
Darpa Wants Brain Implants That Record from 1M Neurons - kungfudoi
http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/darpa-wants-brain-implants-that-record-from-1-million-neurons
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sillysaurus3
If you were offered the chance to become as intelligent as Feynman but only if
you turn over a copy of all your future thoughts to the private business that
made this possible, would you take it? Something non-invasive, like a computer
that images your brain while you sleep.

If we are machines, then it seems reasonable that within a few millennia we
might have this capability. I'm trying to think up some scenarios where it
might be reasonable to turn over your brain to a business.

The ability to become "immortal" would probably be enough for most people. Is
your disembodied mind still you? Do you feel an attachment to the idea of
preserving it? What about modifying it?

Where it gets really strange is if you think of your wife or husband making a
backup of their brain, then running a simulator on that backup. I.e. giving it
"life" by letting the simulated neurons fire. Does that count as thinking?
What if you can see those thoughts? What if you can communicate? Would you
love them just as much as you love your SO?

Probably useless questions, but I can't help but wonder.

(I've expanded my comment since it was posted; the "no"'s are in response to
the first question.)

Also,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E)

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captainmuon
I think we should really fix society before we develop that kind of
technology. We need a socio-cultural breaktrough of the same magnitude as the
technological breakthrough. Something on par with the development of
monotheism, enlightenment, capitalism, or democracy. A "communistic" utopia
(for lack of a better word) without the flaws of its historical
implementations. Then the question is moot. There is no private business, or
indeed any other entity, government or private, that you would make such a
_deal_ with. There is no second party that wants to withhold technology, or
steal your thoughts. Rather it will be "From each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs" \- you get the augmentation for free, and you
contribute what you feel comfortable sharing back to society.

Often, utopia is portrayed as the result of a technolocial breakthrough,
sometimes "if we could read each others thoughts there would be no
misunderstanding and conflict". I believe it is the other way around - utopia
is a precondition for singularity-type technology. At least, if we want it to
be beneficial and not hellish.

Brain implants are easy, communism is going to be hard.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I agree. Once we develop the ability to upload and modify brains, it will be
easy to morph them. We can extract the primal desire to defend yourself, to
become angry, to want to own property. These emotions will be reserved for the
founders.

It will take time to get there. Many will resist, so we have to keep our goal
a secret. But people are gullible. With our morphogenic brain technology, we
can give people experiences they've only dreamed of. Think of it. The high of
heroin, with none of the downsides. The ability to know instantly when any of
your loved ones are in distress. The ability to shape yourself and your
children into any form you desire.

If we appeal to base emotions, if we appeal to their need to control, to own,
to shape, then we can implement our plan.

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lossolo
> Many will resist, so we have to keep our goal a secret.

This is not democracy. Every dictatorship begins with "I know better what is
good for you than you do".

You should watch movie "Equilibrium" with Christian Bale. I don't think you
really want that, it only sounds good in theory.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Well, it was firmly tongue in cheek. :) I've been thinking of trying to write
some short stories pulling from various themes in technology. Most ideas have
been done to death, but with a bit of skill it might be possible to write
something worth reading.

A tangent, but: I've been wondering how a novelist builds their skill. They're
not born with it. One idea would be to watch a movie and write it like a book,
transcribing it scene for scene. I'm not sure whether that'd help, though.

~~~
SubiculumCode
No ideas about the second, but an aside on the first.

'Most ideas have been done to death' is a central reason I have stopped
reading novels that much. Ah its one of those, he will do this. Ah yes, I see
the twist. its one of those.

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bllguo
I highly empathize with this. These days I'm just interested in imagination. I
don't care if a book or novel or movie is good. I will most likely never
consume it. I'm looking up synopses and scanning them for innovative ideas.

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lwansbrough
This is hard, but perhaps even harder than you might think. I read an
extremely long exploration of this concept a couple weeks ago. It's a layman
explanation but it really does a great job of outlining the real complications
of such a device. Here's the article:
[https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

One takeaway that gives you the sense of scale: there are at least 40,000
neurons in 1mm^3 of the cerebral cortex. Those 40,000 neurons create around
20,000,000 synapses. You have to create a sensor that can capture a reasonable
portion of those synapses to understand what's going on in that tiny section
of the cortex.

~~~
criddell
Modern CPUs have on the order of 10 billion transistors and we have a pretty
good idea of how those work. In my (uneducated) opinion, it feels like current
tech must be close to providing the tools and scale necessary to start
figuring this stuff out, no?

~~~
apl
We didn't have to reverse-engineer the CPU. Also, CPUs are rationally
designed; we have zero guarantees that an evolved brain follows any principles
at all. Every brain region may be highly specialised to a single algorithm or
task with zero mechanistic overlap. Figuring out deep neural nets is a closer
analogy, and at the moment we have very little intuition for how to do even
that. Keep in mind that the brain is vastly more complex than even the most
advanced ANNs.

On the technical side: The most advanced neural techniques allow for parallel
measurement calcium signals in ~10,000 neurones. That's a long way off from
complete observation!

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tectonic
See also Elon Musk's Neuralink and the recent waitbutwhy post all about it:
[https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
To pick out one interesting point from that article:

> I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he
> just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually
> arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a
> piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. ... That's
> Gutenberg’s thing? A bunch of stamps?

Gutenberg's genius was figuring out that while it took a long time to cast and
to set up the stamps - probably longer than just writing the page - he'd
_Automated_ his process and could print _At Scale_. (His other major
contribution was a good screw press, and, more importantly, the metalurgy and
a casting system for the letters).

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jahabrewer
> when people read aloud or read silently to themselves the neural signal in
> the superior temporal gyrus can be used to reconstruct the words

How long until counter-interrogation techniques include not even thinking
about what you want to conceal?

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xxSparkleSxx
This is a thought that's been floating around in my head for too long and
probably doesn't exactly fit here but oh well.

Isn't language a bit of a proxy for what we are actually trying to
communicate? As in the statement "Yesterday, I saw a yellow bus" the are
millions of shades of yellow, different bus styles, and of course different
times of day and different scenery in which you could have seen that bus.

Is it possible to convey that picture of the yellow bus (wherever and whenever
you happened to see it) through a level of communication below typical
"language." Is it possible to reconstruct thoughts that have not been put into
explicit words? Additionally, if we were able to do this and do it in both
ways (sending/receiving) would a Chinese speaker and English speaker be able
to communicate without learning a new spoken language?

~~~
captainmuon
I would guess the internal representations are too different. Maybe some are
inherited, but most develop over the course of your life.

You can think of it as MS Word vs. Libreoffice Writer. You don't get better
interoperability by letting an app access the other app's memory, whcih is a
crazy historically grown representation of memory-mapped structs.

And by accessing this private structure (and say memcpy'ing external data into
it), you open yourself to lots of exploits, like buffer overflows. No way I'm
letting somebody memcpy random information into my brain.

~~~
Houshalter
It's theoretically possible to reconstruct exact images of objects you are
imagining. You could just show them an image of the yellow bus you saw. I
wonder how communication would evolve with such an ability.

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gene-h
My only worry with this is that it might be too focused on developing
technology rather than doing basic science to make such things possible. Time
and time again trying to develop the tech before the science is ready has not
been very fruitful.

Current neural interfaces tend to kill neurons and eventually fail.
Determining how to avoid these problems is still a very big question. This is
incredibly important for making practical neural interfaces. However, the
approaches developed might not necessarily be compatible with technologies
developed here. For example, the manufacturing process might need to be
completely different, or a flexible substrate might be required.

There has progress in solving these problems though:
[https://phys.org/news/2017-03-graphene-based-neural-
probes-p...](https://phys.org/news/2017-03-graphene-based-neural-probes-probe-
brain.html)

~~~
devindotcom
Yeah, I've been working on a BCI explainer and this is a critical point. The
science isn't even close, either in hardware, software, or even basic brain
knowledge.

Of course, it's kind of one of those situations where you need the knowledge
to get the knowledge, but we'll break the cycle somehow!

~~~
gene-h
I wouldn't be too worried about the software, the human brain is pretty good
at adapting to things. A great demonstration of this was an experiment where
congenitally blind people were able to 'see' by sitting in a chair with an
array of 400 vibrating pads.[0] There has also been some success on the
software side with hippocampal prostheses[1]. All in all it's pretty simple
stuff, we've been able to reverse engineer the transfer function for part of
the hippocampus, so if that region is damaged we can emulate it with an
implant and some matlab code.

I would say that this is the end of the beginning for BCIs.

[0][https://tcnl.bme.wisc.edu/laboratory/founder](https://tcnl.bme.wisc.edu/laboratory/founder)
[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_prosthesis#Recent_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_prosthesis#Recent_development)

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hackpert
More than anything, I am excited about the possibilities this opens up. A lot
of fields that DARPA touches with its funding-filled hands turn into a
technology that defines the future, from the internet to self-driving cars to
GPS. Exciting times we live in indeed!

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solotronics
defense technology for everyone! can't wait for my US NSA Facebook TM brain
implant to keep me happy and productive.

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kafkaesq
Which pretty soon will be implanted "optionally" in people released from
mental hospitals, out on parole, convicted of sexual offense, etc. In the same
way ankle bracelets are "optional" for inmates who fancy the idea of getting
out of jail at some point.

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laythea
Is this not like shoving a single scrappy copper wire into an Ethernet port
and expecting to be able to read, parse and process Ethernet data?

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fundabulousrIII
No thanks. We were designed as autonomous nodes for the core purpose of
survival. It would be nice to have unlimited information at the speed of light
but informational veracity and trust would have to be factored in. Furthermore
bidirection is pure IP theft.

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sjg007
Ok so this explains Musk's new startup then.

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msimpson
Not one Johnny Mnemonic joke? I'm proud of you guys.

