Neuralinks Brain Implant Will Save Us From Ai Annihilation
Even in a benign A.I. scenario, we will be left behind. But with a brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride, says Musk.
First off, the kind of superintelligence Musk is afraid of remains science fiction, with computer scientists divided on when, and even whether, it will ever arrive. Many think it is at least a few decades off. Secondly, Musk envisions his brain-computer interface as a two-way communication mechanism, so even if Neuralink succeeds in delivering on Musks grand vision, its brain implants could just as easily be used by superintelligent machines to control humans as they could be a means for humans to ensure their dominance over superintelligent machines. And either way, the technological advances necessary to enable that kind of high-bandwidth brain-computer mind-meld are also years, if not decades, away.
Neuralink Cofounder And President Max Hodak Left The Company In April 2021 In February 2022 He Revealed He’d Invested In A Rival
Hodak announced on May 1, 2021, that he’d left Neuralink a few weeks previously, tweeting that he remained a “huge cheerleader” for the company.
In February 2022, Hodak published a blog post saying he’d been serving as an advisor to Synchron, a rival biotech company that beat Neuralink to human trials with its own neural interface technology.
Hodak also announced he’d invested in Synchron and told Bloomberg in an email: “I really don’t want this to be construed as a knock on Neuralink.”
“I’m sure they will also get into humans soon too,” Hodak told Bloomberg.
Elon Musk: Neuralink To Start Implanting Chips In 2022
During a live broadcast interview at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit on Monday, Musk stated that Neuralink plans to begin implanting chips in 2022
Musk explained that Neuralink has been tested in monkeys and is “safe and reliable.” He also stated that the Neuralink brain chip may be removed with ease.
“We hope to have this in our first humans – which will be people that have severe spinal-cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics – next year, pending FDA approval,” he said per Daily Mail.
When it comes to implanting the chips, he claims that Neuralink adheres to far stricter requirements than the FDA.
Musk had wanted to start human testing by late 2020 in 2019, however, this was postponed. In February, he said that Neuralink will begin implanting the device in individuals by the end of 2021.
This time, it appears like Musk is overconfident that the trials will begin in 2022.
In a , Musk reaffirmed the 2022 deadline. “Progress will accelerate when we have devices in humans next year,” he said.
Replacing faulty/missing neurons with circuits is the right way to think about it. Many problems can be solved just bridging signals between existing neurons.Progress will accelerate when we have devices in humans next year.
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Why Elon Musk Doesnt Like Taking Time Off
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So, what reason does Musk have for not wanting to take time off? Well, according to a CNBC interview, theyll kill you. OK, well unpack that in a minute. He has said he doesnt think his employees should be working extra-hard if hes running off on vacations. Musk works a ton of hours and has a very hands-on approach, even admitting in an interview with CBS to sleeping on the factory floor in 2018 when Tesla Model 3 production was behind. He claimed he did that because he didnt have time to go home and shower.
But in addition to his hardcore work ethic, bad things happen to Musk while on vacation. In 2000, on his honeymoon, he found out that the board of X.com had pushed him out as CEO. Additionally, the last two times he tried to take a week off, several rockets exploded. One of them was the deadly 2014 crash of Virgin Galactics SpaceShipTwo. The other incident involved Musks own rockets. Plus, something even worse happened to him on vacation.
Could Elon Musks Neuralink Be A Game
03 September 2020, Brandenburg, Grünheide: Elon Musk, head of Tesla, stands on the construction site … of the Tesla Gigafactory. In Grünheide near Berlin. Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB
dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
At the end of August, via a live webcast, Elon Musk updated the world on the progress of Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company he founded back in 2016.
Maverick technologist Musk, who is also CEO of cutting-edge electric automobile manufacturer Tesla TSLA and space exploration company SpaceX, outlined a bold vision for the future of humanity.
Musks world of tomorrow is one in which cybernetically augmented super-humans are, not just able to overcome the scourge of disease and disability, but wholly transcend their physical form via direct integration with machines and technology.
To use Musks own words, Neuralinks implantable device is like a Fitbit in your skull. Comprised of super-thin threads that carry electrodes, the technology is intended to facilitate high throughput communication to external computers and, potentially, secondary links placed elsewhere in the body.
Neuralink brain implant for connecting humans and machines
getty
Neuralink is certainly no gimmick either. The company already employs over 100 people and is looking to rapidly expand its workforce.
The companys first round of clinical trials will focus on patients with spinal cord injuries.
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Are Musks Claims Credible
These claims might appear grandiose. Yet the underlying science is not controversial.
Neural implants have been helping people since the early 1960s when the first cochlear implant was placed in a person with impaired hearing. There has been much progress in the 60 years since then.
Read more:Neuralink put a chip in Gertrude the pig’s brain. It might be useful one day
Neuroscientists are broadly optimistic the device has potential to treat tinnitus. It may also be useful in treating obsessive compulsive disorder, repairing brain injuries, and treat conditions such as autism or degenerative diseases of the nervous system using deep brain stimulation.
As Paul Nuyujukian, director of the Brain Interfacing Laboratory at Stanford University, observes:
We are on the cusp of a complete paradigm shift. This type of technology has the potential to transform our treatments. Not just for stroke, paralysis, and motor degenerative disease, but also for pretty much every other type of brain disease.
Proposed Acquisition Of Twitter
April 14, 2022
Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter as early as 2017. In January 2022, Musk began purchasing Twitter shares, reaching a 5% stake in the company in March. By April, Musk owned a 9% stake, making him the largest shareholder. Musk did not file the necessary SEC paperwork within 10 days of his stake passing 5%, a violation of U.S. securities laws. When Musk publicly disclosed his investment in an SEC 13G filing on April 4, Twitter shares experienced the largest intraday surge since the company’s 2013 IPO. The revelation that Musk had acquired a significant stake in Twitter followed Musk’s March tweets in which he questioned Twitter’s commitment to freedom of speech and floated creating a rival social media site, although the comments were made after he had acquired 7.5% of Twitter’s stake.
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There Are Many Large Slow
“It takes several decades before a technique that is well understood in laboratory animals such as rodents and non-human primates , is clinically deployed in patients,” says the Allen Institute’s Koch. “It is very difficult to speed up traversing this valley of death given the complex legal, medical, regulatory and human factors involved. We are talking about brain surgery after all.”
In addition to regulations and legal and medical concerns, there are also privacy and ethical issues hackers, could, in theory, gain access to other people’s brains through a BCI, for example.
But Neuralink also faces another reality: There is still so much that even neuroscientists do not know about the brain.
Musk “has a track record for not accepting ‘that’s impossible’ and pushing for unreasonable timelines. Without that, SpaceX and Tesla would have failed long ago. But there difference is, ‘rocket science’ and the science behind electric cars have been written. He can out-engineer tradition ,” Kozai says.
However, “the brain is where that begins to fall apart,” says Kozai.
“The brain is the most complex piece of highly organized active matter in the known universe,” says Koch. “We do not understand how large-scale neural activity is organized to give rise to thoughts, percepts, consciousness and actions.”
“Brain science is still largely unknown,” says Kozai. “It’s hard to out-engineer the brain if you don’t understand how the brain works.”
In 2020 Neuralink Showed Off One Of Its Chips Embedded In A Pig Named Gertrude
The demonstration was proof of concept, and showed how the chip was able to accurately predict the positioning of Gertrude’s limbs when she was walking on a treadmill, as well as recording neural activity when the pig snuffled about for food. Musk said the pig had been living with the chip embedded in her skull for two months.
“In terms of their technology, 1,024 channels is not that impressive these days, but the electronics to relay them wirelessly is state-of-the-art, and the robotic implantation is nice,” said Professor Andrew Jackson, an expert in neural interfaces at Newcastle University.
“This is solid engineering but mediocre neuroscience,” he said.
Jackson told Insider following the 2020 presentation that the wireless relay from the Neuralink chip could potentially have a big impact on the welfare of animal test subjects in science, as most neural interfaces currently in use on test animals involve wires poking out through the skin.
“Even if the technology doesn’t do anything more than we’re able to do at the moment in terms of number of channels or whatever just from a welfare aspect for the animals, I think if you can do experiments with something that doesn’t involve wires coming through the skin, that’s going to improve the welfare of animals,” he said.
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What Neuralink Does Have Going For It
Experts point out Neuralink has something going for it: Musk’s deep pockets and star power.
In 2019 Musk invested $100 million Neuralink, according to The New York Times. In total, Neuralink has raised a total of $158 million and is estimated to be valued at just over $500 million, according to PitchBook.
TK Kozai, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburg’s Department of Bioengineering, who says he interviewed with Neuralink in the company’s early days, was told by a former Neuralink “insider” that the company spends generously.
Kozai heard from the insider that if ever they wanted a piece of equipment to try something out, “‘we would have it at our building the next day, even if it was a multimillion dollar piece of equipment, and even if we only use it once or twice.'”
The process of getting access to funding in academic or government research is much more laborious and slow, Kozai says.
And then there is Musk’s fame.
“It’s less about Musk’s breakthrough in messaging as opposed to the spotlight already being on Musk, and he’s bringing that spotlight to BCI,” Kozai says.
Most recently, Musk headlined a Neuralink product update in August. For the demo, a pig named Gertrude, who was implanted with the Link three months prior, had her brain activity projected onto a screen. “You can literally rub the pig on its snout and we can detect exactly where you touch the snout” with brain data collected by the Link, Musk told Swisher.
The Bci Will Restore Mobility For People With Spinal Cord Injuries
In April 2020, a team of researchers reported that they had successfully restored sensation to the hand of a research participant with a severe spinal cord injury using a BCI system. We think that Musks claim of restoring mobility with a BCI is well within reach. But questions remain about how much functionality such systems will be able to produce and how easy it will be for patients to learn to use them. Questions also remain about the longer-term safety of having implants in the human brain.
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Tham Luang Cave Rescue And Defamation Case
In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a mini-submarine to assist the rescue of children stuck in a flooded cavern in Thailand.Richard Stanton, leader of the international rescue diving team, urged Musk to facilitate the construction of the vehicle as a back-up, in case flooding worsened. Engineers at SpaceX and The Boring Company built the mini-submarine from a Falcon 9 liquid oxygen transfer tube in eight hours and personally delivered it to Thailand. By this time, however, eight of the 12 children had already been rescued using full face masks and oxygen under anesthesia consequently Thai authorities declined to use the submarine. Musk was later one of the 187 people who received various honors conferred by the King of Thailand in March 2019 for involvement in the rescue effort, e.g. the Order of the Direkgunabhorn.
In September, Unsworth filed a defamation suit in Los Angeles federal court. In his defense, Musk argued that “‘pedo guy’ was a common insult used in South Africa when I was growing up … synonymous with ‘creepy old man’ and is used to insult a person’s appearance and demeanor”. The defamation case began in December 2019, with Unsworth seeking $190 million in damages. During the trial Musk apologized to Unsworth again for the tweet. On December 6, the jury found in favor of Musk and ruled he was not liable.
Have You Read About Neuralink
- Moderator
Elon Musks latest project, Neuralink, is a brain-computer technology that could have the ability to change the way that we experience disease and paralysis. Have you read about Neuralink? Do you think it could have an impact on the Parkinsons community?
- July 6, 2022 at 1:40 pm#24387Participant
Yes, Ive read about it. Theres some great YouTube videos posted.
It has promise for PD but PD is not their initial focus and they are years away from FDA approval on anything.
Maybe a push from MJF foundation might help them focus more on PD?
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The Bci Will Treat Neurological Conditions Like Parkinsons Disease
There is current technology such as deep brain stimulation that can already do some of this. Neuralink could potentially further advance on these treatments. But the current configuration of the Neuralink device, which has electrodes implanted close to the surface of the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortex, is not set up to conduct deep brain stimulation.
Asperger’s Syndrome Vs Autism
Asperger’s syndrome and autism are now considered the same diagnosis under the autism spectrum disorder DSM-5 reclassification of the disorders.
Asperger’s syndrome used to be viewed as different from ASD because people with Asperger’s have average or higher-than-average language and intelligence levels, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Of course, if you received a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, and it’s one that you identify with, it’s fine for you to use whatever term you choose. From a medical standpoint, Dr. Hanks says that the term Asperger’s “should not be used at this point.” But, he adds, “there are many people who identify as having Asperger’s who have latched onto that. If someone introduces themselves to me and says, ‘I have Asperger’s,’ it’s not my place to say they don’t.”
Mandell says there are many other “complex” problems around ASD that need to be addressed. he wonders if “we have done a disservice to people by saying that individuals who may have significant challenges, but are employed, in relationships and living independently, have the same condition as people who have only a few words, are self-injurious, and require 24-hour care. Changing the name in the DSM is not going to fix that.”
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What Do We Need To Be Cautious Of
The FDA categorises Neuralink as a class III medical device, the riskiest category. Before human trials start, Neuralink must successfully clear the rigorous FDA regulatory controls.
To be approved, the company must provide exhaustive clinical trial data from non-human test subjects to conservatively justify moving to the next phase. Some monkeys have died during Neuralinks tests, and critics have raised animal welfare concerns.
The approvals process for human testing could take some time.
The regulators will be looking for unintended negative consequences of the device, such as depression. Also of interest will be how practical it is to remove or repair a device should it malfunction, and how to manage the risk of brain injury or infection.
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Once FDA-approved, Neuralink will enlist human volunteers and the next round of trials will proceed.
How long it will be until the device is commercially available and how much it will cost is anyones guess. It could be years and with a price tag that puts it out of reach for all but the wealthy.
So its wise to not hold out false hope for an affordable implant in the short term.