Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The first productivity of cyberpunk: the revolution in brain-computer interface just in time for midnight snacks is coming too fast.

Musk revealed at the Neuralink communication meeting held in Silicon Valley:

The first brain-computer interface product

Named N1

Human testing can be started within six months at the earliest.

"We are working very hard to step up preparations for our first clinical trial," Mr Musk said lightly.

"most of our paperwork has been submitted to FDA. We estimate that in about six months, you will be able to see Neuralink on people's heads."

Neuralink's proposed N1 brain-computer interface (internal structure) Photo Source: Neuralink Banana Milkshake, Cyberpunk's first Productivity Conference, Silicon people have a core feeling:

Without the banana milkshake (banana smoothie), I'm afraid this brain-computer interface revolution would not have come so quickly.

Why would you say that?

As you may know, Neuralink has been experimenting with animals such as monkeys and pigs in the past. There are at least eight monkeys with names, and there are countless reservists without names.

But according to the regulations, Neuralink cannot force them to participate in the cooperation experiment.

What's more, Neuralink already knew a truth as early as the early days of the in vivo experiment: the melon that twists hard is not sweet. Let these monkeys do the experiment, even if they are a little forced, reluctantly, it will affect the effectiveness of the experiment.

So Neuralink developed a set of incentives for the principle of "voluntary participation":

As long as you do the experiment, there is an unlimited supply of banana milkshakes!

Photo Source: Neuralink specifically, like conditioned reflexes, Neuralink breeders helped design a reinforcement mechanism: every time the monkey participated in the current experiment and completed an operation, they got a banana milkshake.

In this way, the more you do the experiment, the better you drink. Over time, a feedback mechanism of stimulus enhancement is formed.

As you can see in the picture below, these monkeys are doing experiments while sucking drinks from the tube in front of them.

It can be said to be: do experiments happily, drink milkshakes happily...

This feedback mechanism has played a very important role in the research and development of Neuralink in the past two years.

First, let's take a look at the following brain-controlled cursor experiment:

Photo Source: Neuralink (although it seems that monkeys can type, but not so, how can monkeys understand English? )

The experimental staff have already designed what the next key should be pressed, and it will be marked in a conspicuous yellow way on the virtual keyboard of MacBook in front of the monkey.

Under the action of the incentive mechanism, as long as the monkey "moves" to the next button through the mind-controlled cursor and sends a "press" signal, sweet and delicious banana milkshakes will flow out of the tube.

Driven by the desire for dessert, the monkey typed such a sentence: have some night snacks (can i please have snacks).

Source: Neuralink, but Neuralink is not satisfied with letting monkeys type with the cursor. After all, one of its phased goals is to enable people to control common electronic devices, including mobile phones, through brain-computer signals.

So the company's army of monkeys, driven by banana milkshakes, is doing all kinds of training, including not limited to:

Click and drag

Sliding input

to write

Gesture recognition

Wait a minute...

Source: Neuralink, take handwriting as an example:

"at first it was a virtual keyboard. Now we can directly use the brain-computer interface to read the signal, combined with the graphics in the picture, and the trained signal patterns to accurately judge what the monkey is writing on the screen," said an Neuralink technology expert.

If it goes on like this, I'm afraid monkeys will really have to "learn" to write and spell.

In addition, the banana milkshake can also stimulate the monkey to recharge the brain-computer interface!

This is simply for the Neuralink staff, saving a lot of trouble.

The specific mechanism is designed as follows:

They turned a tree into a "milk tea shop" and put the charging board in the decorative branches:

Photo Source: Neuralink, as long as the monkey wants a banana milkshake, he will run over and suck the tube.

As a result, it will aim its head right at the charging board and recharge while drinking a drink.

This design, the brain circuit is really very interesting!

Photo source: the speeches made by the guests at the Neuralink conference generally give the Silicon people an impression, that is:

We encountered a technical problem in the experiment. → thought of a lot of ways to solve →, but in the end, it had to be bananas, →, bananas, it really worked!

Did not expect to achieve cyberpunk, banana milkshake has become the first productivity.

Looking forward to Neuralink to diversify its products and launch its own brand of banana milkshake. )

Source: Concord Food from banana milkshakes to the plasticity of monkey brains, of course, in addition to bananas, Neuralink is also using more "serious" and "high-tech" stimuli to train more powerful monkeys so that they can better train Neuralink to develop the various signal decoders, algorithm models, testing tools and so on needed to develop the next generation of brain-computer interface products.

In the following example, Neuralink takes advantage of more complex stimulus methods.

The company has two phased goals, one of which has just been mentioned, that is, to help (paralyzed) people gain motor function.

Another phased goal is the visual body: to help the visually impaired who have been living in the dark regain their light by means of external devices and brain-computer interfaces.

For the vast majority of visually impaired people, the problem lies in the eyeball, and their optic nerve, the visual cortex in the brain, is likely to still be intact. So Neuralink hopes to be able to use the brain-computer interface, through external sensors (cameras) to send signals directly to the visual cortex, so that the blind can regain light. To achieve this goal, Neuralink opened the skull in the monkey's visual cortex and installed a brain-computer interface.

Photo Source: Neuralink, however, this time the work is more complicated: instead of reading the simple logic of brain signals and controlling peripherals, it is completely reversed, and the visual content obtained from the outside is compiled into primitive brain nerve signals and transmitted back to the brain.

Monkeys are not human, and there is no way to tell the experimenters what they saw or did not see or what they saw. As a result, Neuralink designed a new stimulus mechanism (inverse correlation reverse correlation, a common method in neuroscience):

Photo source: Neuralink1) artificial intervention signals inputted by brain-computer interface to stimulate monkeys' eyeball movement

2) using an external eye tracking device to verify whether the actual eye movement vector is consistent with the artificial signal.

3) when the results match, use a banana milkshake for motivation.

As shown in the following figure: the green line represents the moving path of the eyeball, and the flashing white dots serve as a control. You will see that the monkey's eyeball suddenly moves toward a position where there is no white spot, precisely because a signal of human intervention is received through the brain-computer interface.

At first, the degree of correspondence between the eye movement vector and the artificial signal is not high.

Interestingly, however, as the test time became longer and the number of tests increased, the monkeys became more skilled and more consistent.

Image source: Neuralink brain refers to a kind of plastic tissue, that is, synapses and connections between neurons in the brain can establish new connections due to the influence of learning and experience, thus affecting individual behavior.

The Neuralink team is pinning its hopes on this plasticity by constantly training monkeys to acquire a non-native low-dimensional vision with the help of external signals.

If the application scale of this technology is further expanded, the complexity of the signal becomes higher, upgrading from a single vector to lines, surfaces, shapes, colors, and further increasing the number of pixels.

That way, won't it be possible for those who are blind to regain their vision?

The idea is great and the prospect is optimistic. However, there are still many challenges, and there are still many technical barriers to cross.

Neuralink provides a simulation diagram. It shows the vision that can be obtained roughly in the near future through the visual ontology technology of the Neuralink brain-computer interface (note that this is not a real picture, just a simulation).

In an ideal visual body kit, the image is obtained by a camera installed at the height of the eye, passed into the mobile phone for signal processing, and then transmitted to the visual cortex of the brain through the brain-computer interface.

Photo Source: Neuralink, this reminds me of Cyber punk 2077. In the game, one of the first two cyberware that the protagonist gets is Kiroshi Optics. With it, the protagonist gains the ability to scan electronic devices and hack them on the basis of normal vision.

Photo Source: TriggerStudio / CD PROJEKT RED / Netflix returns to the real world, and the visual ontology is not as cool as it is in the game yet.

A biotech writer at the MIT Technology Review wrote that

"Musk claims that the body can 'restore' vision-perhaps in the long future. The vision that can be produced through the body is not the vision that you and I have. It is more like a spot of light, and may be able to combine to form a simple display effect, like the old-fashioned light bulb scoreboard."

Source: @ antonioregalado

Photo Source: even so, MERIT is still a significant technical mission to bring light back to the blind.

Of course, cyber punk, as a kind of cultural inspiration for all kinds of literary works, also sounded the alarm for the future where human beings rely too much on science and technology. While the brain-computer interface revolution brought about by Neuralink is exciting, many of its risks are not to be underestimated.

Over the past year, Neuralink has also stepped up efforts to improve technical security and, more importantly, to ensure the safety of users. The company's efforts include:

Alternative techniques for human brain tissue have been developed for testing in a laboratory environment, such as electrode testing of cortical cells grown in petri dishes (below).

"the ultimate goal is to reduce or even completely eliminate the need for live animals and clinical trials in future product development and testing," said an Neuralink expert.

Image source: Neuralink developed a robotic surgery technique that does not need to be created on the meninges (dura) and implants electrodes directly outside the meninges (creating on the meninges will lead to the formation of a large number of tissues in the recovery process, covering the interface equipment, easy to cause hidden danger of infection, and very inconvenient for later equipment maintenance.)

Source: Neuralink regards upward compatibility (scalable upgradability) as one of the core principles of technology research and development. Like the previous one, making a coin-sized opening in the skull, even if you try to control the wound, will still face tissue problems caused by late healing, which will make it very difficult to remove the device at a later stage. It is difficult to upgrade the hardware, so the hardware must maximize the ability to upgrade the software.

"after all, no one wants to change the computer interface like an iPhone every year, and the best thing is to get it in one step," Musk said.

In the real world, the first fire of this cyber punk revolution seems to have been lit.

Maybe the future Neuralink will be able to become a cyber technology giant like Arasaka.

I laughed because Elon Musk sent a meme directly to my anterior cranial cortex through NeuraLink. ™. Oh, my God, this is great. I blinked twice, praised it with NeuraLike ™, and thought very seriously, "Thank you, sir! please send Bitcoin." I opened my eyes and suddenly found that it was already dark and I was choking a man.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Silicon Man (ID:guixingren123). Article: du Chen, Editor: VickyXiao

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