Tech Billionaires Invest In Linking Brains To Computers (technologyreview.com)

"To many in Silicon Valley, the brain looks like an unconquered frontier whose importance dwarfs any achievement made in computing or the Web," including Bryan Johnson, the founder of Braintree online payments, and Elon Musk. An anonymous reader quotes MIT Technology Review: Johnson is effectively jumping on an opportunity created by the Brain Initiative, an Obama-era project which plowed money into new schemes for recording neurons. That influx of cash has spurred the formation of several other startups, including Paradromics and Cortera, also developing novel hardware for collecting brain signals. As part of the government brain project, the defense R&D agency DARPA says it is close to announcing $60 million in contracts under a program to create a "high-fidelity" brain interface able to simultaneously record from one million neurons (the current record is about 200) and stimulate 100,000 at a time...

According to neuroscientists, several figures from the tech sector are currently scouring labs across the U.S. for technology that might fuse human and artificial intelligence. In addition to Johnson, Elon Musk has been teasing a project called "neural lace," which he said at a 2016 conference will lead to "symbiosis with machines." And Mark Zuckerberg declared in a 2015 Q&A that people will one day be able to share "full sensory and emotional experiences," not just photos. Facebook has been hiring neuroscientists for an undisclosed project at Building 8, its secretive hardware division.
Elon Musk complains that the current speeds for transferring signals from brains are "ridiculously slow".

Comments

Is the tech bubble official yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

People are investing in this? We barely have any idea how the human brain works, let alone linking it to something.

A time machine would be a better investment as far as magical fantasy pipe dreams go.

Re:Is the tech bubble official yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and for that investment to pay off. I could invest in unlocking human's ability to shoot laser beams from their eyes, and it would be a poor investment, even though we'd probably learn more about the human eye works.

This is a poor investment. The only reason tech billionaires are doing is because, like the rest of us, they must face their inevitable demise, and no amount of money will prevent it (unless they can upload their minds somewhere; this is their fantasy pipe dream, to be rich and powerful forever).

Re:Is the tech bubble official yet?

[drinkypoo]

The only reason tech billionaires are doing is because, like the rest of us, they must face their inevitable demise, and no amount of money will prevent it (unless they can upload their minds somewhere; this is their fantasy pipe dream, to be rich and powerful forever).

No amount of uploading your mind will produce an immortal "you". It will only produce a copy of you. This is irrespective of whether there is such thing as a soul. You can destroy the copy, but that's not literally "moving" your consciousness any more than copying the contents of a file and then unlinking it is literally "moving" the data. Maybe it's possible to do it by replacing your neurons "one at a time" (more or less) with nanites which have learned to behave like neurons. That would depend on whether there is or is not a soul. As far as I know, nobody has yet devised an experiment capable of determining whether consciousness actually lives in the brain, or whether the brain is a receiver for a consciousness which exists independently of the body. For what it's worth, I'd bet on it just being good old observable physics, but I'm also betting on the eventual answer being irrelevant to my existence in that it's not coming during my lifetime and "I'll find out" first.

Re:Is it better than heroin?

[Rei]

I couldn't give a rat's arse about "sharing sensory and emotional experiences". However, if by the time I die the state of the art can get to the point of:

1) Accurate ability to model of a full brain's worth of neurons;
2) The ability to read, from a human brain, each neuron's activation levels and connections (e.g. injecting bioluminescent proteins that respond to chemical factors inside the neurons, with numerous CCD sensors scattered throughout in the brain, each monitoring many thousands to millions of neurons),
3) The ability to trigger activation or apoptosis of neurons (aka photosensitive proteins for specific purposes, with said CCD devices also being able to project light signals to specific neurons) ... then going neuron by neuron, doing the following:

1) Simulating it
2) Replacing the signals it sends to its neighbors with the results of its simulation
3) Causing the now simulated neuron to commit apoptosis

* ....one by one until the whole brain is eliminated and all that exists is the simulation.... then I would be greatly appreciative ;)

If we're lucky it won't be necessary to model neurons individually. If one could determine what's going on just by studying ganglia - their inputs, outputs, average activity in various regards, perhaps broken down into subregions when dealing with large ones, etc - then would greatly simplify the task. Because you have ~85 billion neurons in the brain, but ganglia have a couple dozen to hundreds of thousands of neurons each.

Re:Here's how it plays:::

[Hognoxious]

The Guardian is full of commies who all want everyone to live in teepees and ride bikes everywhere.

Except themselves, of course. Because little Sophie-Malala might have asthma.