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Comment by T-A | Hacker News Reader

By now everybody probably realizes that Musk's "predictions" are on some kind of relativistic timescale related to Earth's frame by a factor O(10). In 2008, the Falcon Heavy was going to fly "in a couple of years"; with some luck, it will actually fly this summer.

Let's be optimistic and call it a factor 9/2 ~ 4. Using the same factor for Neuralink, it will have its first medical device out in 15 years and its first general consumer device in 30 years.

The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". I would be willing to bet that Neuralink is shooting for something which won't require that, along the lines of injectable "neural dust" or stents:

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n3/full/nbt.3428.html

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> The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure".

And that article seems to me like a direct response to an article in which Tim dedicated thousands of words trying to explain how intrusive the current methods of scanning the brains are in order to support the claim that Musk is planning on coming up with something little less intrusive than opening a skull.

In fact, here's a direct quote from the Wait But Why article:

> This is a major topic at Neuralink. I think the word “non-invasive” or “non-invasively” came out of someone’s mouth like 42 times in my discussions with the team.

I have a strong feeling that the author of this article had a strong feeling about the subject before reading the Wait But Why article and dismissed some of the claims because of his previous opinion. Otherwise, I have a difficulty believing that this was his opinion after spending a considerable amount of time actually consuming the article and its claims.

Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) == O(1)

True if you are wearing your mathematician's or computer scientist's hat. If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50". Context usually makes it obvious which one it is.

Heh, or perhaps we could say that it's simply a short hand colloquialism for "on the order of 10 years"? ;-) As somebody with physics and engineering degrees, as well as 20 years of CS experience, I'd very much enjoy it if we'd stop perpetuating the idea that nobody without a PhD in CS understands asymptotic complexity.

> If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50".

Ahgg, leave this poor notation alone. What has it ever done to you?

What has it ever done to you?

Expanding to "of order 10" in spoken language.

Man, I hope the engineers who design the bridges I use paid more attention in their math classes.

Mathematical notation is a language, and its abuse can be justified if it facilitates communication. Even professional mathematicians do so when writing papers: The audience is not an automated theorem prover, but other humans, and we don't throw syntax errors if we encounter an expression that does not conform to a narrow set of formal rules.

I am perplexed by the negativity. This has nothing to do with mathematics, it's about notational conventions. Only knowing about one of them does not make you better at taking limits.

If the objection is about context dependence, why is nobody going "Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) is the orthogonal group in ten dimensions".

>The one big objection I have to this article is the emphasis on how "opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure". I would be willing to bet that Neuralink is shooting for something which won't require that, along the lines of injectable "neural dust" or stents:

The stent is placed in a blood vessel resting on top of the cortex, this will never be able to give you the resolution required for what we would consider a neural lace.

If Neuralink could somehow make "neural dust" that crosses the blood brain barrier and transmits very local recordings then they might be on to something.

The dream scenario would be tiny robots that cross the BBB and keep going until they latch onto a neuron.

That won't help.

There are 100 billion neurons in the brain. Even if you decide on a low-bandwidth limited system, you're still looking at somewhere between 1 and 10 billion neurons.

The bandwidth is fairly low, but you still need to work out a way to address the individual dust units for both reading and writing. You have to be able to place them fairly accurately. And you also have to make them maintenance-free, or replaceable if they break.

None of this is even remotely possible today. It may be possible fifty to a hundred years from now, but by then some other technology may have appeared.

I'd guess this approach is going to seem impossibly crude - like trying to build an i7 core out of valves.

Your cortex contains "only" 20 billion. The mean firing rate of neurons is estimated to be between 1 and 10 Hz. If you wanted to monitor 10% of the cortex you would then need at to handle at most 20 giga events per second. Not so bad after all.

We knew how to build rockets, we don't have the slightest clue how to hack into the brain and interface with the information in it. I think your time estimate is going to be way off, but I hope it is right!

We have lots of ideas how to do that!

We're just not very good at it. But placing a more sensitive EEG inside the head and then using stimuli mapping to reverse enough of the signal-information map to read intentional output seems a fine research path.

(And we already know you can get some output woth that method.)

Placing a more sensitive EEG inside the head isn't anyone's definition of "non-invasive."

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