolition man in the future or no?

kordless 9y ago

<rant>There is no fucking way I'm getting a neural implant. Musk, Zuck and their likes can go fuck themselves for even daring to put money behind these ideas before working on the larger problem of understanding how the Internet, and then intercommunications it gives our brains, has negatively affected us as a society[1]. Being aware of our brain's weak spots is critical to preserving a rational society. I would extend that to the infrastructure that connects them as well. </rant> [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

MichaelMoser123 9y ago
but think of the business potential! advertising and propaganda can be streamed right into the brain, no way to block this information, this feature alone must be worth its price in gold.

tsaprailis 9y ago

"So what facts am I missing? What makes it even remotely okay that Musk and Facebook are promising the public telepathy within a few short years?" The author probably didn't read Tim Urban's WBW article[1]. Elon Musk never claimed that we were going to have telepathy n a few short years but rather that he was hoping that he would have some sort of BCI that would also be used by people who don't have some sort of disability. "I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities." "And Mark Zuckerberg gave a timeline of about 25 years. Mark Zuckerberg said: “I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.”" So I think the whole article has a clickbait-y theme, I would expect something more objective from the MIT Technology Review. Finally as the author said Musk has indeed missed the deadlines on his achievements, but nonetheless also he manages to go through with his plans, both with SpaceX and with Tesla. So even though I don't expect the neural lace in "a few short years" I think it will come eventually. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

jfarlow 9y ago

For as much as Musk goes back to 'first principles', I am unclear how, from first principles, a metal electrode can healthily and sustainably interface with a living human cell. From first principles the size, material, sensitivity, and most importantly, energy dissipation and efficiency of metals are incompatible with living tissue in the long run, as far as I know. There might be ways to get around any of the above features, but in doing so you often end up sacrificing exactly the point of the chip (power vs speed, sensitivity vs utility, size vs sensitivity). To my mind the far more reasonable mechanism to interact with living neural tissue is given just a cursory 'in the future' remark in the mentioned essay, optogenetics. If you use light for the transmission of signals you get rid of many of the above issues. But, unlike Facebook's tech, you would actually need direct line-of-sight to the cells. The trouble with optogenetics currently is there is the same delivery problems associated with using CRISPR in a live organism. On the other hand, if you solve that delivery problem, you not only get all the medical benefits of being able to fix mutated genes, but you also get the (from first principles) useful access to optical I/O in the brain. And the fact is that optogentics actually has some significant capabilities even today. It's much more of a bottom-up approach, but that is traditionally the direction Musk has used for his success: http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/sequence_info.html http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/sequence_inf... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mouse+optogenetics https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mouse+optogenet... Rockets and electric cars were invented decades, if not a century before Musk came in and 'redid' the technologies from first principles. In this case he seems to have approached this like a rich man, not a principled engineer - rather than from first principles, more simply, "let just hire lots of smart people". And I don't think the result will be without utility - lots of good things have come from such research groups. But the result of this experiment will look nothing like the commercial success of Tesla or SpaceX. A best-case scenario is a bell-labs investment into a multi-decade long exploration of technology.

djsumdog 9y ago

These claims by Musk and the FB exec are pretty outlandish. Any type of surgery is very high risk. Brain surgery is incredibly dangerous. There's a reason why so few surgeons specialise in it. The article even mentions one of the human trials which used implants was directed at people who were already paralysed. But all that aside, developing sensor technology that could get accurate measures of brain activity in a non-invasive and non-destructive way would be quite a breakthrough (and really the first step to anything more substantial. Until we invent nano-robots, implants will simply be way too dangerous). We have no real idea of how the brain works. It's so vastly different from any machine we've ever designed, filled with redundancy and not only electrical signals, but chemical signals that combine to create all kinds of inputs and feedback. Trying to read our stream of consciousness is not an easy task, as it may not be represented in the brain in a way we could recognise with instruments (or even in one discrete location in the brain at all). Brain research is always amazing, but it also shows just how far humanity is lacking in our own understanding of the world. Advertising/Propaganda, the Stanley Milgram Experiments, conformity experiments all suggest brains may be more deterministic than we care to admit. We have hundreds of thousands of inputs (skin, eyes, internal pain/nerve cells, hearing) and there's no way we could raise twins in a lab and control all those inputs to see if we can get two humans to always do the same thing (ethically). I wonder if we ever do create machines/AI that have connotative abilities and that can understand self-awareness; if they may end up telling us that they (and in turn us) don't actually have the free well we think we do.

adrianN 9y ago
Don't start the free will discussion, please, the term is basically meaningless. If you try to define it with sufficient precision to make a conversation about the topic possible you get people who disagree with the definition.
r3bl 9y ago
> These claims by Musk and the FB exec are pretty outlandish. Except that those are not claims made by Musk and Zuckerberg. Musk-related, the article says: > He says that within eight to 10 years healthy people could be getting brain implants as new computer interfaces. While in WBW's article Musk's quote is: > I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities. Notice the second part, which this article totally dismisses. That was his optimistic, "if all goes perfect" claim. From the article: > What makes it even remotely okay that Musk and Facebook are promising the public telepathy within a few short years? ...while Zuckerberg's quote is: > I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.

nabla9 9y ago

Best way to improve brain implant technology is to pour the money into the basic research and technology. When they work in medical treatments, other uses can follow. For example: * new way to insert implants into the brain without the risks of seizure, infection, stroke, swelling and eroding wires. * New nonmetallic electrode array implants and wires that don't require removal before using MRI. --- If I had few millions of extra money. I would spend it to figure out how the brain of Caenorhabditis elegans (roundworm) works in detail. The brain of roundworm has been mapped exactly (connectome is known) and we know it's 302 neurons and 8000 synapses well but we still can't understand how it brain works. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/30/simulating-the-brain-sure-thing http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/30/sim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WormBase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WormBase http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/

skummetmaelk 9y ago
The C. elegans nervous system is completely different from that of higher animals. Its neurons do not even spike.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  And we still don't know how its brain works. Perhaps there's more involved than a connectome and a simple neural model.
- nabla9 9y ago
  Not completely different, but significantly less complex. There are non-spiking neurons in humans as well. They may have significant role in neuroplasticity.

Animats 9y ago

Musk needs to get back to work. His 2017 task list: - Get Model 3 Tesla in production by mid-summer. (Musk said he'd sleep at the plant to make that happen.) - Launch Falcon Heavy late this year. - Launch Dragon spacecraft in crewed configuration, unmanned. - Catch up on Space-X launch backlog and make some money. (Some customers have canceled because of delays.) - Finish battery factory in Nevada and make some money. - Get Brownsville launch facility ready for 2018 launch. (March drone video: [1] Not much but dirt piles.) - Get self-driving car technology to work. (Vehicles are currently shipping with the hardware, but no software.) That's just this year. For 2018, he's supposed to send people to the moon. Not a good time for the CEO to be doing a new startup. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEFsGRgrvTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEFsGRgrvTc

komali2 9y ago
I'll take radical optimism over realistic pessimism any day.
nabla9 9y ago
Musk is leveraging constantly. Part of his strategy is using his public personality and track record to lure more investments in. His is using financing as rocket fuel. Either there is a huge explosion or spectacular success. What is admirable in him is that his risk taking is directed towards making new things that provide value even if his business totally collapses and he loses it all personally.
elevensies 9y ago
I see Musk as having a Caesar-like role. He commands the army (of execs, engineers, technicians, skilled labor), his job is to decide what to attack. Each of those bullet points probably has 100 to 1000 people actively working on it. I don't think Musk could stop attacking new problems any more than Caesar could relinquish control of the army.

komali2 9y ago

How does this guy have this much energy

psyc 9y ago
There are massive positive feedback effects at that level of power and connectedness.
- komali2 9y ago
  But arguably more massive negative feedback effects. Just look at this comment section, or the stuff the guy gets tweeted at him. Maybe he doesn't read any of that, sure. Still, though, must be exhausting.

mamon 9y ago

And who would like to actually use such device, willingly? It is bad enough that our computers can be hacked, I don't need anyone directly hacking my brain. Not to mention that sometimes you want to just take a break from your spouse's stream of grumbling, "telepathy device" would make that even harder.

adrianN 9y ago
I would.

deegles 9y ago

If we had 100% reliable brain to machine interfaces today, I don't think it would change much for the average person. It would be like having a voice assistant with 100% ASR accuracy. Yes, you would be able to use it silently and that would certainly be more convenient, but we have to build better bots/skills to handle that input. Maybe in 25 years we'll get there, and by then brain interfaces will be a natural evolution.

nabla9 9y ago
If we had good resolution brain brain machine interfaces, we could use them to modify own our own behavior using biofeedback.

DougN7 9y ago

I'm a huge Elon fan, but it feels like he's jumped the shark on this one.