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Comment by 781 | Hacker News Reader

Why are advances like this always presented as useful in a medical context?

It seems to me like some sort of fear of talking about commercial use cases - for example in this case the ability to talk in your mind with your phone, person-phone telepathy if you wish

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Because a slight increase in convenience to be able to talk to your phone subvocally is trivial compared to granting capability for vocal communication to someone who is incapable of regular speech. One is a slight improvement in convenience for an otherwise able person. The other is life-changing.

True, but many people weigh the convenience by the number of uses.

In that case, 0.0001 * 1 million >> 1.0 * 100

Are there really that many people willing to have electrodes implanted in their brain just to... type on their phone!?

Honestly, for a few thousand Euros, if it worked really well (and was a well supported product software wise, with open APIs) ... I might do it - And I do think that while it wouldn't be everyone, significantly many people willing to do it could be found.

Only on Hacker News could people's main concern about whether to have invasive surgery to put electrodes on the surface of the speech centres of the brain be ensuring the APIs of the software it transmits messages to are open!

Not right now, but imagine if the level of invasiveness/danger was on the same level as a birth control implant, or botox, or lasik. I've had surgery to remove drainage tubes from my eardrums just because they were being inconvenient. I'd rather put up with that in exchange for being able to do 150wpm hands-free.

What are you going to do with your hands while you are concentrating on your writing? They are going to be dangling there, useless for nothing except reflex actions like picking your nose or driving your car (!).

I already have attached devices that let me enter text faster than I can think it. I think the tech only gets interesting for the handy-capable when it goes beyond words, capturing images or sounds as you imagine them, and that is a long way of.

I might be holding my phone, I might just not be near a keyboard, I might be controlling a video game and use it for extra input...

And while I can type sentences pretty fast, sometimes I get bogged down with things like code and entering special characters and being able to subvocalize a single syllable to activate macros would be pretty nice. (Yes I know you could do that without a brain interface, but the point is that hands are limited.)

Edit: why does this comment get a downvote?

These use cases are all great for speech recognition, which is decades ahead of brain interfaces and less invasive (and just as quiet if you want by sub-vocalizing into a throat mike). Again, not particularly interesting to most of us but very interesting to people with various disabilities.

I'm looking forward to the day that a technology like this is safe or simple enough for widespread commercial use. I would be concerned about the safety of brain surgery, but lots of people get lasik which uses lasers to cut your eyes, which in my head is much scarier. Hopefully someday this could be a fairly routine procedure.

If this was consumer-grade technology, you wouldn't need to type on your phone, you could simply communicate with others directly like telepathy.

I think Star Trek II put it well, in that the needs of the many are not always more important than the needs of the few.

I think you mean Star Trek III: The Search for Spock? :)

You're right - I had mis-remembered it. The scene I was thinking of was the one near the end of Wrath of Khan where Spock and Kirk are discussing sacrifice, but that's not where the quote is from.

I'll blame it on the scene in II being so much more memorable. ;)

Selling subvocal control could fund the disability case. Finding users willing to pay to build the technology you want is very much in vogue.

It's where the money's at:

> This work was supported by grants from the NIH (DP2 OD008627 and U01 NS098971-01). E.F.C. is a New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator. This research was also supported by The William K. Bowes Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The New York Stem Cell Foundation and The Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation

(Acknowledgements section, p. 498.)

Another factor that no one has mentioned is that this approach seems to require invasive brain surgery. This is likely not a large risk for someone suffering from locked-in syndrome, but would be for someone who wants to improve their typing speed.

As such, most early use cases would be restricted to people with few alternatives, such as medical cases.

Per another comment [1]

"This technology uses an electrode array referred to as ECoG, which needs to be surgically placed on the surface of the brain. Current technology does not make it possible to have the signal quality from non-invasive methods."

[1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19742479

I predict that you'll see this deployable by nanobots within a decade.

Or with neural lace some time sooner...

"Musk defined the neuro lace as a "digital layer above the cortex" that would not necessarily imply extensive surgical insertion but ideally an implant through a vein or artery" well it is still pretty undefined. Essentially neural lace can be anything enabling this kind of communication.

I'd bet you 100USD that isn't true.

As other people have already said, it's where the grant money is. That's why many of the top "statistics" programs in the United States are really biostatistics programs - They get more funding and research opportunities and all of the benefits that come with those.

I think the study of cortical implants is interesting for this question because they touch the same questions basically.

Cortical implants basically form the opposite side by providing a direct interface between machines and the brain. They are already available and deployed in medical contexts. Why aren't they deployed in healthy people as well?

They have pretty cool advantages. With them, you can listen to music, etc. without being affected by outside noises (unless you want to). Imagine having a phone call in a noisy environment and you can actually hear stuff. Imagine your neighbours having a loud party but you can still sleep tight because you turned it into sleep mode where only fire alarms may disturb you. How many conflicts you could avoid!

However, cortical implants have heavy disadvantages: They give you worse hearing quality than normal hearing, they require surgery, and also need devices on the outside that are in contact with them. That's why they aren't useful for healthy humans yet. But maybe, with improvement, one day they will become.

Basically, the problems of this technology will be the same: worse quality, requirement for surgery, requirement for extra devices to carry around.

Do you mean cochlear implants?

Ohhh right yeah I meant cochlear ones. Sorry about that :)

In many cases there are multiple avenues for application, but this paper says the research was specifically funded by the National Institute of Health, which means the PR focus will be toward human health/disease.

> Why are advances like this always presented as useful in a medical context?

You don't think that people who have lost the ability to speak, e.g. from stroke would find it useful?

I believe it is about grants. If your research has medical implications, there may be more grants available.

Because commercial use requiring brain surgery is most likely not going to work

you can't get funding for these sorts of things unless you show medical context first. It may change- billionaires funding brain scanning companies are an exmaple, but even then they tend to work with quadriplegics.

If you cure a quadriplegic, then getting approval for the general public tends to be easy (it's an easy sell) but the other way around... not so much.

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