Hacker News Reader

Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I truly dislike this technology for my own personal reasons.

That aside, I think the problem you bring up is pretty much "solved" as the only thing that is missing are training sets. Pretty much like when Tesla just needed a bunch of driving footage to start improving its self-driving AI, and they got it.

The first Neuralinks (I believe) will be intended to gather as much data as possible in order to tackle this concrete issue. After that is going to be a quite vanilla "big data + ML" type of job.

It would be cool to see, if different people have different neuronal dynamics for the same sort of "activity". Who knows what it will be found. Regarding "the pig demo", we don't know for sure if they can do that to any pig wearing a neuralink (i.e. like installing software) or if the data/model was produced and meant to work on that particular pig only.

View on HN

> That aside, I think the problem you bring up is pretty much "solved" as the only thing that is missing are training sets. Pretty much like when Tesla just needed a bunch of driving footage to start improving its self-driving AI, and they got it.

That is absolutely not the case, and we are absurdly far from anything like it. We haven't even been able to decode very much useful information from the "brain" of a nematode yet, and there we don't care in the slightest about its health.

Self-driving is actually an interesting example (though it is likely many orders of magnitude simpler than interfacing with the higher functions of the neural system of, say, an insect). We are still much farther away from real self-driving with the skills of an average human driver (such as not hurtling into static obstacles on a road) than anyone was thinking a few years ago. In fact, the CEO of Waymo believes that we won't achieve full, all-condition self-driving in our lifetimes (though he does believe that we will achieve useful self-driving in common conditions).

Regarding the brain, we don't even know yet where the computation takes place yet - to what extent does it happen at the cellular level, and to what extent and the neural network level? Further, the electrical signals are unlikely to be the only important part - there are many chemical substances that impact our judgement and reasoning, so I don't see why we would assume that even capturing all of the electrical activity of the entire neural network would be enough to decode thought patterns.

>That is absolutely not the case, and we are absurdly far from anything like it. We haven't even been able to decode very much useful information from the "brain" of a nematode yet

Huh? What?! Have you actually watched the update?

They decode the position and movement of the limbs of a pig as it is walking, in real-time, with uncanny accuracy.

Yes, motor signals. This is not necessarily entirely new, we have been able to take simple readings of motor signals for years, this is 'just' pushing the frontier (not to say that it isn't a great accomplishment!).

Thought processes though are a completely different beast, and we have no realistic hope of interpreting them at this time. We wouldn't even know what to look for. We're missing much more fundamental research in how thought works in even simple animals before we could have the first hope of finding something in a brain. Even thought processes such as 'that direction is more promising for food'.

Oh, I see your point. Yeah, we are not even sure how consciousness emerges. But, for sure, some sort of crude i/o with someone's thoughts could be established, and not far away.

I'm not even talking about consciousness, just basic computation in neural networks. How does the very simplest animal decide whether to move left or right in the presence of a stimulus? Can we influence that thought, not at the sensory/motor level, but at the computational level?

These are unanswered problems in worms. They are unanswered even in single-celled organisms, or at least in colonies of single-celled organisms, such as slime mold.

So I don't believe that any kind of IO will be achievable in the next hundred years, beyond possibly interpreting motor functions, and perhaps providing simple sensory input.

Agreed, ML will be able to extract signals from this data, no question. The electrodes really are the limiting factor I think, because you're going to need millions placed all over the brain and deep inside too for a truly useful implant.

I don’t think that’s entirely true because brains are quite adaptable. In similar sorts of studies, humans managed to train themselves to use the electrodes to direct things. It may never be ‘perfect’, but I think you’d be surprised how much could be achieved using such a method.

>because you're going to need millions

For sure, increasing # of electrodes + bandwidth must be on the roadmap.

You may not need to go as deep and broad as you believe. Most processing happens on the cortex anyway, the interior (white matter) is pretty much interconnection. Also, the action of one neuron could trigger thousands of others in quite remote regions, so you could probably get a decent picture of what's happening without having to cover it all.

I was honestly quite impressed by "the pig demo", I wouldn't have guessed that would be possible with the current state of their tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com