13 ms·

Will This “Neural Lace” Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI?

80 points by dnetesn 9y ago

ephemerol 9y ago
The fundamentals of this idea are so shockingly hand-wavey, that I find this to be something of a hazard to Elon Musk’s reputation. It’s far enough afield, that as blue sky projects go, this is farther away from us now, than cold fusion was in the 1980’s. Hint: we’re still not sure if cold fusion will arrive very soon. It’s great to see caution in light of powerful technologies, but this blue sky concept is thrown into the mix as if to say “try anything to make it work” and in so doing, leaves the overall prophetic narrative in the realm of AI dominance as inexorable. To hear this idea floating around is like saying: So, let’s do something to our brain. Anything. Sprinkle wires on it, and maybe those wires will help. What’s in them? Who knows! But golly, anything to gain an edge because the who knows! But yeah, AI is already here to stay, and there’s no controlling it, so just route around it. There’s no plan here. Just add in the “make-brain-smart-wires” and pray. No one explains how we’ll be smarter, which is especially bothersome, given that we can’t quantify subjective experience, motivation and emotional reaction. Are terrible people, criminals, dictators,and third world war lords getting these things too? Why will it make them do good? Why is it better to make an evil person more powerful than an artificial entity which we fear?
- nefitty 9y ago
  AI, like any other militarily-beneficial technology, will advance whether some societies want it to or not. Nuclear weapons, drones, armored vehicles... These are all similar examples where being the ethical "sucker" is extremely hazardous to the survival of your state. The access people have to possible neural enhancements will be dependent on the rules of their society: Chinese social ratings, US economic status, Russian political connections, etc. Will a criminal have a harder time getting neural enhancements in China or the US? Our definition of what a criminal is will be wildly different in edge cases. I think an interesting, current corrolary is nootropics and meditation. These are not going to inherently make you a "good" person,and they are easily accessible to anyone who wants them. If you want to train your brain and increase your self-control, it's ultimately up to you what you do with those advantages. Formal consequences emerge when new behaviors are perceived as detrimental to society. In terms of how neural enhancements will.make us smarter, does it really matter? If the output is what you intended, at what point do you need to focus on how you got there? Anyways, pick a challenge and put an enhanced and unenhanced human head-to-head. We'll discover our new capabilities through experimentation, just as we always have.
- tylerjwilk00 9y ago
  I don't think it's quite as far fetched or far out. The fundamental point of the neural lace is increased bandwidth OUTPUT from the human mind so that it can be INPUT for some other process. Bare with me... Right now I am using 2 thumbs to output this message. Not very efficient. I could hop on a keyboard and up my output bandwith to 10 fingers. That would be faster but still bottlenecked on the mechanics of my hands. Sure I could use voice buts it's loud and mostly words only. Not great for quiet rooms or coding with special characters. Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10. Now with training I could learn to activate each circuit. Even if the training was only for a digital signal of 0 or 1 that's 2^10 unique signals. Not to mention these could be modifiers of other outputs. And the real kicker is this signal generation happens at the speed of thought. Imagine coding in an IDE at that speed! I didn't touch on the whole AI threat but the point is simply that if we need to be defensive or offensive against an AI we need to be able to output meaning quicker than running to the server room and unplugging HAL.
  - aroman 9y ago
    Even getting reliable and useful output from the brain is still much much harder than you think it is. > Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10. 10 circuits connect to what, exactly? How? Where? Attaching electrodes to existing cells is invasive and uncomfortable (to say the least), and temporary because scar tissue forms and severs the connection in time. But suppose you developed some way of reliably, durably, and non-invasively attaching external artificial neurons into your brain (to be sure, a huge jump). Where would you put these neurons, exactly? What would they synapse to? Just one or two particular neurons? How would you locate them during "install time"? How would the user access them during "run time"? Most brain-machine interfaces use motor neurons because they're easy to access. Maybe that'd be a good route, but again, doing this reliably and non-invasively is really hard, especially if there isn't a clear feedback loop. I don't know why, but a lot of people seem to think that neuroscience is a lot closer to being "solved" than it actually is. Truth is, we barely have any idea how the brain works, let alone how we can meaningfully augment and interact with it.
- pnloyd 9y ago
  Elon musk has talked a bit about this company. The goal is to develop a device which will help increase our low output "bandwidth", not make us smarter. Has the feasibility of such a thing even been explored before? I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss it, I know some types of information have already been decoded from the brain, at least parts of their goal have been proven to be conceptual possible. https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/03/06/mind-reading-ai-isnt-science-fiction-anymore/ https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/03/06/mi...
- lsc 9y ago
  > The fundamentals of this idea are so shockingly hand-wavey, that I find this to be something of a hazard to Elon Musk’s reputation. The rest of the comment implies that you aren't joking.
- maaark 9y ago
  >Hint: we’re still not sure if cold fusion will arrive very soon. I thought cold fusion was confirmed nonsense?
erikpukinskis 9y ago
I love Elon, but this notion of a “bandwidth problem” in UI is what happens when someone with no training in UI whatsoever tries to extrapolate. Imagine the neural lace already existed. Close your eyes, and picture what you would experience. Would it be 3D? Probably. Our brains have spatial hardware. Would it be auditory? Probably, our brains have hardware for that too. Would there be language? Ya, that’s part of our hardware too. So it’s an experience of sights and sounds and language... But think about an iPad... that already had sights and sounds and language. Actually it’s capable of beaming far more of all three to you than it does. And it’s capable of taking in far more input than you generally use. It can do 10 finger multitouch, plus sound recording. Newer devices will have full body tracking. And yet... we don’t use all that available bandwidth. For the most part we stare at a few words, some boxes and lines... why? If Elon is right that more bandwidth is the problem, why aren’t there more high bandwidth user interfaces on existing devices? The answer is: we don’t have a bandwidth bottleneck. We have a design bottleneck. And if I dropped a fully functional neural lace at Elon’s office, he’d have exactly the same design bottleneck. And he’d realize that if he wants to solve his problem, he needs to hire 10 really good UI designers, and then 10 more, and then 10 more, and it’s going to be decades before they max out even the bandwidth of an iPhone.
- pnloyd 9y ago
  No UI on an iPad could allow me to input some things as fast as the split second it takes me to imagine them (think structures and scenes)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- snovv_crash 9y ago
  With input bandwidth I agree with you. But output bandwidth is another matter. Currently we use keyboard, mouse, stylus, and touch panels. We're already seeing some changes here with the new VR sculpting movement, but for output a direct brain interface would drastically increase our output bandwidth.
- 9y ago
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
Ada Palmer's (imo fantastic) Terra Ignota series has this concept, among many others. She envisions a "set-set", or a child who is trained to use "neural lace" like implements from a very young age and barely uses their actual limbs, and these set-sets are the most adept at running computer systems. In the world of Terra Ignota, "set-set"s are highly controversial.
- make3 9y ago
  "Terra Incognita takes place in 2454" I'd be surprised if humans ran any computer systems by then
dsr_ 9y ago
FWIW, the term "neural lace" was coined by Iain Banks. From Excession: One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace. ~ That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented. She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing. ~ Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I'd never really thought of it that way. ~ It is not generally a use much emphasised. ~ I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device back into its bowl on the table.
- ImaCake 9y ago
  I first encounted the "neural lace" idea in Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, where it is called "nanonics". My favourite imagining of such a device is in Peter Watt's "Echopraxia" where it's used to create a hive mind by physics monks.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- melling 9y ago
  That’s briefly mentioned near the end of the first paragraph: ... solution to this unappealing fate is a novel brain-computer interface similar to the implantable “neural lace” described by the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks in Look to Windward, part of his “Culture series” books. Along with serving as a rite of passage, it upgrades the human brain to be more competitive against A.I.’s with human-level or higher intelligence.
swiley 9y ago
There's a limit to how quickly we think (I think I remember reading during drivers ed that we had an average decision making bandwidth of ~ 2^7 bits per second.) For most people there really isn't enough going on in their head that they couldn't just spend a few hours typing it out. If you want to see what happens when people type faster than they think then visit any online forum. IMHO: good Direct Neural Interfaces probably won't be anything more interesting than the invention of GUIs. It will be neat, it will make computers more intuitive (via neural plasticity) and maybe let us directly share thought with each other (really neat! totally useless) but nothing really new will probably ever come of something like this. In fact, if it became popular I think it might make learning some things harder. Software engineering for example is entirely about communicating precisely (with others, yourself, and your computer.) If you live your whole life communicating telepathically you might never learn to communicate well.
- 908087 9y ago
  > and maybe let us directly share thoughts with each other ...and various advertising corporations.
OrganicMSG 9y ago
The media tends to push binary stories of humans vs AI. Science fiction, on the other hand, has long explored the complexity inherent in human, AI and cyborg interactions.
hexo 9y ago
EEG is now "neural lace", mkay, good job naming things!
tintor 9y ago
Neural Lace explained on Wait, but why? https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
ilkan 9y ago
How misleading. The article is about the challenges, and possible diagnostic and repair benefits, of creating electronic circuits that don't trigger the immune system. Not "competing with ai".

80 points by dnetesn 9y ago

The fundamentals of this idea are so shockingly hand-wavey, that I find this to be something of a hazard to Elon Musk’s reputation. It’s far enough afield, that as blue sky projects go, this is farther away from us now, than cold fusion was in the 1980’s. Hint: we’re still not sure if cold fusion will arrive very soon. It’s great to see caution in light of powerful technologies, but this blue sky concept is thrown into the mix as if to say “try anything to make it work” and in so doing, leaves the overall prophetic narrative in the realm of AI dominance as inexorable. To hear this idea floating around is like saying: So, let’s do something to our brain. Anything. Sprinkle wires on it, and maybe those wires will help. What’s in them? Who knows! But golly, anything to gain an edge because the who knows! But yeah, AI is already here to stay, and there’s no controlling it, so just route around it. There’s no plan here. Just add in the “make-brain-smart-wires” and pray. No one explains how we’ll be smarter, which is especially bothersome, given that we can’t quantify subjective experience, motivation and emotional reaction. Are terrible people, criminals, dictators,and third world war lords getting these things too? Why will it make them do good? Why is it better to make an evil person more powerful than an artificial entity which we fear?

nefitty 9y ago
AI, like any other militarily-beneficial technology, will advance whether some societies want it to or not. Nuclear weapons, drones, armored vehicles... These are all similar examples where being the ethical "sucker" is extremely hazardous to the survival of your state. The access people have to possible neural enhancements will be dependent on the rules of their society: Chinese social ratings, US economic status, Russian political connections, etc. Will a criminal have a harder time getting neural enhancements in China or the US? Our definition of what a criminal is will be wildly different in edge cases. I think an interesting, current corrolary is nootropics and meditation. These are not going to inherently make you a "good" person,and they are easily accessible to anyone who wants them. If you want to train your brain and increase your self-control, it's ultimately up to you what you do with those advantages. Formal consequences emerge when new behaviors are perceived as detrimental to society. In terms of how neural enhancements will.make us smarter, does it really matter? If the output is what you intended, at what point do you need to focus on how you got there? Anyways, pick a challenge and put an enhanced and unenhanced human head-to-head. We'll discover our new capabilities through experimentation, just as we always have.
tylerjwilk00 9y ago
I don't think it's quite as far fetched or far out. The fundamental point of the neural lace is increased bandwidth OUTPUT from the human mind so that it can be INPUT for some other process. Bare with me... Right now I am using 2 thumbs to output this message. Not very efficient. I could hop on a keyboard and up my output bandwith to 10 fingers. That would be faster but still bottlenecked on the mechanics of my hands. Sure I could use voice buts it's loud and mostly words only. Not great for quiet rooms or coding with special characters. Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10. Now with training I could learn to activate each circuit. Even if the training was only for a digital signal of 0 or 1 that's 2^10 unique signals. Not to mention these could be modifiers of other outputs. And the real kicker is this signal generation happens at the speed of thought. Imagine coding in an IDE at that speed! I didn't touch on the whole AI threat but the point is simply that if we need to be defensive or offensive against an AI we need to be able to output meaning quicker than running to the server room and unplugging HAL.
- aroman 9y ago
  Even getting reliable and useful output from the brain is still much much harder than you think it is. > Now imagine an integrated set of circuits directly connected to my brain. It wouldn't have to be many. Let's say 10. 10 circuits connect to what, exactly? How? Where? Attaching electrodes to existing cells is invasive and uncomfortable (to say the least), and temporary because scar tissue forms and severs the connection in time. But suppose you developed some way of reliably, durably, and non-invasively attaching external artificial neurons into your brain (to be sure, a huge jump). Where would you put these neurons, exactly? What would they synapse to? Just one or two particular neurons? How would you locate them during "install time"? How would the user access them during "run time"? Most brain-machine interfaces use motor neurons because they're easy to access. Maybe that'd be a good route, but again, doing this reliably and non-invasively is really hard, especially if there isn't a clear feedback loop. I don't know why, but a lot of people seem to think that neuroscience is a lot closer to being "solved" than it actually is. Truth is, we barely have any idea how the brain works, let alone how we can meaningfully augment and interact with it.
pnloyd 9y ago
Elon musk has talked a bit about this company. The goal is to develop a device which will help increase our low output "bandwidth", not make us smarter. Has the feasibility of such a thing even been explored before? I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss it, I know some types of information have already been decoded from the brain, at least parts of their goal have been proven to be conceptual possible. https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/03/06/mind-reading-ai-isnt-science-fiction-anymore/ https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/03/06/mi...
lsc 9y ago
> The fundamentals of this idea are so shockingly hand-wavey, that I find this to be something of a hazard to Elon Musk’s reputation. The rest of the comment implies that you aren't joking.
maaark 9y ago
>Hint: we’re still not sure if cold fusion will arrive very soon. I thought cold fusion was confirmed nonsense?

erikpukinskis 9y ago

I love Elon, but this notion of a “bandwidth problem” in UI is what happens when someone with no training in UI whatsoever tries to extrapolate. Imagine the neural lace already existed. Close your eyes, and picture what you would experience. Would it be 3D? Probably. Our brains have spatial hardware. Would it be auditory? Probably, our brains have hardware for that too. Would there be language? Ya, that’s part of our hardware too. So it’s an experience of sights and sounds and language... But think about an iPad... that already had sights and sounds and language. Actually it’s capable of beaming far more of all three to you than it does. And it’s capable of taking in far more input than you generally use. It can do 10 finger multitouch, plus sound recording. Newer devices will have full body tracking. And yet... we don’t use all that available bandwidth. For the most part we stare at a few words, some boxes and lines... why? If Elon is right that more bandwidth is the problem, why aren’t there more high bandwidth user interfaces on existing devices? The answer is: we don’t have a bandwidth bottleneck. We have a design bottleneck. And if I dropped a fully functional neural lace at Elon’s office, he’d have exactly the same design bottleneck. And he’d realize that if he wants to solve his problem, he needs to hire 10 really good UI designers, and then 10 more, and then 10 more, and it’s going to be decades before they max out even the bandwidth of an iPhone.

pnloyd 9y ago
No UI on an iPad could allow me to input some things as fast as the split second it takes me to imagine them (think structures and scenes)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
snovv_crash 9y ago
With input bandwidth I agree with you. But output bandwidth is another matter. Currently we use keyboard, mouse, stylus, and touch panels. We're already seeing some changes here with the new VR sculpting movement, but for output a direct brain interface would drastically increase our output bandwidth.
9y ago

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

Ada Palmer's (imo fantastic) Terra Ignota series has this concept, among many others. She envisions a "set-set", or a child who is trained to use "neural lace" like implements from a very young age and barely uses their actual limbs, and these set-sets are the most adept at running computer systems. In the world of Terra Ignota, "set-set"s are highly controversial.

make3 9y ago
"Terra Incognita takes place in 2454" I'd be surprised if humans ran any computer systems by then

dsr_ 9y ago

FWIW, the term "neural lace" was coined by Iain Banks. From Excession: One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl; a net, like something you'd put on the end of a stick and go fishing for little fish in a stream. She tried to pick it up; it was impossibly slinky and the material slipped through her fingers like oil; the holes in the net were just too small to put a finger-tip through. Eventually she had to tip the bowl up and pour the blue mesh into her palm. It was very light. Something about it stirred a vague memory in her, but she couldn't recall what it was. She asked the ship what it was, via her neural lace. ~ That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented. She gulped, quivered again and nearly dropped the thing. ~ Really? she sent, and tried to sound breezy. ~ Ha. I'd never really thought of it that way. ~ It is not generally a use much emphasised. ~ I suppose not, she replied, and carefully poured the fluid little device back into its bowl on the table.

ImaCake 9y ago
I first encounted the "neural lace" idea in Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, where it is called "nanonics". My favourite imagining of such a device is in Peter Watt's "Echopraxia" where it's used to create a hive mind by physics monks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
melling 9y ago
That’s briefly mentioned near the end of the first paragraph: ... solution to this unappealing fate is a novel brain-computer interface similar to the implantable “neural lace” described by the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks in Look to Windward, part of his “Culture series” books. Along with serving as a rite of passage, it upgrades the human brain to be more competitive against A.I.’s with human-level or higher intelligence.

swiley 9y ago

There's a limit to how quickly we think (I think I remember reading during drivers ed that we had an average decision making bandwidth of ~ 2^7 bits per second.) For most people there really isn't enough going on in their head that they couldn't just spend a few hours typing it out. If you want to see what happens when people type faster than they think then visit any online forum. IMHO: good Direct Neural Interfaces probably won't be anything more interesting than the invention of GUIs. It will be neat, it will make computers more intuitive (via neural plasticity) and maybe let us directly share thought with each other (really neat! totally useless) but nothing really new will probably ever come of something like this. In fact, if it became popular I think it might make learning some things harder. Software engineering for example is entirely about communicating precisely (with others, yourself, and your computer.) If you live your whole life communicating telepathically you might never learn to communicate well.

908087 9y ago
> and maybe let us directly share thoughts with each other ...and various advertising corporations.

OrganicMSG 9y ago

The media tends to push binary stories of humans vs AI. Science fiction, on the other hand, has long explored the complexity inherent in human, AI and cyborg interactions.

hexo 9y ago

EEG is now "neural lace", mkay, good job naming things!

tintor 9y ago

Neural Lace explained on Wait, but why? https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

ilkan 9y ago

How misleading. The article is about the challenges, and possible diagnostic and repair benefits, of creating electronic circuits that don't trigger the immune system. Not "competing with ai".