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Neuroscientists Weigh In On Elon Musk's Mysterious 'Neural Lace' Company (ieee.org)
the_newsbeagle writes: Elon Musk has set out to change the world with SpaceX's reusable rockets and Tesla's electric cars, and now he plans to change your brain. His new company, Neuralink, will reportedly build delicate brain implants called "neural lace" to help people with neuropsychiatric disorders and to give healthy people strange new mental abilities. But the news announcements about the company contained scant details about what kind of hardware Neuralink might actually build, and what engineering challenges the company will have to overcome in pursuit of miniaturized and safe brain implants. Here, five neuroscience experts describe those challenges, and give hints on what to expect from Musk's neural dust. One of the neuroscientists is Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of the Openwater startup, which is looking for ways to develop a noninvasive BCI for imaging and telepathy. Jepsen was also "an engineering executive at Facebook working on its Oculus virtual reality gear; before that she spent three years at Google X, running advanced projects on display technology," reports IEEE Spectrum. She says that Neuralink will likely face many medical hurdles, even if their process doesn't require splitting open patients' skulls. "The approach as I understand it (not much is published) involves implanting silicon particles (so called "neural lace") into the bloodstream. One concern is that implanting anything in the body can cause unintended consequences," says Jepsen. "For example, even red blood cells can clog capillaries in the brain when the red blood cells are made more stiff by diseases like malaria. This clogging can reduce or even cut off the flow of oxygen to the parts of the brain. Indeed, clogging of cerebral capillaries has been shown to be a major cause of Alzheimer's progression. Back to neural lace: One concern I would have is whether the silicon particles could lead to any clogging."
I assume he read about something like this in a scifi novel when he was a kid and now that he's rich he's throwing money at it
As a fan for the progression of technology I hail him as a hero for sacrificing his funds to make the world a better place. He deserves all the fame in the world. It's not like he's selfishly using his riches to be Batman, he's contributing his gobs of money for the betterment of Humanity.
What have you done to help your fellow man today, other than to post as an anonymous coward to belittle the selfless ambitions of a man using his billions for the greater good?
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
There's also nothing that says that this thing would need to be hardwired up in a certain way and if two were inverted, fuck it, it's gone. I assume there would be a training period in which the software (like electronic software) would learn what was hooked up to what.
For that matter, there's plenty of training and learning on the wetware side that could work.
Without real technical details, it's hard to say "This can't possibly work because of X thing that is already known." On top of that, Elon Musk is not known for proposing things that are going to run headfirst into problems one could identify just from a wiki page. I'd assume it's technically feasible.
Then there is the extreme danger of hacking, whether corporate or government or just the idiot kid down the street with the wrong software.
Really? You're going to poo-poo an awesome technology (again, assuming Musk hasn't just totally gone bonkers) based on "brain hacking?" After just saying "we really can't know where stuff will connect with the brain?" Some idiot kid down the street is going to know the wiring of your brain and the backdoors into it better than any neuroscientist does? Because neuroscientists don't know that level of detail. This won't be life-and-death stuff like breathing: your body does that on it's own.
If it had the potential to do something like "press here to cause a seizure," then Musk is going to have a hard time getting that to market or past his lawyers. He can't even get his car sold in some states, he's not going to railroad this thing despite obvious safety concerns. Again, he's not an idiot. If there were any chance of someone putting someone else to sleep with it, one would assume he would put that into the "Neat but stupid" idea pile.
Speaking of, I'm sure there are some fascinating but fatally flawed ideas that have come from Musk's team. They should publish a book of them.