Attempts to computerize your brain. Elon Musk is not the only one

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Everything in this area is not as revolutionary as Musk's "neural lace". But on the other hand, it is less scary and much more real.

Elon Musk wants to combine a computer with a human brain, build a "neural lace", create a "direct cortical interface", no matter how it looks. The founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI has hinted at these plans repeatedly in recent months, and then most recently The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had launched a company called Neuralink, which aims to implant tiny electrodes in the brain. "One day it will" allow thoughts to interact directly with the network."

And he is not the only one who pursues this goal. Brian Johnson, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who previously sold startup PayPal for $ 800 million, is now building a company called Kernel, promising to fund the project with $ 100 million of his own. He says the company is aiming to create a new kind of "neural tool" in hardware and software - that will ultimately allow the brain to do things it has never done before. “I'm worried about being able to read and write basic brain functions,” Johnson says.

In other words, Musk and Johnson are taking a Silicon Valley approach to neuroscience. They talk about the technology that they want to build long before it appears in reality, they set the agenda before the rest. And they are investing in this idea like no other. Take all these sci-fi ideas using brain interfaces - that's where the term neural lace comes from - and you have a whole new and potentially very important industry that is ridiculously difficult to grasp.

Let's start here: According to David Eagleman, a neurologist at Stanford University and an advisor to Kernel, the concept of the symbiosis of the computer interface and the human brain is not new, it is already many years old. “With any neurosurgery, there is a certain risk of infection, death on the operating table, and so on. Neurosurgeons are completely reluctant to perform any operations that do not require surgical intervention, because the human brain is a delicate thing, "he says - the idea of implanting electrodes is doomed from the very beginning."

However, surgeons have already implanted devices that can help treat epilepsy, Parkinson's, and other conditions through what's called deep brain stimulation. In situations like this, the risk is justified. Researchers at IBM are conducting a similar project, analyzing brain readings during epileptic seizures in order to create implants that can help stop them before they happen.

The immediate goal of Kernel and, apparently, Neurolink is to work with devices in the same direction. Such devices will not only send signals to the brain as a treatment, but also collect data on the nature of these ailments. As Johnson explains, these devices could also help collect a lot more data about how the brain works in general, and ultimately provide important data to science. "If you have much higher quality neural data from more areas of the brain, it gives you a lot of possibilities," says Johnson. "We just didn't have the right tools to collect this data."

As Eagleman explains, this can not only help cure brain diseases, but also improve the capabilities of healthy people, because there will be direct access to the brain.

What Johnson and, presumably, Musk are hoping to do at the moment is to gather data that could help us create a kind of interface in a few years that will allow humans to connect their brains to machines. Musk believes such things will help us keep up with artificial intelligence. “At any rate of development of AI, we will lag behind him - he said at a conference last summer -“in the end, the intellectual gap can become so great that we become a kind of pet like a cat. And I don't like the idea of being a pet cat.

But Eagleman is adamant that this kind of interface won't involve implanting devices into a healthy brain. The same is said by other scientists working in this field. Chad Bouton, vice president of advanced technology at the Feinstein, who is working to develop bioelectronic technology to treat disease, also warns that brain surgery is incredibly invasive.

Eagleman believes that scientists will be able to develop better ways to interact with the brain from the outside. Today, doctors use techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to understand what's going on in the brain, and transcranial magnetic stimulation to change its state. But these are pretty crude methods. If scientists can better understand the brain, Eagleman says, they can improve these techniques and create something more useful.

Researchers may also develop genetic methods to modify neurons so that machines can “read and write” from outside our body. Or they could develop nanorobots for the same purpose. All of this, says Eagleman, is more believable than lace implanted into the nerves.

However, aside from all the big hype surrounding Johnson and Musk's claims, Eagleman admires what they do, mainly because they are investing in research. “Because they are rich, they can focus on the big problem we're trying to solve and try to succeed,” he says.

All of this doesn't sound as revolutionary as neural lace. But on the other hand, it is less scary and much more real.

Wired, Posted by Cade Metz