Shh, I’m drafting an email about the gif vs jif debate.
Sent,
Our brains are individuals.
Little gelatinous masses...
But Silicon Valley superstars want to create something from science fiction that would
change all that -- a new tech called neural lace.
“Neural lace” was coined by Iain Banks in a long running set of science fiction novels.
In the books, the tech helps brains interact with AI, and with each other.
Back in the real world, tech companies want to give your brain this same upgrade!
No, thank you, I say.
Good day, sir.
Neural lace might sound shiney, but it’s just another way of saying, Brain Computer
Interface -- something scientists have experimented with for decades.
This totally took off in the 90s, and by the late 2000s there were more than 100 new, peer-reviewed
papers a year just looking at how to hook up man to machine…
We’ve hooked up rats to these things with mixed results.
We’ve made it so paralyzed people could move a cursor or feel sensations.
We’ve even made the whole thing wireless!
Right now, tbh, BCI’s are not awesome.
They suck up information about brain activity…
like brainwaves with EEGs, or blood flow with fMRIs.
They can measure activity with electrodes, but to date no BCI can directly interconnect
and read neurons in the brain.
We just get a general idea of what’s going on.
And that’s what neural lace is promising.
A direct, hard connection.
Right now, it’s sort of like we’re watching the brain through binoculars, rather than
going over and just having a chat.
Which makes humanity sound like real creepers.
Neural lace’s promise, is that the lace would be injected into the brain, embed itself,
and then live in there, intertwined with your brain cells -- translating your thoughts into
computers, uploading and downloading information from networks and so on.
This could improve memory, and allow us to keep up with AI -- we could even communicate
with each other!
I know, it sounds amazing.
But it doesn’t exist, yet.
Not in the way you’re thinking.
Yes, Elon Musk, the Lex Luthor slash Tony Stark of our day has teased it.
But we’re not there yet.
Here’s where we are: A prototype of brain-injectible technology was published in Nature Nanotechnology
in 2015.
After injection, this nanoscopic plastic-and-metal mesh embedded itself in mouse brains.
That’s it.
We’ve invented a plug.
A socket.
A place where we can start to connect a brain to something else.
This seems akin to learning how wires work, and saying we’ve invented the internet,
computer and the smartphone.
The paper made a splash, because it’s the first successful embedding.
Right now, BCI’s require invasive brain surgery, massive computers, or are just too
crude to be useful.
This is just an injection.
Which is a huge win!
But…
Being able to add an interface right into the brain is a step down the path to The Singularity
-- when man and machine become one… but it’s just ah- step.
Think about it… what’s the lace going to run on?
glucose from the brain?
It would need to be more efficient than the brain itself.
It would need to communicate out of the head reliably, and would need to not cause the
immune system to reject it, or adapt if cells moved or died nearby.
Right now, it’s being seen as a way to deliver drugs or therapy for Parkinson’s, diagnose
head injuries or treat cancers, at the moment it’s still fairly science fictional.
But the promise of being completely interconnected is pretty incredible!
So count on hearing about it, a lot, in the coming years.
I mean, we’re basically cyborgs already…
using phones and computers to augment our brains, so why not just plug them right in?
Look, we’re doing all this to better integrate man and machine so we can compete with AI,
right?
Well, we might be out of luck because robots can sense emotions via radio waves.
We’re screwed.
Check out this video, here for more info.
And let us know down in the comments if you are worried about AI, cause some of you probably
are, and please subscribe for more Seeker.