Neuralink - Technology for the Brain

Machine Interaction, AI Limitations, and Neuralink

Machine learning and artificial intelligence help to discover new things, push the boundaries, and sometimes even save people’s lives. What can we do with the help of algorithms and what is still ahead of us?

Just today, Elon Musk presented the long-awaited Neuralink: a brain interface device cable of connecting AI with your brain.

When you first hear it, Neuralink’s pursuit sounds like it comes straight out of a mad genius’s diary; certainly, with Elon Musk at the head of the company, that image might not be a far stretch. But if you look beyond what seems to be a Sci-Fi horror movie, you can get a glimpse of quite a different future for humanity — one that has a new, sixth sense: Neuralink.

What Is Neuralink Right Now?

Neuralink is a device that will first be used to help paraplegics with simple tasks such as using an iPhone and making mouse clicks on a computer — by making no physical movement. To be clear, human trials have not yet started; Elon Musk and his team are optimistic about beginning by the end of 2020, but they anchor that timeline with the fact that FDA approval is not easy. So far, Neuralink prototypes have been tested on rodents and apparently even a monkey, according to Musk.

What is Neuralink developing?

Neuralink is building a fully integrated brain machine interface (BMI) system. Sometimes you'll see this called a brain computer interface (BCI). Either way, BMIs are technologies that enable a computer or other digital device to communicate directly with the brain. For example, through information readout from the brain, a person with paralysis can control a computer mouse or keyboard. Or, information can be written back into the brain, for example to restore the sense of touch. Our goal is to build a system with at least two orders of magnitude more communication channels (electrodes) than current clinically-approved devices. This system needs to be safe, it must have fully wireless communication through the skin, and it has to be ready for patients to take home and use on their own. Our device, called the Link, will be able to record from 1024 electrodes and is designed to meet these criteria.

Purpose of Neuralink : -

Creating a device capable of:

• Possibly solve a variety of brain problems
• Help spinal injuries problems
• Help people who are unable to control some muscles of their bodies because of brain damage, possibly restoring their full-body motions

How the Link is Established

Unfortunately, there is no workaround, you will need to undergo a very fast surgery (1 hour top) to install Neuralink in your brain. So far, this is the least invasive device developed by Elon Musk’s team. With the surgical precision of a robot, there is no visible damage to neurons, when installing.

Surprisingly, the procedure to install Neuralink, as specified by Musk, should be fully automated: “You want something that is as precise and automated as possible”. The only way you can achieve a result is by using a robot capable of performing this surgery.

Human Trials

Elon Musk is pushing for the first human implantation soon. In collaboration with the FDA, Neuralink is pending required approvals and further safety testing

In theory, said Musk, with a brain interface you could save up your memories as data, downloading them and uploading them according to your will. This, however, is not yet available.

LINK - The Part That’s Outside the Brain

Having a bionic superbrain chip robotically implanted in your head is something that most of us would consider a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Musk and his team want to keep it that way. Software updates are already inconvenient, and always happen whenever we don’t want them to. The idea of having to make a trip to the local neurosurgeon every time the software wants to run an update takes away a glimpse of the appeal that having a superbrain might bring. So a large piece of Neuralink resides outside of the skull, as a wearable behind your ear.

This wearable, called the Link, houses the software as well as the battery. This way, when you’re at 5% battery life, you can just remove the device to recharge. Same with a software update — the processing happens on the Link.

What Neuralink Wants To Be

It wants to be a computer inside everyone’s brain — one that we don’t have to carry around in our hands, and that’s undetectable in use. While Elon Musk probably likes the idea of helping out paraplegics, nothing seems to tickle him more than giving our future AI overlords a good kick below the belt. And he believes Neuralink will deliver that blow.

In the unmeasurable future, he sees Neuralink’s brain-chip as elective surgery. That means it won’t be covered by insurance in the United States. Sorry, that last sentence was an irrelevant, sarcastic jab at the joke that is American healthcare. In all seriousness, what it means is that people will want it, not need it. It may become more common around the world than plastic surgery (maybe with the exception of Beverly Hills).

Neuralink is not a mandatory thing. This is a thing you can choose to have if you want. This is something I think will be really important at a civilization-level scale.

- Elon Musk

What Neuralink Can Become

The success of Neuralink will change the trajectory of future innovation. What once seemed quite innovative and still beyond reach (e.g., augmented reality glasses) now seems a bit outdated when imagining a future with Neuralink. At this point in time, Neuralink’s technology probably won’t be able to create full sentences from the little firings in your neurons, but it can be trained to translate certain firing patterns into, maybe, images. Or single words. And this type of feature can be improved over time.

the speed of communication will also improve. Right now, when I’m typing, the speed at which I communicate is limited to the speed at which my fingers can gracefully traverse planet QWERTY. When I’m using my phone, it’s how fast my thumbs can weave. Even when I’m speaking, I can only speak so quickly before I get tongue twisted. But a mind’s thoughts are instant. Neuralink may eventually be able to capture those instant thoughts and transcribe them into instant communication, faster than the words can leave my mouth.

The Future Concerns

Talking about concerns, there’s a list of that, too. Ransomware, a virus that locks your computer’s files and deletes them one by one until you pay a ransom, is a serious threat to computer networks today. Now imagine that on your brain. Hacking, software bugs, and hardware defects could be a threat to your daily life.

In the less-distant future, another concern is Neuralink’s ability to not only read signals, fire its own signals, it’s essentially able to do work on behalf of your neurons. But the brain is very sensitive, it changes throughout an entire lifetime in response to different stimuli, including chemicals and how neurons communicate with each other. Adding Neuralink into the equation could change how our brains develop.

Human-machine Collaboration

In a world with advancing AI, the best choice for humans is to become symbiotic with machines. Not humans versus AI, but humans working with AI.

As I wrote about in The Future is Faster, connecting our minds to machines will not be business as usual. It will represent a radical shift in our ability to communicate, think, and work.Imagine connecting your mind to the cloud. Suddenly, the entirety of human knowledge is accessible in an instant. With this ability, what kinds of novel and profound theories and innovations will emerge? What new businesses will we create?

Now imagine that billions of people have this ability. We’re paving the way for what could be the most historic acceleration of progress and technological innovation in history.

Neuralink Merging Your Brain With A.I

Neuralink, says Musk, is going to go the invasive route. It’s developed a chip containing an array of up to 96 small, polymer threads, each with up to 32 electrodes that can be implanted into the brain via robot and a 2 millimeter incision. The threads are small — less than 6 micrometers. Once implanted, according to Musk, the chip would connect wirelessly to devices. “It basically Bluetooths to your phone,” he said. “We’ll have to watch the App Store updates to that one,” he added (the audience laughed).  

The company’s long-term goal is a bit more fantastical, and relates to Musk’s oft-repeated concerns over the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence. That goal is to use the company’s chips to create a “tertiary level” of the brain that would be linked to artificial intelligence.

“We can effectively have the option of merging with AI,”

“After solving a bunch of brain related diseases there is the mitigation of the existential threat of AI,” he continued. “This is the point of it.”

As many as 10 implants could be inserted into one hemisphere of the brain. These are connected via very small wires tunnelled under the scalp to a conductive coil behind the ear. This coil connects wirelessly through the skin to a wearable device that the company calls the Link, which contains a bluetooth radio and a battery. A single USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device to a phone or computer, simultaneously recording all chip channels.

Controlled via a smartphone app, the Link can be used to make software updates and fix bugs via bluetooth, avoiding the need to tamper with the chip. Once the Link is taken off, the implant is shut down. Data from the brain can be streamed from a wearable device to a phone or computer

The launch of Neuralink follows Musk's prediction at the World Government Summit in Dubai two years ago that humans will need to digitally enhance their brains if they are to keep up with computers in a future dominated by artificial intelligence. "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," said Musk. "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.

Progress and Future Aspects

In terms of progress, the company says that it has built a chip and a robot to implant it, which it has implanted into rats. According to the whitepaper the company has published (which has not yet undergone any peer review), it was able to record rat brain activity from its chips, and with many more channels than exist on current systems in use with humans. 

That said — as many healthcare startups have learned — it’s a long road to travel from rats to human, and not everyone makes it. For Neuralink, the first human clinical trials are expected for next year, though Hodak mentioned that the company has not yet begun to the FDA processes needed to conduct those tests. Neuralink isn’t the only group trying to do a scalable implant with flexible electrodes, either. Research showing success with a comparable device was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Not that Musk expects that you’ll be connecting your brain anytime soon. Despite the improvements to machine interfaces that the company was touting last night, Musk warned the crowd that many of the advancements he’s talking about are years or decades away. 

“It’s not going to be like suddenly Neuralink will have this incredible new interface and take over people’s brains,” he said. “It will take a long time, and you’ll see it coming. Getting FDA approval for implantable devices of any kind is quite difficult and this will be a slow process.”

Thank You