How Can The Metaverse Let Neuralink Users Live A Fulfilling Life?

Quick links to practical solutions

In past 19 articles, I have guided you through the upcoming short-term technological innovations at the boundary of the mind and the machine.

The unique proposals developed throughout reveal the gestalt value and practicality of combining a great many “firsts”. The first-generation Motor BCIs, first-generation LLMs and other foundation models, first-generation Users, and first-generation Avatars. The proposals included:

• Success Criteria for Clinical Motor BCI — User Outcomes: A set of Success Criteria a Motor BCI should satisfy, based on a combination of clinically validated instruments measuring Users’ PROs — rather than engineering feats,
• Success Criteria satisfied with VR: A map of available VR experiences that, if coupled with a Motor BCI, satisfy many of the aforementioned Success Criteria,
• Improving Motor BCI decoders: VR-enabled strategy to propel the Motor BCI decoders into clinical maturity,
• Loudmouths (v0): A novel high-performance neural speech decoder leveraging Transfer Learning,
• uCat System with uCat Client App (v0) prototype: A VR system that consumes the User’s decoded movements, teaches the User how to master their Motor BCI to embody an Avatar, and serves virtual experiences that improve their QOL.

Despite my best efforts, multiple important topics deserving of attention were omitted. I merely grazed upon what appeared to be addressed in detail elsewhere, such as the efforts to miniaturize the Motor BCI and VR hardware, to improve implants’ biocompatibility and insertion techniques, to estimate Motor BCI economic impact, to develop foundational models in other domains, to resolve computational challenges in simulating realistic physics, to elucidate local and global funding landscape for the constituent R&D, …, the list goes on.

On the other hand, advances in other topics do not seem intuitively articulated elsewhere, and future versions of this document may expand to cover them. These include efforts to deploy Motor BCI decoders scalably, replicate the User’s likeness virtually, restore the sense of touch, move beyond the electrophysiological data acquisition, account for variables beyond spiking activity to infer the brain's computation, protect User’s data and privacy, and the wider ethics of high-bandwidth neural interfaces.

According to Vance (2023):

“[Neuralink] estimates that each implant surgery will run it about $10,500, including exams, parts and labor, and that it will charge insurers about $40,000. It forecasts annual revenue as high as $100 million within five years. Neuralink says it plans to perform 11 surgeries in 2024, 27 in 2025 and 79 in 2026. Then things really ramp up, going from 499 surgeries in 2027 to 22,204 by 2030, according to documents provided to investors.”

As tens of thousands of Users receive their high-bandwidth Motor BCI implants by the end of the decade, it is up to all of us to develop valuable ways they can be used. Traditionally, in the short to medium term, the 'ways' outlined in this document would rely heavily on securing financial backing from governmental entities. However, the practicality of feasible Motor BCI outcomes, as evidenced throughout, justifies private or even individual supporters. Should our strategy resonate with you, our vibrant community welcomes allies and advocates from all walks of life.

Part 20 of a series of unedited excerpts from uCat: Transcend the Limits of Body, Time, and Space by ?? Sam Hosovsky*, Oliver Shetler, Luke Turner, and Cai K. First published on Feb 29th, 2024, and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

uCat is a community of all who recognize the alignment of the technological frontiers described in this work. Join us!

Sam was the primary author of this excerpt.