SPEAKER: I was a shy, scrawny kid, constantly sick.
I spent a lot of my time reading books or playing video games,
and I developed a bit of a fascination with science fiction.
So, as an awkward teenager, when it came time to choose a career,
I wanted to do something that would help
nudge the 21st century just a tiny
bit towards those thriving utopias we see on shows like Star Trek.
I had two ideas work on artificial intelligence
or work on cybernetic implants.
I chose these because I thought they sounded the coolest.
My teenage decision process was as such.
We don't even understand how intelligence works,
so artificial intelligence must be hundreds
of years off cyborg implants.
I mean, we have cameras that can see an ultraviolet
and robotic arms in car factories.
How hard can it be just wire them up to humans, right?
Also, A.I.
programming is all maths, and I am terrible in math's.
So, the choice was for me was pretty easy
to nobody's surprise my know-it-all.
Teenage self failed to predict the future
advancement of science and technology.
Today, AI is the latest hot topic, but we're not walking
around with those cyborg limbs and laser eyeballs.
Still, I stuck with it, completed my degree and Ph.D.
in neuroscience, and now I work as a research fellow at the University
of New South Wales in a field of Neural Interface Engineering.
Neural, meaning the brain, interface to connect
or communicate with, engineering,
building things so my field builds things
that communicate with the brain.
Pretty straightforward, right?
The things we build are called neuroprosthetics
or sometimes neural implants,
and they come in two distinct flavors.
The first flavor AR sensing implants.
These read the signals from your brain and convert
them into computer code that can be used to drive,
say, the prosthetic limb of an amputee.
The other flavor are active implants.
These take computer code and convert it into
something the brain can understand,
usually via short electrical pulses to the nerves.
This is the kind that I specialize in.
An example of an active implant is
the bionic ear made particularly famous
in Australia by our very successful bionic ear manufacturer Cochlear.
The bionic ear takes the input from a microphone,
and using these short pulses bypasses damage to the area.
In such a way that the brain can interpret a sound restoring
hearing to people with profound deafness.
It's no coincidence that the two technologies I just
use as examples both help people with disabilities.
Neural interface engineering is fundamentally about accessibility.
It provides a way for those of us who have lost the ability
to sense the world or to physically interact with it,
to react just those functions and in doing so regain our independence.
I think there's a tendency to consider my field as
a bit niche with applications only in rare conditions.
But damage to our fragile nervous systems is incredibly common.
For example, neuropathic pain is a condition
that can occur as a result of chemotherapy,
failed back surgery or a car accident.
It can cause even the lightest brush or handshake
to become agonizingly painful.
It is frighteningly common.
One in 10 people, very likely a friend or family
member of yours suffers from this condition.
Perhaps in silence, due to the stigma
often associated with chronic pain,
I'm part of a research team that is developing a new neural implant
that can be implanted in the arm or leg that reduces the overexcited
nerve activity that can occur in these types of conditions.
As another example drew my Ph.D.,
I worked as part of the Bionic Eye Project in Australia
that pushed forward technologies to help restore
vision for people who have gone blind.
The most common form of blindness in Australia,
age related macular degeneration can only be delayed, not cured.
As the global population continues to age,
the prevalence of these kinds of conditions will only increase,
and people with these kinds of disabilities
are being left increasingly in the dark.
The growth of our society is the collective, intellectual,
creative and emotional light of the billions of individuals within it.
Every time we leave someone in the dark like
this through disability or poverty.
We dampen that glow.
It affects all of us.
When someone is just trying to get through their day to day,
they don't have time to entertain sci-fi fantasies.
If we want to survive the 21st century, let alone thrive within it.
We need to make sure everyone has the opportunity to contribute
and that's what neural engineering is attempting to do.
So, hopefully, by now, you have a pretty good idea about what I do,
and maybe you're even convinced it's worth doing.
Now I'm going to deliver a bit of a truth bomb.
These technologies I've been talking about,
broadly speaking are not new.
In fact, some of them are decades old at the same time.
We're not exactly walking around with those
laser limbs and cyborg eyeballs, are we?
If this is established technology, relatively speaking, what happened?
Why didn't those utopias or dystopias promise
to us in books and movies come to pass?
The reasons for this are, as always, complex,
but I'm going to try to break it down a bit.
So first up, to get it out of the way, as you may have guessed,
neural interface engineering is hard.
Those comparisons between the brain and computers you may have
heard in media or during science class at school, forget them.
The brain computes yes, but it is not a computer in the digital sense.
The two work on fundamentally different levels,
and while we do understand more and more about how the brain functions,
it remains one of the most complex systems
that we know of in the universe.
When we try to communicate with it using these electrical pulses,
it's a bit like trying to surf the internet using Morse code.
What this means is, while current neural prosthetics do
provide irreplaceable benefit to those in medical need,
they do not yet perform at the level of our inborn senses,
let alone enhance them.
Finding more effective ways to communicate
with the brain has been my career focus,
but there's a lot more work to be done.
Neural interface engineering is also inherently slow.
Scientifically speaking, it requires these big multidisciplinary
teams of neuroscientists, doctors and engineers,
all of whom must slave away on blue sky projects
that might require decades to come to fruition.
This makes the field unattractive pragmatically for junior scientists
who often already struggle in the current harsh scientific climate.
It also makes it unattractive for funding bodies
who are looking for neatly packaged
projects with easily achievable aims that
can wrap up in three to five years.
Small picture stuff.
One thing that might surprise you, though,
is the whole process isn't actually that expensive.
The cost to develop a new neural implant can be as little as
10 percent of the cost to develop a pharmaceutical drug.
The problem is that the return on that investment is delayed
beyond what most companies are willing to risk.
Five years.
No problems 10 to 20 years.
Not so much an issue we are already far too
familiar with in the realm of politics.
In many ways, the bionic ear actually kind of got lucky.
Turns out, information about sound is conveyed
to the brain a bit like Morse code.
Even with this bit of luck, it's still took close to 30 years
for this technology to move from concept to market.
All of this can be summed up in one broad statement.
Neural interface engineering is big picture science.
It's hard, unpredictable, slow.
But with the potential for sweeping benefits to society,
it's not rocket science.
But the two fields actually have a lot of similarities.
They both require big ambitions and big teams.
We know they are possible to achieve.
We went to the Moon half a century ago now and invented the bionic ear.
But increasingly, the way that our science and society is structured
seems to discourage this type of big picture thinking.
Sometimes private industries do pick up the slack.
And with Elon Musk and rocket science,
they've shown that when they do, they reap the benefits.
Musk has conveniently also started his own neural engineering
company called Neuralink and Facebook have followed suit.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather these
technologies remain in the public interest.
The thought of Mark Zuckerberg reading our minds
with his cyborg lays eyes keeps me up at night.
As we move into the most connected
and information rich age in human history,
I fear our collective vision becomes increasingly myopic.
Life changing technologies like a cure for blindness
or chronic pain are within our grasp.
We're just not reaching out.
This frustrates me, and it should frustrate you, too.
If we are to thrive in the 21st century, we need to stop ignoring these
kinds of big picture projects and stop caring about them together.
Otherwise, we're going to leave millions
of us in the dark and dampen that glow.
I guess some part of me is just still that awkward,
energetic kid trying to make those science fiction stories a reality.
I hope I've imparted just a little bit of that energy on you today too.