Brain Hacking Technology
There's been a lot of hype coming out of Silicon Valley in recent
months about technology that can meld the human brain with machines. But
how will this tech help society, and which companies are leading the
charge?
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made waves in March when he announced his latest venture, Neuralink,
which will design so-called brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
Initially, the BCIs will be used for medical research, but the ultimate
goal is to prevent humans from becoming obsolete, by enabling people to
merge with artificial intelligence.
While these may seem like lofty goals, Musk is not the only one who's
trying to bring humans closer to machines. Here are five companies that
have doubled down on hacking the brain. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]
Neuralink
According to Musk, the main barrier to human-machine cooperation is communication "bandwidth."
This means that using a touch screen or a keyboard is a slow way to
communicate with a computer. Musk's new venture aims to create a direct
"high-bandwidth" link between the human brain and machines.
What that system would actually look like is not entirely clear yet. Words like "neural lace" and "neural dust"
have been bandied about, but all that has really been revealed is a
business model. Neuralink has been registered as a medical research
company, and Musk said the firm will produce a product to help people
with severe brain injuries within four years.
This will lay the groundwork for developing BCIs for healthy people,
thus enabling humans to communicate by "consensual telepathy," which
could be ready within five years, Musk said. Some scientists,
particularly those in the neuroscience community, are skeptical of Musk's ambitious plans.
Facebook
Not to be outdone, just a few weeks after Musk launched Neuralink, Facebook announced that it is working on a way to let people type with their thoughts.
The goal is to build a device that would allow people to "type" up to
100 words per minute, according to Regina Dugan, head of the company's
secretive Building 8 research group. Dugan also suggested that the
device could work as a "brain mouse" for augmented reality (AR),
removing the need to track hand movements to control cursors, The Verge reported.
Facebook has also been light on the details of its plans. The company
has said it does not think implants are feasible in the long term, so
it's focusing on developing some kind of cap that could track brain
activity noninvasively, most likely using optical imaging.
But this technology doesn't exist yet. So, in the meantime, Facebook
said that, within two years, it plans to create a prototype medical
implant that would pave the way for future devices.
Kernel
Musk wasn't the first wealthy entrepreneur to dive into the
underdeveloped neurotechnology space. Last August, Bryan Johnson,
founder of the online payments company Braintree, invested $100 million
into the startup called Kernel.
The company's initial goal was to develop a chip that could record
memories and redeliver them to the brain, based on research by Theodore
Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of
Southern California. But six months later, the two parted ways due to
the long timescales involved, reported MIT Technology Review, and the company is now focusing on technology similar to Neuralink.
Kernel plans to build a flexible platform for recording and stimulating
neurons, with the goal of treating diseases such as depression and
Alzheimer's. But like Musk, Johnson is not afraid to discuss the
prospect of using the technology to augment human abilities and merge
with machines.
"There's this huge potential to co-evolve with our technology," Johnson told CNBC.
Emotiv
Unlike some other companies in this burgeoning industry, Emotiv
actually makes products — electroencephalography headsets that record
brain activity noninvasively.
The technology is lower fidelity than the kinds of neural implants
other companies, such as Neuralink, are considering, but it is more
established. The company has a research-grade device, called EPOC+,
which sells for $799. But it also produces a more consumer-oriented
headset, called Insight, which retails for $299.
Emotiv also produces a variety of software products that allow users to
visualize their brain activity in 3D; measure their brain fitness; and
even control drones, robots and video games, reported The Daily Dot. The company was selected to be part of the Disney Accelerator program in 2015, with the aim of creating a "wearable for the brain."
DARPA
Although it's not a company itself, the U.S. military's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a $60 million program last
year to develop an implantable neural interface in collaboration with a consortium of private companies.
The project, which is a part of former President Barack Obama's BRAIN
Initiative, is ambitious. DARPA wants a device that can record 1 million
neurons simultaneously and stimulate at least 100,000 neurons in the
brain. DARPA also wants the device to be wireless, the size of a nickel
and ready in four years, which is an incredibly aggressive deadline, according to MIT Technology Review.
Potential applications include compensating for sight or hearing
problems because the device could feed digital auditory or visual
information directly into the brain. The exact technological approach is
unclear at this stage, but the project has the heft of some major
engineering giants, such as Qualcomm, behind it, Quartz reported.