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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

#111

Post by mattkrause »

cing wrote: post #30

There's a "non-invasive" brain-computer interface on the market. It's a little less ambitious; targeted towards people who practice meditation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(headband)

There are a lot of these kicking around.

It's a very bare-bones EEG system: the Muse has 4 channels and a few references; EMOTIV has either 5 or 14. The slick part is that they use "dry" electrodes, which do not need to be filled with a conductive gel before use. The signal from wet electrodes is still a bit better (less noise, etc), but the gel is fairly gross to have in your hair.

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

#112

Post by hprotagonist »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #83
hprotagonist wrote: post #6

Have fun with that. Cochleas are tricky enough!

Sure. OTOH, if something does come out of this, it could have extremely far-reaching consequences. Forget interfacing with AI. Think - locked-in syndrome, or people with various disabilities (blindness, etc). This is the kind of moonshot that ought to be encouraged.

I worked on some locked-in stuff. There was recently a bit of a furor when a researcher snuck off to venezuela and had an electrode array implanted in his own brain: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543246/to-study-the-brain.... It, um. didn't go over well in the research community.

We had tried external BCI for locked-in patients based on visually evoked potentials -- thought being that even if you lose the ability to move your eyes you can still steer an on-screen keyboard. EEG is so noisy, though, that it doesn't work unless the patient's looking at the target directly; ie, they can move their eyes. In which case, you should use an eye-tracker because it's $90 and 10 times faster.

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

#113

Post by mdahlstrand »

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'm interested in the subject and appreciated your post, thanks. A couple of questions:

How does the brain adapt to having the electrodes in there, how long before the probes are accepted as being "part of" the brain?

Do you envision we need lots more sensors than in your example above, or is said number enough for precision input (say, text/words, or navigation in a 3 dimensional position & rotation plus a temporal dimension interface)? I guess the brain would work around the rough edges (or lack of sensor resolution) just like it already does with keyboards, mice, bodies, and language.

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

#114

Post by donlzx »

RangerScience wrote: post #106

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.

This scenario scare the hell out of me. Is injecting/intercepting brain signals directly really the way forward? Do we really want to create monster human species?

IMHO, future AI should be used to enhance human cognitives in a noninvasive way. Never in such a dystopian way as in the movie "The Matrix".

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

#115

Post by ceejayoz »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #76
aerovistae wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much what they said about reusable rockets and electric cars.

Eh, it's worth understanding the scale and scope of the problem. I've been thinking about this a lot, recently. The human brain has on the order of 1e11 neurons. The galaxy has on the order of 1e11 stars. Now, would we confidently predict that we could "solve" the galaxy in less than 100 to 500 years, say? And yet we make very, very aggressive estimates of how quickly we might unravel the secrets of the brain. Biolog…

While I'm a bit more optimistic than you, I think you're raising a very important point. We just found out the lungs make half the platelets in the body (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...) - the idea that the brain will be easy to sort out is definitely an overconfident one.

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

#116

Post by eeks »

donlzx wrote: post #114
RangerScience wrote: post #106

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.

This scenario scare the hell out of me. Is injecting/intercepting brain signals directly really the way forward? Do we really want to create monster human species? IMHO, future AI should be used to enhance human cognitives in a noninvasive way. Never in such a dystopian way as in the movie "The Matrix".

I'm thinking more along the lines of Deus Ex.

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

#117

Post by jdpigeon »

komali2 wrote: post #99
cing wrote: post #30

There's a "non-invasive" brain-computer interface on the market. It's a little less ambitious; targeted towards people who practice meditation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(headband)

What's the point of this thing? See if you're meditating right? Anybody know if it works? Could be cool if I could meditate "good" or "not good" in order to turn a light on and off, or turn on my cat feeder or whatever lol

Their app does a fairly impressive job of giving feedback to help you stay on track during meditation.

However, the cool thing about Muse, IMO, is that it's cheap, comfortable (moreso than the Emotiv), gives reasonable signal quality, and has a free SDK for developers. Brain-connecting devices even if they just use EEG open up a lot of doors for interesting products. Assisting in meditation is a great idea, but there's got to be a lot of good BCI ideas that we probably just haven't thought of yet.

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

#118

Post by mattkrause »

hprotagonist wrote: post #110
mattkrause wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And none of my array stuff is published yet (grrr!)

I did single-electrode experiments for my PhD and those definitely mess up the brain after a while. The Utah array stuff strikes me as "less bad" in there's only one* big insult to the brain, but it is a pretty bad one: the arrays are inserted with a pneumatic "gun".

I think you're right that non-invasive techniques will never give us single unit data, though I hope we can get some longer-lasting implantable electrodes soon.

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

#119

Post by Gustomaximus »

donlzx wrote: post #114
RangerScience wrote: post #106

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.

This scenario scare the hell out of me. Is injecting/intercepting brain signals directly really the way forward? Do we really want to create monster human species? IMHO, future AI should be used to enhance human cognitives in a noninvasive way. Never in such a dystopian way as in the movie "The Matrix".

Almost all advancements come with pros/cons and teething issues. How we implement and the the rules around it are key. I like to believe having someone like Musk at the forefront will be helpful. In the same way have to fight for privacy and free speech, the fight for privacy and free thought will surely be an issue as this tech develops. So many positive and negative possibilities here.
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