Monkey MindPong

This technology is simultaneously interesting for it's potential usefulness as a brain augmenting tool, and simultaneously terrifying because of the enormous potential for abuse. Still I'd probably work on it if I had a chance, though the choice of ultimately getting it would not be without consternation.

Hard to argue with the potential for a cognition-extending co-processor. And given that both the neural nets they use and the brains own neurons are capable of learning and adapting to each other, there's probably a world of potential here. This could very well be the start of the next stage in human evolution, unlocked by recent machine learning advances in particular, who's critically to this technology cannot be understated. What remains to see is how it works in (human) practice.

Well thank god it can be billed!

More seriously, I actually yearn for the days of Star Trek and where we look at how innovations like this can make people's lives better first and then just stop there.

I was really excited to see the first goal they mentioned:

>Our first goal is to give people with paralysis their digital freedom back: to communicate more easily via text, to follow their curiosity on the web, to express their creativity through photography and art, and, yes, to play video games.

Modes of interaction in society are so poorly designed for anyone whos sensory functions are different than the norm. Bridging directly from the brain to interactions that currently require voice (normed to English Speaking White Males) or touch or movement or vision is a game changer not just for those who are paralyzed but many different groups for whom technology is not designed and is instead adapted.

> It could be billed based on the energy required to translate the objects.

It could be, but it will be billed with ads inserted directly in to your brain that you can’t skip or turn off - even with your eyes closed.

Digitizing consciousness is a much harder problem, because we don't really understand how much of the brain works, the areas involved with conscious thought in particular, and the exact learning mechanisms the brain employs. The way we do deep learning these days is a very rough approximation of how the brain might work, and backpropagation is not really biologically plausible. So IMO, digitized consciousness is probably two to three orders of magnitude harder than this demo we're seeing here. Could unfortunately be a century away or more.

However, the medical applications should come much sooner. What they've shown is amazing. The monkey's control of the paddle seems to be precise and fast. If people who are paralyzed and wheelchair bound just had a way to operate the wheelchair, a robot arm, and communicate with the outside world reliably, that would already be amazing. If we could somehow reconnect their nerves or give them some kind of mechanized suit, it could be even better... And if Neuralink's tech works, that could be only 10-15 years away.

An engineering feat, definitely. However there are so many ways this technology can be abused.