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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 ne

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.
random4369 9y ago
There's a huge bandwidth bottleneck on both input and output sides. Your imagination of what a neural lace would do is too limited. It wouldn't be 3d, it wouldn't be auditory. It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life. It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart. It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet. It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living 1000km is in your field of view. It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal sense. It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware of your long term goals and your progress towards them. It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and instantly know the layout of their codebase. If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.
- lsc 9y ago
  > Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head. The point is that you need some way of interfacing. A fast bus doesn't do me any good if I don't have drivers and then interfaces to interact with the thing on the other end of that bus. I mean, yes, ideally we'd have some kind of thought-based interface... but you've gotta design that, too.
  - darawk 9y ago
    The bandwidth of your memory is substantially higher than reading, though, is the point.
    - lsc 9y ago
      sure, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great. but my point is that you still need an interface, and my understanding is that we're pretty far away from building an interface that feels like it's just your memory. I mean, it'd be great, sure, if you could do it... but that's an interface that needs to be designed, and it's an interface that we, as humans have no idea how to design. How would you record a memory? how would you replay that memory? how would you index the memory? I mean, sure, the idea is to emulate how the brain works now... but how does the brain work now? I don't think we really have a very clear idea on that level.
nnq 9y ago
Just a hint: there's two letters in IO - Input and Output. If I imagine a complex animated 3D shape in my head, I have like really no easy way to "pull it out" and share it to anyone else. Besides spending up to ~1 week sketching/drawing it in either Autocad or Blender/Maya. The out part is the problem, this is where we have a bottleneck. > iPad [...] 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 Really? You think tapping a screen or moving our bodies is a good way to output data?! There's already a huuuuuuuuuge botlenect between my body and my brain. I don't want to force my interaction with a computing device to go through this bottleneck too. Fuck my slow ass annoyingly useless body, I want something that can read with at least a few megapixels per second from the part of my brain that's doing the visual thinking. Even language is a huuuuge ass bottleneck. If you're someone thinking visually like me, you sometimes just give up sharing an idea when you're like "man, I'd need to write a 500 page novel to put it into words". I wish Elon the best luck in the work developing any kind of interface that could help us bypass either the "language bottleneck" or even better, the "body bottleneck" (because language is still about using part of your body - the vocal cords). I'm passionate about UI/X design myself, but I've never taken it professionally because I find it pointless: only real way to improve an interface is to (1) improve the "business-logic data model" and (2) increase bandwith by nuking the entire interface away and letting people interact with the "core data" itself. This is what Git and Emacs org-mode have at their core: the result is amazing UX, horrible UI and "just kill yourself"-hard learning curves... but if I can get the first one, I can put up with the second two until I can afford to hire an army of UI and learnability experts later. Excell/spreasheets are another such exemples of letting people "touch the data" and forgetting about anything else.
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
You're assuming the status quo of input and then suggesting that it is a given, and thus any technology will in the end by identical to the status quo. Let's consider chess for a minute. When a strong player looks at a chess position they see something very different than what a casual player sees and, in fact, they actually use different parts of their brain. They will be able to see ideas and concepts in a fraction of a second that a casual player could spend hours searching for, and failing to find. Yet paradoxically, show these ideas to the weaker player and they'll understand them easily - it's not magical. I find chess a good example since most people are not very good, but do know how to play so they can understand the analog from the amateur side easily. But you can also see things from the side of the 'master' in language. Look at your post. It's made up of 1,499 characters and hundreds of different combinations of these characters. Yet I'm able to parse it very little time and you wrote it with no significant effort. Think about the immense amount of processing that's going on there, without ever really realizing it. So I see no reason to believe that this sort of invisible processing need be limited. Is there any reason I can't consume the entirety of e.g. Wikipedia or the entire catalog of astrophyics journals? Even going full Neo, the difference between a master jiujitsu practitioner and somebody who's never done it at all is almost entirely in the brain. Why can't that information be consumed in direct fashion? It doesn't really seem all that much more spectacular than consuming the entirety of dictionaries and the countless nuanced exceptions and rules of construction between those words, or somehow being able to instantaneously grasp, to at least a very good degree, a practically infinite variety of chess positions. I also remain cynical on the neural lace, but because I think it's reach far exceeds its grasp. I think to really make progress you would effectively need to begin breaking down the man-machine interface in ways beyond clever signal correlation, and we haven't even scratched the surface there. By analog it'd be like trying to become a fluent speaker, without accent, in Ancient Egyptian by studying hieroglyphics.

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.

random4369 9y ago

There's a huge bandwidth bottleneck on both input and output sides. Your imagination of what a neural lace would do is too limited. It wouldn't be 3d, it wouldn't be auditory. It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life. It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart. It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet. It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living 1000km is in your field of view. It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal sense. It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware of your long term goals and your progress towards them. It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and instantly know the layout of their codebase. If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.

lsc 9y ago
> Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head. The point is that you need some way of interfacing. A fast bus doesn't do me any good if I don't have drivers and then interfaces to interact with the thing on the other end of that bus. I mean, yes, ideally we'd have some kind of thought-based interface... but you've gotta design that, too.
- darawk 9y ago
  The bandwidth of your memory is substantially higher than reading, though, is the point.
  - lsc 9y ago
    sure, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great. but my point is that you still need an interface, and my understanding is that we're pretty far away from building an interface that feels like it's just your memory. I mean, it'd be great, sure, if you could do it... but that's an interface that needs to be designed, and it's an interface that we, as humans have no idea how to design. How would you record a memory? how would you replay that memory? how would you index the memory? I mean, sure, the idea is to emulate how the brain works now... but how does the brain work now? I don't think we really have a very clear idea on that level.

nnq 9y ago

Just a hint: there's two letters in IO - Input and Output. If I imagine a complex animated 3D shape in my head, I have like really no easy way to "pull it out" and share it to anyone else. Besides spending up to ~1 week sketching/drawing it in either Autocad or Blender/Maya. The out part is the problem, this is where we have a bottleneck. > iPad [...] 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 Really? You think tapping a screen or moving our bodies is a good way to output data?! There's already a huuuuuuuuuge botlenect between my body and my brain. I don't want to force my interaction with a computing device to go through this bottleneck too. Fuck my slow ass annoyingly useless body, I want something that can read with at least a few megapixels per second from the part of my brain that's doing the visual thinking. Even language is a huuuuge ass bottleneck. If you're someone thinking visually like me, you sometimes just give up sharing an idea when you're like "man, I'd need to write a 500 page novel to put it into words". I wish Elon the best luck in the work developing any kind of interface that could help us bypass either the "language bottleneck" or even better, the "body bottleneck" (because language is still about using part of your body - the vocal cords). I'm passionate about UI/X design myself, but I've never taken it professionally because I find it pointless: only real way to improve an interface is to (1) improve the "business-logic data model" and (2) increase bandwith by nuking the entire interface away and letting people interact with the "core data" itself. This is what Git and Emacs org-mode have at their core: the result is amazing UX, horrible UI and "just kill yourself"-hard learning curves... but if I can get the first one, I can put up with the second two until I can afford to hire an army of UI and learnability experts later. Excell/spreasheets are another such exemples of letting people "touch the data" and forgetting about anything else.

TangoTrotFox 9y ago

You're assuming the status quo of input and then suggesting that it is a given, and thus any technology will in the end by identical to the status quo. Let's consider chess for a minute. When a strong player looks at a chess position they see something very different than what a casual player sees and, in fact, they actually use different parts of their brain. They will be able to see ideas and concepts in a fraction of a second that a casual player could spend hours searching for, and failing to find. Yet paradoxically, show these ideas to the weaker player and they'll understand them easily - it's not magical. I find chess a good example since most people are not very good, but do know how to play so they can understand the analog from the amateur side easily. But you can also see things from the side of the 'master' in language. Look at your post. It's made up of 1,499 characters and hundreds of different combinations of these characters. Yet I'm able to parse it very little time and you wrote it with no significant effort. Think about the immense amount of processing that's going on there, without ever really realizing it. So I see no reason to believe that this sort of invisible processing need be limited. Is there any reason I can't consume the entirety of e.g. Wikipedia or the entire catalog of astrophyics journals? Even going full Neo, the difference between a master jiujitsu practitioner and somebody who's never done it at all is almost entirely in the brain. Why can't that information be consumed in direct fashion? It doesn't really seem all that much more spectacular than consuming the entirety of dictionaries and the countless nuanced exceptions and rules of construction between those words, or somehow being able to instantaneously grasp, to at least a very good degree, a practically infinite variety of chess positions. I also remain cynical on the neural lace, but because I think it's reach far exceeds its grasp. I think to really make progress you would effectively need to begin breaking down the man-machine interface in ways beyond clever signal correlation, and we haven't even scratched the surface there. By analog it'd be like trying to become a fluent speaker, without accent, in Ancient Egyptian by studying hieroglyphics.