Neuralink's job

Elon = God

Elon Musk is the founder and/or CEO of SpaxeX, Tesla, OpenAI, SolarCity, and the Boring Company. He started all of these companies in order to address large-scale, existential threats to the human race (namely global warming, decrease of resources, need for interplanetary habitance, etc.) Recently, Musk purchased the rights to the name "Neuralink" and is now working on cutting edge BMI technologies to address the existential threat of superintelligence. Musk focuses his efforts on issues he finds to be extremely important and pressing, and generally he has a good sense of that. So Neuralink is pretty important.

Goal: Combine humans with AI basically

"If we can effectively merge with AI by improving the neural link between the cortex and your digital extension of yourself - which already exists, it just has a bandwidth issue - then effectively you become an AI human symbiote. And if that then is widespread, [where] anyone who wants it can have it, then we solve the control problem as well. We don’t have to worry about some evil dictator AI, because we are the AI collectively. That seems to be the best outcome I can think of." - Elon Musk

Bandwidth

What do we mean by bandwidth???

Basically the number of electrodes we are able to put in the human brain. Currently only around 100 electrodes have been in the human brain at once. Neuralink has estimated that around "one million simultaneously recorded" neurons are needed for an interface that would significantly change the world.

Recently, however, engineers figured out how to manufacture 100-electrode multielectrode arrays (pictured to the right) using semiconductor technologies. Today, our maximum is a couple hundred electrodes that are able to measure around 500 neurons at once.

Co-founder of Neuralink Ben Rapoport has said that “the move from hand manufacturing to Utah Array electrodes was the first hint that BMIs were entering a realm where Moore’s Law could become relevant.”

Moore's Law

Moore's Law is an observation that Gordon Moore made in 1965. He noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention and predicted that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future.

Applied to BMIs, if we add 500 more neurons to our maximum every 18 months, we’ll get to a million in the year 5017. If we double our total every 18 months as studied in Moore's Law, like with computer transistors, we’ll get to a million in the year 2034.

Called Stevenson's Law, the findings above show that the number of neurons we can simultaneously record doubles every 7.4 years. If this rate continues, it will take until the end of this century to reach a million recorded neurons, and until 2225 to record every neuron in the brain.

"I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain [is extremely important], we are currently bandwidth limited. We have a digital tertiary self. In the form of our email, computers, phones, applications, we are effectively superhuman. But we are extremely bandwidth constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself, and helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be very important for the future as well." - Elon Musk

Implantation

Even with advances in bandwidth, BMIs will not have a world-changing effect if invasive brain surgery is required.

Elon's goal is for an automated process: “The machine to accomplish this would need to be something like Lasik, an automated process—because otherwise you just get constrained by the limited number of neural surgeons, and the costs are very high. You’d need a Lasik-like machine ultimately to be able to do this at scale.”

Other Really Important Barriers

Wireless

Currently BMI patients have wires coming out of their heads. For BMIs to be widespread and the most effective, wireless technology will have to be implemented. BMIs will have to take care of things like signal amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and data compression on their own, all while being powered inductively.

Biocompatibility

Electronics tend to not do well inside jello-y areas like the brain, and the human body tends to not like having foreign objects in it. This means that the implant will likely need to be hermetically sealed and strong enough to survive decades of the movement of the neurons around it. Additionally, the brain, which treats foreign objects as invaders and covers them in scar tissue, will have to be tricked into thinking the implant is a part of the brain.

Space

Using our current mulielectrode arrays, a million electrodes would take up around the size of a baseball in the brain. That's not gonna fly. Miniaturization is thus a very important step.

Electrode Capability

Electrodes currently are capable of only simple electrical recording or simple electrical stimulation. Realistically they need to have the mechanical complexity of neural circuits and the ability to both record, stimulate, and interact with neurons chemically and mechanically as well as electrically.

Machine Learning

Even if all of the above challenges are met and we engineer and perfectly working BMI implant that can be easily inserted, there's still the issue of understanding all of the information communicated by the neurons that the implant records. By recording the neurons, all we are really doing is learning what a set of specific firings corresponds to and matching them up to simple commands. With a million neurons, that isn't realistic. Kind of like how google translate essentially swapping words from two dictionaries is very different from learning a language, simply deciphering all of the neurons will not adequately convey the information from the brain.

To address this, we will need much more sophisticated machine learning in order to actually understand the language of the brain.

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Graham Templeton. "What is Moore's Law?" Extreme Tech, 29 Jul. 2015, https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/210872-extremetech-explains-what-is-moores-law.

Lacoma, Tyler. “Everything You Need to Know about Neuralink: Elon Musk’s Brainy New Venture.” Digital Trends, DesignTechnica Corporation, 7 Nov. 2017, www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/neuralink-elon-musk/.

Urban, Tim. “Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future.” Wait But Why, 20 Apr. 2017, waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html.

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