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There's a huge bandwidth bottleneck on both input and output sides. Your imagination of what a neural lace would do is too limited. It wouldn't be 3d, it wouldn't be auditory.

It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life.

It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart.

It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet.

It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living 1000km is in your field of view.

It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal sense.

It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware of your long term goals and your progress towards them.

It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and instantly know the layout of their codebase.

If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.

All this speculation ignores the fact that we don't have a practical theory of how the mind works, an therefore no way to know what, specifically, would need to be done to produce a specific outcome. For example, Lieber talks about the development of 3D transistors, so they can be implanted in neurons, but he does say what they would do once there.

To be fair, pharmacology, in its application to mental issues, is at about the same level, but it is also struggling to demonstrate unambiguous successes. As research tools, these devices are great, but it is premature to suggest that we have a technology that is going to change the way we think.

But that's the point of basic research, no?

Minds are things that function in a physical universe. At some point in the future there will be a description of function, followed by a plan for modification or augmentation of existing minds, as well as bottom up design of new minds.

All minds are matter performing some computation. Molecules move around and change in time. In concert with this physical process, subjective experience takes place. There will come a time when physical systems are designed with the goal of creating a particular form of subjective experience.

> Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.

The point is that you need some way of interfacing. A fast bus doesn't do me any good if I don't have drivers and then interfaces to interact with the thing on the other end of that bus.

I mean, yes, ideally we'd have some kind of thought-based interface... but you've gotta design that, too.

I think the solution might even turn out to be something like build-it-and-the-drivers-will-come. Neuroplasticity is enormous. There are reports about a conjoined twin pair in Canada that supposedly can "think inside the others head" (they're connected at the head!).

Agree absolutely, a step toward new research related to "drivers". I think it will be interesting how age might affect early usage of such a neural lace. Perhaps a link operated from a young age (even birth) will operate better as the baby's other "drivers" (for the usual IO operations like sight and hearing) havn't developed as much. Also for AI-safety it is important to begin interfacing between between digital and neural as early as possible.

>Also for AI-safety it is important to begin interfacing between between digital and neural as early as possible.

I see no evidence that we're going to get anything like machine consciousness in the near future. Moore's law was going to get it for us, but... that isn't looking so clear anymore. Sure, machines can do more and more tasks that used to be human-only... but there's not a clear path from that to consciousness.

On the other hand, speculative brain surgery is super dangerous, and shouldn't be done to people who are too young to give informed consent.

All that said, I'd personally be willing to take some significant risk myself, if it gave me a credible chance at a useful neural interface. But I'm an adult; I think it would be ridiculously unethical to make that decision for an infant. Even as an adult, I would personally need a lot more education than I currently have to decide what was 'credible' at this point.

The bandwidth of your memory is substantially higher than reading, though, is the point.

sure, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great. but my point is that you still need an interface, and my understanding is that we're pretty far away from building an interface that feels like it's just your memory. I mean, it'd be great, sure, if you could do it... but that's an interface that needs to be designed, and it's an interface that we, as humans have no idea how to design.

How would you record a memory? how would you replay that memory? how would you index the memory?

I mean, sure, the idea is to emulate how the brain works now... but how does the brain work now? I don't think we really have a very clear idea on that level.

I agree with your point, and that probably has to be a more long-term milestone that has to be achieved for it to work well and integrate seamlessly.

I think the short-term idea is to use the extreme adaptability of the human brain to reprogram itself to send and receive data from external machines. There are already prototypes of robotic arms that are not only controlled via a brain interface, but also give sensory feedback via it.

A practical way to imagine the use here would be snapshotting your short term memory state.

Rather then trying to remember where your keys are you just load the last few snapshots until suddenly it's fresh in your mind that you want to remember where your keys are.

In short, it'd be magic.

Violation of conservation laws would be magic. It is an intricate information processing.

Just a hint: there's two letters in IO - Input and Output.

If I imagine a complex animated 3D shape in my head, I have like really no easy way to "pull it out" and share it to anyone else. Besides spending up to ~1 week sketching/drawing it in either Autocad or Blender/Maya. The out part is the problem, this is where we have a bottleneck.

> iPad [...] it’s capable of beaming far more of all three to you than it does. And it’s capable of taking in far more input than you generally use. It can do 10 finger multitouch, plus sound recording. Newer devices will have full body tracking

Really? You think tapping a screen or moving our bodies is a good way to output data?! There's already a huuuuuuuuuge botlenect between my body and my brain. I don't want to force my interaction with a computing device to go through this bottleneck too. Fuck my slow ass annoyingly useless body, I want something that can read with at least a few megapixels per second from the part of my brain that's doing the visual thinking.

Even language is a huuuuge ass bottleneck. If you're someone thinking visually like me, you sometimes just give up sharing an idea when you're like "man, I'd need to write a 500 page novel to put it into words".

I wish Elon the best luck in the work developing any kind of interface that could help us bypass either the "language bottleneck" or even better, the "body bottleneck" (because language is still about using part of your body - the vocal cords). I'm passionate about UI/X design myself, but I've never taken it professionally because I find it pointless: only real way to improve an interface is to (1) improve the "business-logic data model" and (2) increase bandwith by nuking the entire interface away and letting people interact with the "core data" itself. This is what Git and Emacs org-mode have at their core: the result is amazing UX, horrible UI and "just kill yourself"-hard learning curves... but if I can get the first one, I can put up with the second two until I can afford to hire an army of UI and learnability experts later. Excell/spreasheets are another such exemples of letting people "touch the data" and forgetting about anything else.

With input bandwidth I agree with you. But output bandwidth is another matter. Currently we use keyboard, mouse, stylus, and touch panels.

We're already seeing some changes here with the new VR sculpting movement, but for output a direct brain interface would drastically increase our output bandwidth.

No UI on an iPad could allow me to input some things as fast as the split second it takes me to imagine them (think structures and scenes)

You're assuming the status quo of input and then suggesting that it is a given, and thus any technology will in the end by identical to the status quo.

Let's consider chess for a minute. When a strong player looks at a chess position they see something very different than what a casual player sees and, in fact, they actually use different parts of their brain. They will be able to see ideas and concepts in a fraction of a second that a casual player could spend hours searching for, and failing to find. Yet paradoxically, show these ideas to the weaker player and they'll understand them easily - it's not magical.

I find chess a good example since most people are not very good, but do know how to play so they can understand the analog from the amateur side easily. But you can also see things from the side of the 'master' in language. Look at your post. It's made up of 1,499 characters and hundreds of different combinations of these characters. Yet I'm able to parse it very little time and you wrote it with no significant effort. Think about the immense amount of processing that's going on there, without ever really realizing it.

So I see no reason to believe that this sort of invisible processing need be limited. Is there any reason I can't consume the entirety of e.g. Wikipedia or the entire catalog of astrophyics journals? Even going full Neo, the difference between a master jiujitsu practitioner and somebody who's never done it at all is almost entirely in the brain. Why can't that information be consumed in direct fashion? It doesn't really seem all that much more spectacular than consuming the entirety of dictionaries and the countless nuanced exceptions and rules of construction between those words, or somehow being able to instantaneously grasp, to at least a very good degree, a practically infinite variety of chess positions.

I also remain cynical on the neural lace, but because I think it's reach far exceeds its grasp. I think to really make progress you would effectively need to begin breaking down the man-machine interface in ways beyond clever signal correlation, and we haven't even scratched the surface there. By analog it'd be like trying to become a fluent speaker, without accent, in Ancient Egyptian by studying hieroglyphics.