Difference between revisions of "Brain-Machine Interface"
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| − | Over the years of innovation and technology, there is a pattern that defines the relationship between humans and computers. Starting with the Difference Machine invented by Charles Babbage in 1822, this "computer" took up an entire room and hardly had any personal data | + | Over the years of innovation and technology, there is a pattern that defines the relationship between humans and computers. Starting with the Difference Machine invented by Charles Babbage in 1822, this "computer" took up an entire room, very much separate from its users and hardly had any personal data. The next big leap in design of computers was the original Macintosh created by Apple in the 80's. This was revolutionary in that it was a personal computer that could sit on your personal desk instead of being in a lab or a university library. Therefore It held more personal and private information of the user. The trend continues with laptops, to smartphones, and to wearable technology, which begins to gather biometric data such as heart rates and facial/retinal recognition. |
Revision as of 17:00, 13 March 2020
Brain-Machine Interface is a type of technology that establishes communication between the biological brain with an external device, allowing the user to interface with said devices using only neurological input. While this technology has made tremendous breakthroughs from cochlear implants to neuro-prosthetics, it also raises an array of ethical issues as these devices will gather data that is on a whole new level of intimacy of the user.
Contents
History
1924
A German neuroscientist, Hans Berger, discovers that the human brain gives off electrical signals. He successfully measured this electrical activity and observed different patterns in the electrical waves depending on what tasks the brain was carrying out
Background
The human brain consists of billions of neurons that are connected to one another via axon and dendrites. These neurons produces electrical signals that passes through other neurons to eventually control every voluntary action of the human body. BMI takes advantages of this by relaying the electrical signal from the neurons to an external machine which then interprets the signal.
Current Applications
Cochlear and retinal implants are pretty well known examples of BMI where the implant stimulates damaged or degenerated sensory organs with electrical signals to stimulate sounds or color. One prominent application of BMI technology is in neural prosthetics, which has revolutionized the field of prosthetics. Traditionally, patients who needed prosthetics for variety of reasons were unable to regain full range of movement and dexterity due to standard prosthetics being quite rigid and unsophisticated in possible movements. With neural prosthetics, the prosthetics are no longer just a hunk of material, instead it consists of hundreds of motors, actuators and sensors that allow wide range of motion in places such as the fingers as well as knees and ankles. On top of this biomechanics support, neural prothesis receives and interprets electrical motor signals from the brain, and carries out specific movements that would have happened with the original biological limbs. Due to this, it only takes matter of minutes for someone to get used to this brain to prosthetics communications before they can start moving their prosthetics naturally.
Big Tech and BMII
OpenAI's NeuraLink
One major player of this endeavor is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX among many other groundbreaking ventures. His latest venture OpenAI has announced in 2016 that they are working on building a brain-machine interface called Neuralink, which will bootstrap and augment the capabilities of our biological brain by taking advantage of the advancements we've made in AI. The motivation for this is to be able to compete with Artificial Intelligence, and to ensure we're equipped with enough brain(-machine) power to properly take advantage of AI, not get taken advantage by it. In Musk's own words, humanity has an information bandwidth problem. While computers are able to process and communicate information at every increasing rate, the human brain is limited by our biological infrastructure. In the time it takes our eyes to take in visual information and process it, a computer can process and parse magnitudes greater data. Not only that, it takes us even longer to communicate what we processed, whether that be through speech or typing away on a keyboard with our fingers. In the coming years, this gap of information processing ability will increase even faster, and its not hard to see a society where humans will be obsolete in almost all circumstances. NeuraLink's goal is to harness the capabilities of AI and directly augment our own abilities with it.
Another tech giant Facebook has also gotten their feet in the BMI world. They aim to create a non-invasive device that will allow you to type by just thinking about what you want to say. The team working on this claims this will allow people to type five times faster than the speed at which we type on the phone. It would also allow people who are paralyzed to communicate with ease. Facebook has also acquired a brain machine interface startup CTRL-labs for approximately a billion dollars to further bootstrap their BMI initiative. Considering the company already owns OculusVR, one of the largest platforms for virtual reality technology, Facebook's ability to integrate BMI technology into entertainment, as well as practical purposes is significant.
Ethical Concerns
Relationship between computers and its users
Over the years of innovation and technology, there is a pattern that defines the relationship between humans and computers. Starting with the Difference Machine invented by Charles Babbage in 1822, this "computer" took up an entire room, very much separate from its users and hardly had any personal data. The next big leap in design of computers was the original Macintosh created by Apple in the 80's. This was revolutionary in that it was a personal computer that could sit on your personal desk instead of being in a lab or a university library. Therefore It held more personal and private information of the user. The trend continues with laptops, to smartphones, and to wearable technology, which begins to gather biometric data such as heart rates and facial/retinal recognition.
