NEURALINK PROGRESS UPDATE | Key points + thoughts

there's more complicating this but it's in a lot of ways it's kind of like a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires i guess that was the most quoted thing from the whole neural link update which was streamed a couple of days ago and after watching the full stream i selected a couple of clips which explain what the link their device is all about and i just wanted to share those with you and cut the hour long stream into like a 10 minute video maybe discuss them a bit and how they could be possibly used in the future current prototype version 0.9 has about a thousand channels so that's about 100 times better than the the next best um consumer device that's available and it's a 23 millimeters by eight millimeters it actually uh fits quite nicely in your skull because your skull is about 10 millimeters thick so uh it fits it goes flush with your skull it's invisible and all you can see afterwards is there's a tiny scar and if it's under your hair you can't see it at all in fact i could have a neural link right now and you wouldn't know maybe i do so and it's also got all the things that you would expect to see the sensors you'd expect to see in a smart watch or a phone like uh notional measurement temperature pressure so there's actually a lot of functions that this device could do related to monitoring your health and warning you about a possible heart attack or stroke or other uh damage as well as sort of convenience features like playing music um you can do a lot it's sort of like if your phone went at your brain or something um yeah maybe that's not a great analogy right so it's also inductively charged so well for one it's great that it's inductively charged because you wouldn't want to stick a wire up in your head or take the device each night to charge it but getting to the main specs of the device i think all of those i just made in line with thinking what we wanted to achieve so let's just start from the bottom all day battery life well you don't really want to charge it twice a day because well you have to do stuff and the thing is in your head you can't really take it out uh the megabit wireless data rates you want to monitor the neuron activity real time 24 7 so that's a must uh temperature pressure well that at least explains the fitbit bit in the beginning a fitbit in your skull with tiny wires flush with skull and the size are pretty much the same thing because i think the size is selected by the measurements of the skull so it would be flush with it and the number of channels is if i'm correct 10 times bigger than the next in their competition what's currently available in the market well not really consumer market but still there's a market i think the specs are just derived from the ideas and aims of the neural link itself so knowing those uh what we should check out now is well how does one get a neural link and spoiler it's by a robot which you will see in the background so in terms of getting a link like i said it's essentially you open a piece of sculpt you remove about a coin size piece of skull and then the robot inserts the electrodes we'll talk more about that later then the device replaces the portion of skull that was removed and we basically closed that up with actually a super glue which is how a lot of wounds are closed and then you can just walk around right after right afterwards it's pretty cool so this is our surgical robot and we actually ultimately want this robot to do uh essentially the entire surgery so in everything from from incision uh removing the skull inserting the electrodes placing the device and then closing things up and having you ready to leave so we want to have a fully automated system and we've to clear this this robot does actually work we've used it for uh all of the implantations um so this shows you um a sort of close-up view which i think is actually not too gruesome of the electrodes being inserted in the brain and if you look closely you'll see that um it's a little counterintuitive that if the electrodes are inserted very carefully that there is no bleeding and so the uh if you have very tiny electrodes and if they're inserted very carefully so the robot actually images the brain and makes sure to avoid any veins or arteries so that the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage so you will have no noticeable neural damage in inserting the link neuralink is trying to make the surgery as simple as possible and as automated as possible with the help of a robot and they provide a couple of arguments why we want to use the robot and the main one is the precision of inserting the electrodes into the brain i don't really understand nothing about surgery or the brain itself to the matter of fact but all i can understand is that you just go into the hospital you have this automated surgery by robots for like two hours each time the surgery is the same for each person so it's easier to trust it it's easier to go and do it and i myself if i would get that fitbit for my skull i would actually much more trust a robot than any random surgeon not saying that surgeons are not precise but uh the robots will be the same so like 10 000 people go have the surgery and it's fine most likely i'll be fine as well so yeah now regarding the testing of the device we actually test it on pigs at the moment and they show off a couple of pigs some of them have the neural link some of them had it but now have it removed and there's one pig which has like two neural links well i'll walk right over and show you so what we have in pen number one is joyce uh and she does not have an implant obviously healthy and happy um we're trying to get go through it out and this is how you know it's a live demo she's a little she's like trying to eat something in the corner of her pan um come on gertrude snacks are this way oh man all right we'll we'll wait we'll give groceries a second and we'll move on to dorothy sometimes the pigs are a little shy so here's dorothy and in the case of dorothy um dorothy used to have an implant and then we removed the implant so this is a very important thing to demonstrate is reversibility so if you if you have a neural link and then you decide you don't want it or you want to get an upgrade and the neural link is removed is it removed in such a way that you're still healthy and happy afterwards and what dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the neural link remove it and be healthy happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig well thanks dorothy man gertrude are you serious okay this is a high energy pig um all right thanks for coming out um so what you're the beeps you're hearing are real-time signals from the neural link in gotri's head so this neural link connects to neurons that are uh in her snout so whenever she snuffles around and touches something with a snout but that sends out uh neural spikes which are detected here um and so on the screen you can see uh each each of the spikes from the 1024 electrodes and and then if you if she yeah she shuffles around touches this knot in the ground or you kind of feed her some food pigs love food then you can see the neurons um will fire much more than when you're not touching this now and that's what's making the beeping sound all right cool so as you can see we have a healthy and happy pig initially shy but obviously high energy and and uh you know kind of loving life and she's had the implant for two months so this is a healthy and happy pig with an implant that is two months old two months old and working well yeah so at this point uh elon just goes on talking about pigs well more about them but essentially what they are trying to show is but whenever gertrude's snout touches anything we can catch that as a spike of neuron activity and say yeah the snout touch something and might seem funny at first but when you think about it our bodies is like our body is like a network of sensors and if we touch even ourselves at one point or another we feel that sensation and it's really hard to measure it without wearing a costume or anything like that and the thing is that this link device can actually sends that there's a lot of decoding and algorithms that have to be done for that to actually work properly but the thing is that we have the ability to do those and this is where the whole discussion begins like what's the extent of the measurements that we can do with a device like that on a consumer scale let's say everyone owns a cell phone gets a link in 10 years and what kind of applications we could develop for that uh and for data scientists well what could we predict and talking about the predictions uh we actually didn't only show the snout thing but we moved on and tried to track the movement of the pig based on the signals we are getting in the brain from the newer neurons and yeah i'm just gonna show you that now in terms of additional brain reading activity when we have say one of our pigs on a treadmill we're going to treadmill it's very funny concept really and we uh take the readings from the neurons and we try to predict the position position of the joints um and so we say we have the predicted position of the joints and then we we measure the actual position of the joints you can see that they're almost exactly aligned so we're able with a wireless neural neural implant to actually predict the position of of all of the limbs uh in the pig's body with very high accuracy so this here is uh one of the most amazing things that i saw during the update that was streamed a couple of days ago and that is that they actually can predict the movement of joints just based on the neuron activity that we are tracking within the brain so you don't need to have any sensors on separate joints you don't need a camera to track that well you need to make the algorithms at least i guess so but afterwards you can just have a sensor in your brain and that predicts everything within your body your joint movement what are you touching is it hot or cold and that is quite amazing personally to me just because of the variety of possibilities that this opens up in our ability to track data of humans and track physical data maybe even mental data maybe you could even you know send a mental image telepathically to your friend via the link and the main thing why i'm so excited about it is that maybe just maybe i don't really know this will become a consumer product in some like 10 years from now and then we'll have all that data at least i hope so in some form or another and we will be able to do applications for that maybe track the movement of humans maybe stimulate drugs and that goes into the direction of ethical questions already so what about security what about security of the mind like i get the data protection from what you browse online with to vpn but what about your thoughts is that possible to read it might sound silly at this point but my guess that with version two three or four maybe even ten uh you'll be able just to send the mental image that you have in your brain to your friend via the link and that will be the new normal so yeah uh i think i'll finish my video pretty much with this just a small clip from the q a that we had after the presentation so this is the clip and it basically discuss the aim of their upcoming human trials what they want to tackle first so our first clinical trial is aimed at people with paraplegia or tetraplegia so cervical spinal cord injury we're going to enroll we're planning to enroll a small number of patients uh to make sure the device is safe and that it works in that case uh yeah so actually just to elaborate on that um if somebody is um like a severe spinal cord injury uh you know to agree that they they even they have um very limited control even over their facial muscles uh then uh but with with this implant you can actually uh think just just by thinking you can output words and you can you can type and you can control a computer control a phone and which is pretty pretty wild and i think something that's very exciting as a long-term application is if you can if you can sense what somebody's trying to do with their limbs what they want to do with their limbs then you can actually do a second implant that's at the base of the spine or wherever just after wherever the spinal injury occurred and you can you can create a neural shunt so we i i think long term i'm confident that long term uh it will be possible to restore somebody's full body motion so if somebody even has a severed spine they will be able to walk again they will be able to use their hands um and like when you have a severed spinal cord you essentially have broken broken wires um and so if you can just jump over those wires and transmit the single signals over those wires you can give somebody the ability to walk again naturally so yeah their main aim now is to try and tackle those people and try to help them and as i said it's just amazing the variety of possibilities that this could bring to us as a race in the whole like we could just have a direct api from our brain to the computer and computer could have the same with our brain just check on us if we are healthy if everything is all right if we are having a stroke in five minutes and yeah if you would google around neural link and their progress update you might see quite a bit of criticism but what i mainly think is and and there's like more startups kickstarter that actually try to do the same and i think it's great just this thing is uh most followed in my opinion so this is why i'm sharing this one but the main thing to take away from this is that a brain chip a fitbit in your skull with wires is being brought to the consumer market which which is a bigger revolution than the mobile phone or the internet itself was because like if now you think we are connected then wait wait till we have this and i think that's with what i'll end my [Music] video

Channel: adam0ling

Views: 60

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: elon musk, artificial intelligence, what is neuralink, neuralink, neurolink, fitbit, link, cyborg, tesla, spacex, brain, human interface, brain machine interface, neuralink demo, neuralink explained

Id: sIM5RFBphh4

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020