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Elon Musk Launches Neuralink To Connect Brains With Computers (businessinsider.com) 120
At Recode's conference last year, Elon Musk said he would love to see someone do something about linking human brains with computers. With no other human being volunteering, Mr. Musk -- who founded PayPal and OpenAI, thought of Hyperloop, is working on a boring company, and runs SpaceX, TeslaX, SolarCity -- is now working on it. From a report on WSJ: Internal sources tell the WSJ that the company, called Neuralink, is developing "neural lace" technology that would allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface. Neural lace involves implanting electrodes in the brain so people could upload or download their thoughts to or from a computer, according to the WSJ report. The product could allow humans to achieve higher levels of cognitive function. From WSJ's report (paywalled): The founder and chief executive of Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.has launched another company called Neuralink Corp., according to people familiar with the matter. Neuralink is pursuing what Mr. Musk calls "neural lace" technology, implanting tiny brain electrodes that may one day upload and download thoughts. Mr. Musk didn't respond to a request for comment. Max Hodak, who said he is a "member of the founding team," confirmed the company's existence and Mr. Musk's involvement.
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Duh there's already an invention to stop that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I'd be more worried about a hacker threatening to shut down my brain I don't transfer all my money to their account immediately. Or a bored teenager just shutting down people's brains for the fun of it.
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that damn cybernetic dolphin is a junky! (Score:2)
I need a Sino-logic 16, Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine intelligent translator... Thompson iPhone.
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You forgot your Ono Sendai. I guess I might have 2 in my basement, if you need one.
I'm willing to pay $1000 USD (Score:2)
If Elon Musk volunteers to be the first to get that chip implant surgery. No? You don't want to have the surgery Elon? Oh well.
First Experiment (Score:2)
Find out how many times you can ghost dub an augmented cyberbrain before the owner becomes catatonic.
Brains are all over the place (Score:2)
with scatter-shot associative activations
isn't it much better to just have the computer listen to what's on our mind after we've focussed it into a coherent intent or action-story.
In other words, isn't it better to just have the computer listen to us speak, and sense our intentional motions. Yes, trackpad, touchpad, haptic glove I'm talking about you.
If they're trying to say the computer could directly interact with the neocortex to provide additional associative memory capacity, I'm skeptical. The brain fo
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DARPA is actually a giant idea vacuum, sucking concepts out of Musk and every other wide eyed visionary tempted by the chance of a research grant.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm saying that DARPA is more shadow than substance, they take ideas from people like Musk (who publishes them willingly in press releases) as well as people like academics seeking grant money. They repackage the ideas that interest them, then float them back on the market fishing for people who will write deeper proposals along those lines. For every 10 proposals directly targeted at DARPA RFPs, delivered by people with legitimate ability to deliver, DARPA might fund one - and I think they do it as often to stimulate further thinking in the field (incentivising those who did not get the grant) as they expect actual genuine progress out of their regular cadre of grant recipients.
DARPA is not a giant skunkworks of advanced research prototypes that have cartoon-like powers, it's a bunch of paper-pushers seeking other peoples' ideas, rarely developing them beyond tiny pilot programs. Like the corporate world, they'll get one solid hit every rare interval, but most of the time it's just a finger on the pulse of what's percolating at the edge of tech development.
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Re: Bullshit (Score:2)
Think about that for a bit - if your limited resources allow it - but either way, fuck off.
Actual article (Score:4, Informative)
Original article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/e... [wsj.com] (WSJ paywall)
Other coverage: http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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I saw this on an episode of black mirror once (Score:1)
Worked great for the user
cool! (Score:1)
so the ship to Mars will be like a Borg cube?
Thanks, but no thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thanks, but no thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
You wouldn't get your brain hacked, that's silly. It would just be a better version of the currently existing human interface (keyboard input, VGA output).
If your desktop gets hacked, you don't worry about someone hacking your fingers or eyeballs, do you? Well with this brain interface if your computer gets hacked, the worst thing would happen is that the hacker would beam annoying images directly to your brain (instead of displaying it on your VGA monitor) and maybe fuck around with your keyboard mappings so your brainwave commands to the computer don't work properly.
Solution to a hacked PC would be to disconnect it from your brain electrode and de-hack your PC manually, or get another PC.
Hopefully the connection from PC to your brain would be wireless, so a hacker can't actually zap your brain with electrical voltage. But even if it's wired, you could put a good mechanical fuse or circuit breaker in between the PC and your brain so only tolerable voltages are ever transmitted.
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i wonder if this will enable Eula reading which may or may not reference the read only clause of brain.
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You wouldn't get your brain hacked, that's silly. It would just be a better version of the currently existing human interface (keyboard input, VGA output).
There is evidence that the right kind of sensory input can damage, or at least rewire, your brain. Look up the McCollough Effect. I imagine that once we understood the visual cortex well enough to be injecting images directly into our optic nerve, we might be able to figure out more nefarious memetic hazards.
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If your brain can't be hacked via sensory inputs, then why does this do anything at all?
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I imagine that once we understood the visual cortex well enough to be injecting images directly into our optic nerve, we might be able to figure out more nefarious memetic hazards.
This would give new meaning to "Once seen, you can never unsee it."
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Having goatse beamed directly into your brain is quite serious.
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You wouldn't get your brain hacked, that's silly. ...
Well with this brain interface if your computer gets hacked, the worst thing would happen is that the hacker would beam annoying images directly to your brain (instead of displaying it on your VGA monitor) and maybe fuck around with your keyboard mappings so your brainwave commands to the computer don't work properly....
Hopefully the connection from PC to your brain would be wireless, so a hacker can't actually zap your brain with electrical voltage. But even if it's wired, you could put a good mechanical fuse or circuit breaker in between the PC and your brain so only tolerable voltages are ever transmitted.
So, someone could put images directly into my brain? You do realize that most of our thoughts are images? If someone can control the images in your mind, you are effectively under their control. Schizophrenics complain about the images, also the voices, they do dangerous violent things because of these influences. Not as benign and lulzy as you make it out to be.
A brain zap could be used as reinforcement when planting commands and reinforcing ideas, it would not have to go beyond the tolerable level to
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If my desktop gets hacked and they decide to change my wallpaper to goatse, yeah I do worry about my eyeballs getting hacked.
You can't unsee some things.
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If your desktop gets hacked, you don't worry about someone hacking your fingers or eyeballs, do you?
You don't seem to have met many Breitbart readers.
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You want real evolution of man? How about our brains evolve to not need computers at all anymore? Maybe computers are just a crutch.
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"not need computers" and "be always connected to a portable micro computer implanted in our heads" are functionally the same thing.
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Which is better: Having a brain that doesn't need a electronic crutch installed in it
or
Having a brain that's as good (if not better) than a computer all by itself?
I don't assume all technology makes us better. I'm seeing some of it as making us weaker, lazier, and dumber, and that's not going to be good for us in the long run.
Also,
be always connected to a portable micro computer implanted in our heads
..would more or less create the situation I outlined above: 3rd parties being able to hack our brains directly. Nope, no, and hell, no, in that or
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1) I think that there is no "us", some people are improved by tech and others are fucked by it.
2) Humans can already be hacked by a 3rd party, it's called social engineering. If we gained telepahty or enhanced brains, then more remote forms of hacking would become possible as well. The more forms of input and output you can process, the more hacks will be available.
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We can't even secure our non-brain-connected computers, devices, vehicles, etc, from outside intrusion,
Nobody is making you use those things. I use a smarterphone (aka a "dumbphone") with an uninteresting OS, my car has no wireless connectivity and both my desktop PC and router which run Linux have never been compromised.
why in the world would I want to open the door for someone to hack my brain through a computer?
At this point it's merely researching the possibility. Why do you think any medical-grade product made from this would be internet connected?
I'll leave my brain standalone and air-gapped from computers
If you live to see the resulting product, you may change your mind when everyone has perfect memory and significantly high cognition than you. You c
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Can you say 20+ years out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Kudos for starting, but it's a long long road from reading electrical signals from implanted electrodes to:
A) an implant that you would actually want to live with in normal life (relatively free of complications, side effects, long life, replaceable when it malfunctions, etc.)
B) a quality of communication that exceeds simple demonstration of concept low bandwidth gimmicks
These types of bio-electrical neural-computer interfaces are starting to bear fruit for the profoundly blind, deaf, and amputees - cases where they have nothing and anything is an infinite improvement. Moving from that (today's) stage to improvement over normal function will take decades of development, and investors who don't care for much resembling profits or ROI in the meantime. Patents they might file today will likely expire before the patented idea generates any profits.
Again, kudos for starting, we've already got the Hollywood take on what this tech might do, and we can tell from our (currently crude) cellphone interfaces to the web what a small sliver of the potential could be. It will be awesome when it gets here - but I might require major advances in life extension if I'm going to see it get "better than normal."
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So please just fuck off and let real people do real science without all this bullshit.
Re:Can you say 20+ years out? (Score:5, Insightful)
A "lace" brain-machine interface is just a bunch of electrical potential pickups, with all the same drawbacks as any other implanted electrode. Real science isn't bullshit, and it's not a cartoon-world either, bio-material interfaces are messy, problematic, and prone to all sorts of failures.
Just wait (Score:2)
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It's a good thing Bill Gates isn't running it, no BSOD problem as long as it isn't running windoze
Well it is in one respect (Score:2)
Elon Musk is clearly easily bored.
Starts cool things, but moves on to something else on a whim. Are investment analysts going to consider this a risk for his current main companies?
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What would you want him to do? Risk everything on a single project and wait decades until completion/failure until he can start working on a new project?
Last time I checked, humans did not have lifespans of a few hundred years.
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Elon Musk is clearly easily bored.
Starts cool things, but moves on to something else on a whim. Are investment analysts going to consider this a risk for his current main companies?
That's quite the overstatement. He's been helming SpaceX and Tesla for nearly 15 years. He does seem to have a restless intellect but that doesn't make him flighty
Full report in Google Doc (Score:4, Insightful)
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I guess you weren't there a few million years ago. Earth was the most inhospitable environment conceivable.
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i will sell you a one way ticket to where ever you want to go, just give me cash.
(offer void where prohibited)
also check out alaska, its still more habitable than mars and you get all the isolation you could want.
Self-contradictory (Score:2)
And immediately afterward, they say:
So it's pretty clear that not only is there a physical interface, the electrodes, but this interface is pretty darn invasive because you have to have it implanted in your skull.
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so your choice is to use a KB/mouse or get surgery for brain implants... yeah that sounds goodish
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Bulwark Against AI (Score:2)
Musk is very adverse to AI's doing these functions. Maybe neural laces will give humans enough of an advantage that they stop wanting strong AI.
This might be the most important article you read this week: http://www.vanityfair.com/news... [vanityfair.com]
On the other hand, (Score:2)
Christopher Walken fans know what I'm talking about.
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I *think* that scene was Cliff Robertson. Didn't see this until I had posted, but that kind of sacred the shit out of me...
"Brainstorm" - with Christopher Walken.
Are we there yet? (Score:2)
NerveGear
It looks like ... (Score:2)
I see it. (Score:2)
Elon Musk in the time-traveling Jack the Ripper from the future who fled backwards in time to us.
Now he needs the technology to build his own time machine and does this step by step by 'inventing' the necessary parts.
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Elon Musk in the time-traveling Jack the Ripper from the future who fled backwards in time to us. Now he needs the technology to build his own time machine and does this step by step by 'inventing' the necessary parts.
He already has one, but it's on Mars. A few trivial repairs, some power batteries, and interface method and his plans can come to completion.
Elon Musk is an alien (Score:2, Interesting)
I read somewhere about a theory that Elon Musk is actually an alien stranded on Earth and he's trying to advance human civilization to the point where he can build a spaceship and return to his home. I'm beginning to believe it.
I wonder if it's similar to (Score:2)
I don't thing it's that simple (Score:1)
Brain Fungus (Score:1)
Infections (Score:2)
Not a good idea, yet... (Score:1)
Firstly, security on one's brainwaves is critical. While current technology allows pretty coarse-grained analysis of brainwaves, that will change. When it does, those coarse-grained waveforms will be reanalyzed to delve deeper.
Secondly, what protections exist for biometric data? In a world where the state is trying to *reduce* encryption, protection of biometric information (ESPECIALLY brainwaves) is critical. It doesn't get
Brains are a delicate thing... (Score:1)
Not to be rude... (Score:2)
But why doesn't he focus on getting us all in electric cars that we can ALL afford? >$30k?
Priorities (Score:1)