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Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

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Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#101

Post by mattkrause »

QuantumRoar wrote: post #33

If I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain. Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an interface read out individual neur…

If I may add some details....

The most popular implant is probably Blackrock Microsystems' "Utah Array", which has 96 electrodes arranged in a 10x10 grid (minus the corners). It looks like this: http://aerobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg For scale, the entire electrode grid is about 4mm on a side and the electrodes are between 0.5 and 1.5mm long (depending on the model).

There are a few other models (and similar stuff from other companies), but I'd be surprised if anything with thousands of contacts is in regular in vivo use. There are some in vitro (i.e., cells or tissue slices in a dish) systems with more contacts, but the signal quality isn't nearly as good.

We can read out the activity of single neurons--people have been doing it for single electrodes since the 1960s. It's slightly easier with a single (movable) electrode since you can creep up on the cell until its action potentials are fairly large and well-isolated from the background noise (here, large means about ±150 µV). You can't move the array or its individual electrodes, so you're stuck hoping that the individual shanks end up in good positions. Then, data is recorded at a fairly high sampling rate (say, 30 kHz) and the "spikes" are clustered based on their shapes to get individual neurons' responses.

The ADCs aren't directly at the contacts, but you want the amplifiers and ADCs as close to electrode as possible to avoid all sorts of weird EMI from the mains, other equipment, etc. Getting the grounding and shielding right is a bit of a black art and eats up tons of researcher time. (You'd think "throw it all in a Faraday cage" would work, but...it doesn't).

What else do you want to know? :-)

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#102

Post by zzzzzzzza »

jp555 wrote: post #87
scotth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bizarrely, humans weren't used for computation in the Matrix. They were batteries...somehow.

Well, a resting human body generates 4x more heat per volume than the fusion reaction at the core of the Sun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Astrophysical... But why didn't the machines just build geothermal generators? I guess it's not much of a story then?

pretty sure the volume of available humans was way smaller than the volume of the core of the sun

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#103

Post by zzzzzzzza »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #82

The universities, companies, and individuals involved in this machine learning renaissance are a collective super-intelligence. It's amazing how fast we can learn now, fuelled by information-sharing over the internet. I'm literally forgetting the names of everyday acquaintances because I'm learning and retaining so much new stuff. The problem, from an individual's perspective is that, while you can stand on the shoul…

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them -" "You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding. "No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist." Ender & Valentine, Ch. 13: Valentine

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#104

Post by hdespiritu »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #74
maverick_iceman wrote: post #70

Am I the only one surprised (and concerned) by how many ventures Musk start at the same time?

I am too. He's been successful so far, but it seems to me that at some point, he will be overextending himself, and will start to run into more failures. As a Tesla shareholder, I wish he would focus on making sure that company is successful. Just Tesla, with its car, power, and battery divisions, is a huge project for one person to manage.

Elon is not the first to take on so many ventures at once. Richard Branson has done it with overwhelming positive results (some losses are bound to happen). It seems that after a certain point, an entrepreneur that is so inclined gets more effective at putting the right processes in place so that they're no longer a bottleneck at the management level.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#105

Post by taneq »

komali2 wrote: post #98
baq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he needs the money, but he doesn't want it. he's not playing the business game for the game's sake, he wants to advance civilization and the best way to do it is via billion dollar disruptive businesses, so that's what he's doing. i applaud him for keeping true to this after however many years of having access to that much assets.

We should be so lucky he's not purely profit-driven. Even on /r/futurology, supposedly a place of boundless imagination and hope for the future, I get attacked for suggesting that maybe it's not a bad idea to at least investigate the potential behind solar roads. Nope, those are stupid and a waste of money, fuck me for being an idealist. My point is most of society is self-limiting for whatever reason (obsessed with…

Solar roads are stupid because they're a terrible use of resources. You could literally build a roof of solar panels over the road for cheaper than you could build a 'solar roadway', and it would be more efficient to boot. It's nothing to do with idealism - if you were being an idealist you'd be backing a less inherently handicapped proposal.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#106

Post by RangerScience »

BAM - http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n7/full/nnano.2015.1...

AFAIK, it's the most promising technology for actually making the neural lace.

TL;DR: If you put electrodes on an angled plastic mesh, you can roll it up, inject it, and it'll safely unroll. Also, brain cells like to grow into it.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#107

Post by FeepingCreature »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #78
jameslk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was more around addressing global warming from the perspective of mitigation rather than prevention. There seems to be a lot of reports that indicate our opportunity for preventing global warming has passed or will soon pass[0][1][2]. So if that's the case, it seems like it would be pretty important to work on solutions to survive the effects of global warming instead. 0. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s…

I've been seeing studies since the release of the Inconvenient Truth claiming that the point of no return has been reached. I don't doubt climate change, but I'm very skeptical of studies positing a slippery slope of catastrophic proportions. It's true we don't know the cascading effects of increased CO2 and methane emissions, but that doesn't mean it the unknown is apocalyptic.

And hey - maybe we won't all die!

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#108

Post by M_Grey »

hexagonc wrote: post #94
M_Grey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're easier to socially engineer, but so far humans are monstrously hard to hack; we're as likely to break unpredictably or not at all, as be broken.

I would argue that humans are quite easy to hack although perhaps not in the way you were thinking. Our perceptions are quite easily and reliably hacked even when we know it is happening, as demonstrated by the success of stage magic and optical illusions[1]. At one point, there was a great deal of fear that companies and adversaries could influence large groups of people with subliminal messages[2]. Although the eff…

Optical illusions are neat, but I don't think it rises to the level of a "hack" in the sense that anyone is talking about here. Subliminal stimuli is, as the massive warnings on the article suggest, utterly unproven. There is a difference between being swayed or marketed to, or just too lazy to disengage from the onslaught of marketing... and "hacking". If hacking humans worked, the marketing wouldn't be necessary in the first place.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#109

Post by red75prime »

dogma1138 wrote: post #13
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did 1880s people have to merge with assembly lines? I think you're being fairly dramatic and too "/r/futurology" here. The whole point of technology is to create tools to make our lives easier, not to become tools. People won't desire this and pushing this kind of pressure on people seems like a recipe for revolt against the capitalist system that has thus far provided so much wealth. The assembly line works for us,…

No, but like with any other performance enchanting utility it's going to be effectively peer pressure. If AI+human will be better than just AI people will "merge" with it at that point if it's a true AI you might as well be a different species to them as you'll likely won't be able to even communicate with them after a while.

Mysterious superintelligent AIs, which are too smart to communicate with baseline humans. I think this is just a plot device for post singular fiction. You just can't write superAI explaining its own behavior, because you aren't smart enough. The best you can do is write about mysterious AI, which can't communicate with you or can't explain its own actions because they are too complex to explain.

Returning to your post, I think that human-AI hybrids will be perfectly able to communicate or explain their plans to baseline humans (merging with AI should enhance communication capabilities, not hamper them).

They could have problems explaining their feelings, thought processes, perceptions, as those things may not correspond to anything baseline human experiences. They could have no reasons to talk to baseline humans at all. But it is not inability to communicate.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#110

Post by hprotagonist »

mattkrause wrote: post #101
QuantumRoar wrote: post #33

If I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain. Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an interface read out individual neur…

If I may add some details.... The most popular implant is probably Blackrock Microsystems' "Utah Array", which has 96 electrodes arranged in a 10x10 grid (minus the corners). It looks like this: http://aerobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg For scale, the entire electrode grid is about 4mm on a side and the electrodes are between 0.5 and 1.5mm long (depending on the model). There are a few other models (and…

I've done ephys in mice and gerbils. Spike sorting is nontrivial, and the effects on local tissue from jamming long shank electrodes into cortex are nothing i'd like done to me.

Unfortunately, less invasive recording techniques will never give you the ability to record from single units.

edit: pulled your google scholar and boy am I preaching to the choir...

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