It feels kind of ridiculous to say that, but Elon Musk's most ambitious project is not to send a rocket ship full of people to Mars. No
This is a breeze compared to Neuralink, the biotech startup he founded in 2016, that tries to connect the human brain to computers.
On Friday, Musk was joined by a cadre of scientists, surgeons and animal technicians from Neuralink for a live streaming progress update on his latest brain-computer interface, officially known as Link. "In many ways, it's like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," proclaimed Musk.
The presentation also featured the company's latest version of the company's "sewing machine" surgical robot, which can be used to implant thin wires into the brain, as well as three pigs. One, the audience was told, had a "working" Neuralink implant in the skull.
Musk stated from the start that the "main focus" of the event was on recruiting talent to work at Neuralink, but that didn't stop him from delivering some kind of spectacle. The intriguing presentation - featuring a flashy Hollywood trailer and disobedient pigs - was rounded off with an in-depth question and answer session that covered more technical aspects of Neuralink's plan to replace a small portion of your skull with a dollar-sized gizmo that this can read your mind.
Musk spent a lot of time describing the link and its capabilities, but barely went into details and did not provide accurate data on the experiments the company conducted. Instead, he often thought of a science fiction future where we could replay memories, achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence, or give people a super-vision that would allow them to see in wavelengths of light that the human eye could normally can not see. Other collaborators noted the exploration of the nature of consciousness itself.
These grandiose imaginary futures are in dramatic contrast to the reality of Neuralink's current progress. Yes, the future of technology could certainly be life changing, but the lightning-fast presentation underscored how much Neuralink has focused on the "computer" in the "brain-computer interface". Since the launch conference in 2019, Musk's startup has made significant improvements to its device and tackled significant engineering challenges that could hinder implantation.
But it doesn't seem that much time has been spent thinking about the "brain".
That's enough, pig
As always with Musk's big, live revelations of his ongoing work - He did it with SpaceX, He did it with Tesla - There was a huge interest in what he had to perform, fueled by hyping tweets he gave to his 38 million followers. Hundreds of thousands tuned in to the livestream and millions have seen the presentation on YouTube since then.
The stars of the update were three experimental pigs. During the stream, Musk literally pulled back a curtain to reveal the pigs who each helped test Neuralink's newest device. Musk explained that one little pig had no link, one little pig had one (but it was removed), and the third pig was still wearing the implant.
Gertrude, pig number three, shuffled her snout over a small pen, and viewers could hear and see what Musk referred to as real-time signals from his brain cells firing at an indicator that lit up on the screen. The neural link in Gertrude's head was connected to cells in her snout, according to Musk. Every time Gertrude touched something with her snout, the signals sharpened, beeped and puffed for the audience.
In a later part of the presentation, Musk showed a short recorded video of a pig believed to be wearing a Link device and running on a treadmill. The device read his brain activity while walking.
This is one of the most interesting parts of the #Neuralink Update (in the absence of hard data). According to Elon, the machine can predict where the joints should be - "they are almost exactly aligned" - and of course they are close together ... but there is a problem with being "close" and accurate here. pic.twitter.com/n6UebvswA8
- Jackson Ryan (@dctrjack) 29th August 2020
"We take readings from the neurons and try to predict the location of the joints," Musk explained, claiming the Neuralink device could do this "with very high accuracy." However, the video seemed to show significant differences in the predicted position and that indeed Position. This doesn't mean that Musk is lying about the results or that Neuralink made up a misleading representation, just to emphasize how difficult it really is to decipher the brain.
It is unclear how big these differences really are at the moment. If the Neuralink controlled the pig's movement, would it fall down completely? Would it break a leg? How would his walk be? We just don't know because we couldn't see any data. We don't know where the thin wires of the Neuralink are connected to the pigs' brains, how durable they could be, how long they can be implanted in the brain, or what signals we've seen Really mean.
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk and Neuralink may still be releasing raw data related to the update on Friday in an peer-reviewed journal, as they eventually did after the Neuralink launch conference in 2019. But Musk also made big, as-yet-confirmed claims about a monkey that "can control" a computer with its brain "at the same conference and we have yet to see those results. Oddly enough, after the progress update, the Neuralink website was updated with links to the Summer kick-off event and October 2019 peer review paper have been removed.
Angus McMorland, a bioengineer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said the theory behind Neuralink's work is not controversial and notes that he is not too concerned with the data, but suggests details about the quality and stability of too know the units.
Your brain on Neuralink
The complexity of the human brain is amazing. Almost incomprehensible.
"In the brain we have about 80 billion neurons and many times the number of connections between them," says McMorland.
All of these connections that conduct electrical impulses around your brain are responsible for you. Your thoughts, movements, language, beliefs, social interactions ... yours awareness. They are your brain cells that shoot away. They are your brain cells and are reading this article.
However, experts who study the brain have only a rudimentary understanding of how these connections and their location in your brain are intertwined and how function is controlled. Neuroscientists can point to spots in the brain that light up when you scroll down this page, but they can't tell you what it is Taxes this action. While they can better determine which regions and impulses are responding to what, we just don't have a good "map" of the brain.
What Neuralink can potentially do is pioneering a better way read Brain signals that accelerate the pace of research in this area. However, understanding these signals is inherently more difficult. It could be even more difficult to manipulate.
McMorland is a good example. During the presentation, it was suggested that one day you could conjure up a Tesla if you just thought about it. But conjuring a Tesla can be different every time you do it. Different parts of the brain and unique patterns of brain activity may be required depending on the situation.
"This pattern can vary depending on the context: are you in a restaurant, in a hurry, standing on the side of the road, or robbing a bank?" asks McMorland.
Does it really matter now, four years after Neuralink was founded? Maybe not to Musk.
As McMorland rightly points out, this approach is very similar to what the tech billionaire did with SpaceX and Tesla. Take previous technologies, tinker with them, make small tweaks, and package them in high quality, neatly packaged products.
Can this roadmap work for Neuralink too?
Potentially, but deciphering and deciphering the brain is a mammoth problem that must be solved before any of the imaginative applications touted by Musk and his colleagues can be realized. And it's a problem bigger than building missiles and electric vehicles. We may be excited about the technology, but you can't put the cart in front of the horse - or in front of the pig, so to speak.
