This is basically the long-term goal of Neuralink as stated by Elon Musk. I am however very skeptical because of two reasons:
Natural selection did not design brains to be end-user modifiable. Even if you could accurately monitor every single neuron in a brain in real-time, how would you interpret your observations and interface with it? You’d have to build a translator by correlating these neuron firing patterns with observed behaviors, which seems extremely intractable
In what way would such a brain-augmenting external memory be superior to pen and paper? Pen and paper already allows me to accomplish working-memory limited tasks such as multiplication of large numbers, and I’m neither constrained by storage space (I will run out of patience before I run out of paper) nor by bandwidth of the interface (most time is spent on computing what to write down, not writing itself)
It seems there is an extreme disproportionality between the difficulty of the problem and the value of solving it.
I agree with you, I too am skeptical about Neuralink being useful anytime soon.
The augmentation in my vision, at the beginning at least, is external. I don’t attempt to modify the brain. I externally “record” a persons life. A simple manifestation of such a augment would be a wearable device: Google Glass.
It follows you around and forms “memories”. This external augmentation, then is able to store, index and retrieve relevant memory at scale, with speed, and aid brains normal abilities.
Hopefully its easy to see that such an external augmentation is better than pen-and-paper based memory system.
This is basically the long-term goal of Neuralink as stated by Elon Musk. I am however very skeptical because of two reasons:
Natural selection did not design brains to be end-user modifiable. Even if you could accurately monitor every single neuron in a brain in real-time, how would you interpret your observations and interface with it? You’d have to build a translator by correlating these neuron firing patterns with observed behaviors, which seems extremely intractable
In what way would such a brain-augmenting external memory be superior to pen and paper? Pen and paper already allows me to accomplish working-memory limited tasks such as multiplication of large numbers, and I’m neither constrained by storage space (I will run out of patience before I run out of paper) nor by bandwidth of the interface (most time is spent on computing what to write down, not writing itself)
It seems there is an extreme disproportionality between the difficulty of the problem and the value of solving it.
I agree with you, I too am skeptical about Neuralink being useful anytime soon.
The augmentation in my vision, at the beginning at least, is external. I don’t attempt to modify the brain. I externally “record” a persons life. A simple manifestation of such a augment would be a wearable device: Google Glass.
It follows you around and forms “memories”. This external augmentation, then is able to store, index and retrieve relevant memory at scale, with speed, and aid brains normal abilities.
Hopefully its easy to see that such an external augmentation is better than pen-and-paper based memory system.