A Chip is Coming Into Your Brain
Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2020 10:52 pm
Nearly everyone (including you), if they live long enough, will develop at least one brain-spine neurological disorder. I have witnessed one myself, where an aging relative slowly decays into an infant-like mental state; it was terrible. An implantable device can solve this problem. All of your senses: your sight, hearing, smell, pain, feeling, these are all electrical signals sent by neurons to the brain. If someone can correct and control these signals with a machine, you can actually say a permanent goodbye to:
- Depression,
- Insomnia,
- Memory loss
- Hearing loss,
- Blindness,
- Paralysis,
- Extreme Pain,
- Seizures,
- Anxiety,
- Strokes,
- Brain damage,
- and even Addiction.
Musk wrote:What Dorothy [the pig] illustrates is that you can put in the Neuralink, remove it, and be healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig.
Musk did not present any scientific data to support his claims about the pigs or the devices.
While most of the near-term practical applications of wireless brain-machine interfaces are medical, Musk has also expressed a desire that such devices could help human intelligence compete with artificial intelligence, which he considers an “existential threat”. At Friday’s event, the entrepreneur made a number of outsize claims about the potential capabilities of the technology, including that it could be used to summon a Tesla, play video games, or allow a person with a severed spinal cord to walk again.
While curing depression and all sounds great, it has to be noted that Neuralink is founded with a single long-term objective: symbiosis between AI and the human race.
Axios wrote:Comparing the outcome of humans vs. primates, when it comes to AI, the SpaceX founder noted that we could very well end up becoming the equivalent of our animal-brethren to our machine overlords. However, Elon is working on a solution to that particular issue.
The technology being developed by Neuralink will allow us to integrate with computers to access and process information just as well as our AI counterparts. Essentially, our brains will have our very own AI in a cloud that our brains can synthesize with as needed. We already interface with our computers on a regular basis, so the jump from an external device to an internal one would be a natural progression.
It might seem a little far-fetched to have implants in our brains that enable such a capability, but as Elon cited in this interview, such technology is already in development for other needs. For example, scientists are already able to tap into the brain’s electrical pulses that control muscles, meaning that in the case of paralysis, the signal paths can be restored and thus restore movement to once immobile limbs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
Neuroscience experts say that while Neuralink’s mission to read and stimulate brain activity in humans is feasible, the company’s timeline appears overly ambitious. But given the rate of technological acceleration, it is not unfeasible to imagine a mid to far future where telepathy and internet-connected brain become the norm, replacing all the functions currently held by our smartphone. Work, media, entertainment, communication, education, and many more can be streamed directly into our brain as opposed to emanating from our screen and earphone. Clearly, research in this field will be one of the most prominent revolutionary technology that will significantly and irreversibly alter society at large. This is what the hype about Neuralink is all about: not really a brand new technology, but its mass-marketing into the widespread population.
The Next Web wrote:Neuralink represents the first bold steps towards transhumanism for our species. If you want to really dumb it down, think about brain-computer interfaces (BCI) like the computers manufacturer’s started installing in cars in the 1990s. There was a time, long ago, when you’d take your car to a mechanic and they’d diagnose it like a human doctor making a house call. They listen to it, maybe drive it around the block, and eventually start taking things apart to see if they could confirm their suspected diagnosis.
With computers, myriad mechanical and electrical automobile problems can be diagnosed by simply connecting the car to a workstation. A BCI could offer humans similar sensing capabilities. Imagine if you could diagnose health conditions that require anecdotal evidence – such as headaches and other neurologically-induced pain – through direct, real-time analsysis of brain activity. That’d be a game-changer for anyone who’s ever had a migraine.
All that’s interesting, but none of it is new. Scientists have toiled to create a suitable BCI for medical purposes for decades. The reason Neuralink‘s event is, potentially, so exciting is that it represents the first time a serious organization has attempted to bring an invasive BCI out of the realm of medicine and into the general consumer sector.
Make no mistake, Musk’s vision for Neuralink clearly states this device is aimed at everyone. The obvious non-medical benefits would include things like unlocking and opening doors with your mind or sending and receiving text messages as thoughts. These might seem like far-future tech, but the truth is that the ability to do these things has been around awhile. Neuralink‘s working on the hard parts: designing scalable software and hardware and making the surgery to implant it as much like a clockwork outpatient procedure as possible.
The real benefits, the exciting stuff, has more to do with data gathering than telepathy. A BCI capable of translating brain activity in real-time with enough bandwidth to constantly stream could theoretically make mental health conditions as easily-diagnosed and treatable as physical injuries. Imagine if the mental health equivalent of a sprained wrist – say, a mildly traumatic experience – could be diagnosed with precision and treated in such a way that progress and improvement could be codified and monitored.
https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/08/2 ... s-awesome/
It is very likely that billions of people in the future will adopt this kind of technology into their livelihood sooner or later, making massive worldwide changes a certainty. By future, I mean probably like 2030-2040. Obviously, there are multitude of potentially catastrophic risks, from hacking and cyberwarfare to the PRC's surveillance system to big transformation on how society interacts. Thoughts?
Cool!