
Elon Musk: Neuralink Will Do Human Brain Implant in “Less Than a Year” - wlkr
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-neuralink-human-brain-implant
======
_bxg1
Not interested in exposing my literal thoughts to our privacy-deprived digital
world, thank you.

~~~
anitil
I've heard the argument that if the choice was between your brain and your
phone, your phone more likely to give up juicy secrets and accurate
information.

~~~
waste_monk
My phone doesn't have direct read access to my thoughts and memories. A neural
interface would, and the ability to extract information from my brain only
limited by the software running on it. Or rather, if someone could figure out
a way to read my brain and use it for targeted advertising, they would do so,
and my thoughts could be leaked as a consequence.

Currently access to brain scan hardware is limited, but once neural interfaces
become a commodity it will be a lot more accessible and I'd expect we'll see a
lot of rapid improvement in that area. Similar to Microsoft's Kinect - it was
a commercial flop but it's highly prized for research and hacking.

Given the sheer number of vulnerable medical devices that are both vulnerable
and directly capable of killing people (pacemakers, insulin pumps, etc.) I
would be willing to bet we see someone killed remotely via a compromised
neural interface within 5 years of it becoming available for retail.

------
rini17
I keep postponing cochlear implantation (using hearing aids, though) hoping
just for something like this, to supply processed audio signal directly to the
brain. Hope it will have enough bandwidth.

~~~
andbberger
That's ridiculous. Get the treatment you need, don't hold out for fictional
technologies.

As a neuroscientist, it is hard to overstate just how incredibly far away we
are from 'supplying processed audio signal directly to the brain'.

For some perspective, c. elegans has 302 neurons which have been intensely
studied for decades, yet we don't have anything approaching a systematic
understanding of what they all do and how they interact. The human brain has
something like 85 billion.

Not to mention the techno-utopian pretension of thinking that we can somehow
do better than the brain - why would you want to bypass your audio processing
circuits??

In almost any way we have characterized it, the brain turns out to be nearly
optimal. Wiring length, not encoding redundant information (it is not a
coincidence that the receptive fields of CNNs strongly resemble that of V1
simple cells - gabor filters are optimal for vision).... I could go on.

I'm so tired of the techno-utopian musk cult - how incredibly boring. I get
it, you have a hammer. Good for you. Maybe learn to use another tool though?

~~~
rini17
Cochlear implant is complicated procedure with chance of side effects. I
personally know people that got it taken away again. And it has only 30 or so
channels, enough for speech but not sure it's better than my current hearing
with aids(I love music).

It is far from sure thing that the cochlea is the best place to stimulate te
nerves.

