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Elon Musk: Neuralink Will Do Human Brain Implant in “Less Than a Year”
- rini17 6y agoI keep postponing cochlear implantation (using hearing aids, though) hoping just for something like this, to supply processed audio signal directly to the brain. Hope it will have enough bandwidth.
- andbberger 6y agoThat's ridiculous. Get the treatment you need, don't hold out for fictional technologies. As a neuroscientist, it is hard to overstate just how incredibly far away we are from 'supplying processed audio signal directly to the brain'. For some perspective, c. elegans has 302 neurons which have been intensely studied for decades, yet we don't have anything approaching a systematic understanding of what they all do and how they interact. The human brain has something like 85 billion. Not to mention the techno-utopian pretension of thinking that we can somehow do better than the brain - why would you want to bypass your audio processing circuits?? In almost any way we have characterized it, the brain turns out to be nearly optimal. Wiring length, not encoding redundant information (it is not a coincidence that the receptive fields of CNNs strongly resemble that of V1 simple cells - gabor filters are optimal for vision).... I could go on. I'm so tired of the techno-utopian musk cult - how incredibly boring. I get it, you have a hammer. Good for you. Maybe learn to use another tool though?
- rowanG077 6y agoI don't think anyone is making the case here that computers beat the brain at any thing the brain is evolved to do. But there are uncountable tasks computers are better at then brains.
- rini17 6y agoCochlear implant is complicated procedure with chance of side effects. I personally know people that got it taken away again. And it has only 30 or so channels, enough for speech but not sure it's better than my current hearing with aids(I love music). It is far from sure thing that the cochlea is the best place to stimulate te nerves.
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- _bxg1 6y agoNot interested in exposing my literal thoughts to our privacy-deprived digital world, thank you.
- anitil 6y agoI've heard the argument that if the choice was between your brain and your phone, your phone more likely to give up juicy secrets and accurate information.
- waste_monk 6y agoMy phone doesn't have direct read access to my thoughts and memories. A neural interface would, and the ability to extract information from my brain only limited by the software running on it. Or rather, if someone could figure out a way to read my brain and use it for targeted advertising, they would do so, and my thoughts could be leaked as a consequence. Currently access to brain scan hardware is limited, but once neural interfaces become a commodity it will be a lot more accessible and I'd expect we'll see a lot of rapid improvement in that area. Similar to Microsoft's Kinect - it was a commercial flop but it's highly prized for research and hacking. Given the sheer number of vulnerable medical devices that are both vulnerable and directly capable of killing people (pacemakers, insulin pumps, etc.) I would be willing to bet we see someone killed remotely via a compromised neural interface within 5 years of it becoming available for retail.