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Having hundreds of needles injected into your brain may sound more like a torture than a treatment but the potential of Brain-Machine Interface technology has Silicon Valley excited.

Source : PortMac.News | Street :

Source : PortMac.News | Street | News Story:

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Brain-Machine potential excites Silicon Valley investors
Having hundreds of needles injected into your brain may sound more like a torture than a treatment but the potential of Brain-Machine Interface technology has Silicon Valley excited.

News Story Summary:

The process is already allowing some patients with severe paralysis to control a robotic arm by thought alone.

Brain-Machine Interface technology (BMI) is a field of science that's small and relatively new, but it has Silicon Valley brimming with excitement.

Big tech is investing millions in the sector with the hope of creating a future where thought-controlled technology is everywhere, one where typing and texting are no longer necessary.

But ethicists worry about a very different scenario — a future where consumers become cyborgs and being free gives way to capitalist enslavement.

No shortage of ambition

BMI's most influential advocate is Elon Musk, who aims to achieve what he calls a "sort of symbiosis" between humans and artificial intelligence.

"With a high-bandwidth brain–machine interface, I think we can actually go along for the ride," he told a conference of his admirers in late 2019.

"We can effectively have the option of merging with AI."

Mr Musk's research company Neuralink claims to have developed a surgical robot capable of inserting an array of up 1,000 electrodes into a person's brain with pin-point accuracy.

Neuralink unveiled the machine at a press event late last year, but the company is remaining tight-lipped about the finer details of its work.

Despite the secrecy, UK-based neuroscientist Andrew Jackson says the device has enormous potential.

"At the moment, the state-of-the-art is about 100 electrodes," he tells RN's Future Tense.

"What Neuralink has done is increased that by an order of magnitude, and these are flexible individual wires that can be put in different parts of the brain."

And if electrodes no longer need to be inserted by hand, says Professor Jackson, the surgery will be "safer and speedier".

"The robot can do things like identify where blood vessels are and so it will avoid damaging blood vessels during the surgery," he says.

A very long road ahead

Only about 20 or so people have had a BMI device implanted into their brains.

Professor Jackson says the treatment has been targeted at people with major paralytic disabilities, but he concedes the experimentation, so far, has been small-scale.

"They have been able to control the movement of a robot arm in three dimensions and also control grasping of that robot arm, so that would assist with activities of daily living," he says.

Researchers have also demonstrated how a BMI could help patients regain control of paralysed limbs, by thought-controlling a device that delivers electrical stimulation to the muscles of the limb.

The first recipient of a BMI device was Nathan Copeland, a US man who broke his neck in a car accident and is now a C5 quadriplegic, with no sensation from the chest down.

Mr Copeland has four arrays — two in his sensory cortex and two in his motor cortex. He visits a BMI lab three or four times a week to undertake experiments.

He says the implants have allowed him to use his thoughts alone to operate certain devices.

"Basically, they can just record my brain signals and convert them into things that the computer can use to control other things," he says.

"I can control a robotic arm and hand or a computer cursor or I've played some games that use a computer emulator."

But while his BMI has given him greater confidence, and he's been proud to be a "human guinea pig", Mr Copeland says his daily life hasn't changed in any substantive way.

Jennifer Collinger, an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh, is all too aware of the technology's current limits.

"There's tens of millions of neurons that are active in the brain at any one time, and our technology really only allows us access to hundreds of those at a time, so we are really under-sampling what's naturally happening," she says.

She says there's a misconception that scientists can simply place electrodes anywhere in the brain and immediately begin decoding people's thought signals.

"What we really need to do is target areas where we have at least some understanding of what the cells in that particular area of the brain are doing."

Once that understanding is established, she says, a computer then records brain activity while the patient thinks about performing a certain action — for instance, moving a robotic arm — the computer then correlates that brain activity with the task and moves the prosthesis every time it detects that signal in future.

Dr Collinger says other research teams are working on attempts to decode brain signals related to speech. But Professor Jackson says our knowledge of how the brain represents ideas is much poorer than our understanding of how it performs direct action tasks.

"When we go further into the more cognitive domain of things like memories or decisions or emotions, that is all very much at the edge of what neuroscience is currently trying to understand," he says.

Hands-free, voice-free social media

One research team focused on decoding the brain's signals around speech is based at the University of California, San Francisco, and works in partnership with Facebook.

Like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg sees the future of BMI as more than medical.

"Facebook wants to create a device that can literally read your mind," VOX Media tech writer Sigal Samuel says.

She says the Facebook approach involves experiments with non-invasive BMI devices, such as a cap studded with electrodes.

"It has been funding research on BMIs that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words, into English sentences," she says.

Recently, she says, the University of California researchers who are in partnership with Facebook announced their algorithm could translate neural activity into English sentences, with an error rate of only 3 per cent for vocabularies of 300 words.

Like Neuralink, Facebook has kept most of its work "under wraps", Samuel says. But there's no mistaking Mr Zuckerberg's long-term intentions.

"They want to reach a much, much wider audience of billions of people, and that aim is to give everyone the ability to control digital devices, using the power of our thoughts alone," she says.

"Facebook has said, 'Look, we know that we can't really foresee and anticipate all the neuro-ethical risks we are incurring here, that's why we are trying to talk to neuro-ethicists and build neuro-ethical design in from the ground floor.'"

But at the end of the day, she points out, Facebook, like all companies, is primarily focused on its bottom line, on making profit.

Cyborg or zombie?

For neurolaw researcher Nicole Vincent the involvement of big tech raises more than just abstract ethical concerns. There are also serious legal considerations to take into account.

If corporations and governments develop the ability to accurately read people's thoughts, she says, what happens to the legal right to remain silent?

"In this particular case, how should we treat neuro-based evidence? Should it be treated like normal physical evidence at the scene of a crime? So, the distinction gets blurred," she says.

Dr Vincent also foresees potential for discrimination and a drive toward enforced conformity.

If thought analysis is eventually used to find correlations between certain types of people, she says, those correlations might then be used to try and predetermine criminality or mental illness.

"A lot of the ethical considerations stem from the way in which our society may be altered," she says.

"This raises questions about free will, about moral responsibility — is it only the case that somebody can be a morally responsible person when their brain functions as we want it to function?"

And she worries that if BMI-based technology ever becomes a primary means of communication, humans may become dangerously dependent on the tech titans and their machines.

Story By | Antony Funnell


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