This piece describes a lot of why Elon Musk wanted to start Neurolink, and how Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) currently work, and how they might be implemented in the future. It’s a really, really broad article, and aims for breadth while still having enough depth to be useful. If you already have a grasp of evolution of the brain, Dual Process Theory, parts of the brain, how neurons fire, etc. you can skip those parts, as I have below.
AI is dangerous, because it could achieve superhuman abilities and operate at superhuman speeds. The intelligence gap would be much smaller if we also had access to such abilities. Therefore, we should attempt this if possible.
This might be possible, despite how extremely limited and highly invasive existing BCIs are. Opening the skull is obviously way too invasive for most people, but the blood vessels offer a possible minimally invasive solution. They are essentially a highway which goes directly to every neuron in the brain. Current methods monitor at most ~100 neurons, or have low temporal resolution. 1,000,000 neurons is probably the tipping point, where it would stop being an alternative to a keyboard/screen input/outputs, and start being transformative.
Neuralink is exploring many possibilities, and probably won’t narrow to just one any time soon. However, options might include “neural dust”, or stints in the blood vessels. Just as dies have made fine cell structures visible under microscopes, and genetically engineering bioluminescent genes into living animals has made cells glow when active, Neuralink would need a way for such a device to detect individual neuron firings on a large scale.
To do this, the inserts themselves only need to be able to:
React differently to electrical discharge associated with a nearby neurons firing, or to other changes associated with neurons firing, like sodium and potassium levels.
Have that difference be detectable from outside the skull. (I’d divide this into active methods, like emitting light in a wavenelgth which penetrates the skull, or passive changes in properties detectable from the outside, like radioactive isotopes which cluster together based on variables in blood flow.)
(The piece doesn’t make this distiction, but I thought it would be useful for better discussion and understanding.)
Neuralink, of course, hasn’t narrowed the specifics down very much (and will probably pivot several times, in my opinion). However, they will start out offering something largely similar to the sorts of BCIs available to people with paralysis or sensory problems. Elon hopes that if everything goes smoothly, in a decade they would have something which could provide a useful feature to someone without such disabilities, if the FDA would allow it.
They also hope to be able to eventually influence neural firings, so that we could supply information to the brain, rather than just reading information out. This would require something which could be influenced from the outside, and then influence nearby neurons. We can already put an electric field through the whole brain, to minimize seizures, but for meaningful inputs this would also have to be done at the neuron leven.
Why you should read it anyway:
It’s >35,000 words. (For comparison, the cutoff for “short novel” is 40,000.) That said, it’s a good read, and I recommend it if you want to understand why Elon Musk might think a BCI might increase our odds of surviving an AI takeoff scenario.
A lot of it is still hand-waving, and doesn’t make it clear that we don’t necessarily need full self-replicating autonomous nanobots or whatever. Since it doesn’t provide a specific architecture, but just surveys what might be possible, I think it’s easy to give an uncharatable reading. I’ve tried to steel-man the phrasing here, but I think if we focus on tangible, near-term concepts, it can be illustrative of what is possible.
If you read this with a critical eye, you’ll just note that they haven’t narrowed down to one architecture yet, and complain that their lack-of-an-architecture can’t possibly work. The point is to convince lay people that this might even be possible, not to convince them that Neurolink will succeed, but the comments I’ve seen so far have just been skepticism of Neurolink.
Instead, I’d encourage you to read with an eye toward what could be done with a stint or neural dust, and then critically examine the more tangible challenge of how small each of those possible capabilities could be made. What could be done passively? What could be done if inductively powered? How small of blood vessels could various devices fit through? Will those shrink with Moore’s law, or are they physics-constrained?
Honestly, there are a bunch of links I don’t click, because the 2 or 3 word titles aren’t descriptive enough. I’m a big fan of the community norm on more technically minded subreddits, where you can usually find a summary in one of the top couple comments.
So, I’m doing what I can to encourage this here. But mostly, I thought it was important on the AI front, and wanted to give a summary which more people would actually read and discuss.
TL;DR of the article:
This piece describes a lot of why Elon Musk wanted to start Neurolink, and how Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) currently work, and how they might be implemented in the future. It’s a really, really broad article, and aims for breadth while still having enough depth to be useful. If you already have a grasp of evolution of the brain, Dual Process Theory, parts of the brain, how neurons fire, etc. you can skip those parts, as I have below.
AI is dangerous, because it could achieve superhuman abilities and operate at superhuman speeds. The intelligence gap would be much smaller if we also had access to such abilities. Therefore, we should attempt this if possible.
This might be possible, despite how extremely limited and highly invasive existing BCIs are. Opening the skull is obviously way too invasive for most people, but the blood vessels offer a possible minimally invasive solution. They are essentially a highway which goes directly to every neuron in the brain. Current methods monitor at most ~100 neurons, or have low temporal resolution. 1,000,000 neurons is probably the tipping point, where it would stop being an alternative to a keyboard/screen input/outputs, and start being transformative.
Neuralink is exploring many possibilities, and probably won’t narrow to just one any time soon. However, options might include “neural dust”, or stints in the blood vessels. Just as dies have made fine cell structures visible under microscopes, and genetically engineering bioluminescent genes into living animals has made cells glow when active, Neuralink would need a way for such a device to detect individual neuron firings on a large scale.
To do this, the inserts themselves only need to be able to:
React differently to electrical discharge associated with a nearby neurons firing, or to other changes associated with neurons firing, like sodium and potassium levels.
Have that difference be detectable from outside the skull. (I’d divide this into active methods, like emitting light in a wavenelgth which penetrates the skull, or passive changes in properties detectable from the outside, like radioactive isotopes which cluster together based on variables in blood flow.)
(The piece doesn’t make this distiction, but I thought it would be useful for better discussion and understanding.)
Neuralink, of course, hasn’t narrowed the specifics down very much (and will probably pivot several times, in my opinion). However, they will start out offering something largely similar to the sorts of BCIs available to people with paralysis or sensory problems. Elon hopes that if everything goes smoothly, in a decade they would have something which could provide a useful feature to someone without such disabilities, if the FDA would allow it.
They also hope to be able to eventually influence neural firings, so that we could supply information to the brain, rather than just reading information out. This would require something which could be influenced from the outside, and then influence nearby neurons. We can already put an electric field through the whole brain, to minimize seizures, but for meaningful inputs this would also have to be done at the neuron leven.
Why you should read it anyway:
It’s >35,000 words. (For comparison, the cutoff for “short novel” is 40,000.) That said, it’s a good read, and I recommend it if you want to understand why Elon Musk might think a BCI might increase our odds of surviving an AI takeoff scenario.
A lot of it is still hand-waving, and doesn’t make it clear that we don’t necessarily need full self-replicating autonomous nanobots or whatever. Since it doesn’t provide a specific architecture, but just surveys what might be possible, I think it’s easy to give an uncharatable reading. I’ve tried to steel-man the phrasing here, but I think if we focus on tangible, near-term concepts, it can be illustrative of what is possible.
If you read this with a critical eye, you’ll just note that they haven’t narrowed down to one architecture yet, and complain that their lack-of-an-architecture can’t possibly work. The point is to convince lay people that this might even be possible, not to convince them that Neurolink will succeed, but the comments I’ve seen so far have just been skepticism of Neurolink.
Instead, I’d encourage you to read with an eye toward what could be done with a stint or neural dust, and then critically examine the more tangible challenge of how small each of those possible capabilities could be made. What could be done passively? What could be done if inductively powered? How small of blood vessels could various devices fit through? Will those shrink with Moore’s law, or are they physics-constrained?
Such questions will generate the possible concrete architectures which you can then apply a critical lens to. Don’t bother reading if you just want to be critical of the exploratory activity itself. It won’t even put up a fight.
Thanks for the summary and overview!
:)
Honestly, there are a bunch of links I don’t click, because the 2 or 3 word titles aren’t descriptive enough. I’m a big fan of the community norm on more technically minded subreddits, where you can usually find a summary in one of the top couple comments.
So, I’m doing what I can to encourage this here. But mostly, I thought it was important on the AI front, and wanted to give a summary which more people would actually read and discuss.