Neuralink

While the previous update from Neuralink had received mixed and mostly lukewarm reviews, the recent one, showing Pager playing MindPong, has been a blast. Both discuss the same device but the latter shows the incredibly convincing result of an experiment in which the Macaque monkey plays a video game with a joystick that is disconnected. The physical connection of the brain through the hand to the joystick wired to the game console has been replaced with a Bluetooth connection between the brain implant and the game.

I talked on the subject on many occasions, on TEDx and other conferences. 10 years ago these visions were considered revolutionary. Now - we have products that do just that (although not entirely integrated yet as consumer devices). Remember this was several years before Google Glass. But if you look at the sketch I was presenting back in 2011, it resembles the Microsoft HoloLens a lot.

The Neuralink implant itself is not a conceptual breakthrough. Like the iPhone it is an extremely well engineered collection of existing technologies and a proper system architecture. The most important part seems to be the compression of neuron impulses to a tiny stream that can be transported over a low power wireless Bluetooth link. This in turn allows the device to last sufficiently long on a charge.

There is one area though, which I believe Neuralink will develop in future. Today they have demonstrated intercepting and mapping the hand control signals. while this is extremely useful in scenarios addressed by Neuralink (helping disabled people), what will be really interesting is teaching the brain to develop a "virtual third hand", such that the mouse pointer becomes a limb, while the hands are still free to do other activities.

Finally while Neuralink being an implant is not an issue for helping disabled, commercial products interfacing with a brain would have to be entirely wireless. I believe it is possible. Simple devices were capable of wirelessly detecting brain activity years ago. This is similar to the progress we made in mastering wireless, from very early Marconi spark-gap experiments in 19th century to CDMA (initially considered practically impossible) and beyond 100 years later.