On August 29, 2020, Elon Musk, who runs the Neuralink company, presented the company's latest achievements in work on the brain-computer interface.
It is planned to connect the brain to a computer using a miniature chip 23 mm in diameter and 8 mm in height. A chip can have a maximum of 1024 connections to the brain. That is, for the chip to work, more than one thousand microscopic wires with electrodes at the ends must be inserted into the brain. In order to perform the operation of connecting wires to the outer surface of the cerebral cortex with high quality and as safe as possible, a special robot was created that is capable of performing the operation automatically.
The robot analyzes the appearance of the cerebral cortex and tries to insert electrodes between the vessels and large capillaries so that there is no bleeding.
The new chip design differs from the paradigm from last year's Neuralink presentation, when it was planned to place the battery and wireless module separately from the chips.
The chip now contains a battery, a wireless module and a wireless inductive charging coil.
Thanks to this versatility, the chip has become larger, but now there is no need to carry out the very dubious and complex operation of pulling wires under the human scalp from the chips to the ear, as it was supposed before.
The battery charge in the chip should last for one day. It can be recharged at night using an inductive charger.
The chip was successfully implanted into the pig's head and learned to read signals about the movement of various parts of the body. On the charts, you can see that the graph of the predicted movements of the pig matches very well with its actual movements at that moment.
In the near future, such a chip should begin to help fight various mental illnesses, will allow to control mechanized prostheses directly with the help of the brain, and will help dumb and paralyzed people start speaking using a speech synthesizer.
Fighting disease is very important, but of course we understand that this is only the very beginning of the development of technology for connecting the brain to a computer. Fighting diseases is an excellent result and a good pretext on the way to the main goal, which is the transition of life on earth to a new evolutionary level, when living beings can modify their bodies at their own discretion within extremely wide limits. From the very moment of spontaneous generation of life on Earth, there was an evolution of bodies, while the computing power of the brains of living beings increased, which made it possible, from a certain point in time, to the evolution of ideas in some organisms. The evolution of ideas or the evolution of memes is most clearly observed in humans. With the further development of neurointerfaces, it is possible to achieve the fusion of man and computer and the transition of life on earth to a new form,when the evolution of ideas will lead to the evolution of bodies.
But is it possible to merge man and machine with Neuralink technology? Let us assume that in the future it will be possible to insert more than one chip into the skull, but to cover the entire surface of the head with such chips. How many channels between the brain and the computer can then be obtained with such maximum chipping? The surface area of the skull lid is about 400 square centimeters, the area of the chip is about 2. In total, we get 200 thousand wires to the brain. In total, the cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons. Thus, there will be 80 thousand neurons per wire, even with the maximum coverage of the entire skull with chips.
In order to count all the subtleties of thoughts and feelings, such a small number of channels may not be enough. Therefore, other ways of connecting the brain to a computer may be more promising.
For example, artificial neurons can be grown from the very beginning in a matrix with electrodes. They can be genetically modified to make it more comfortable for them to live on a chip with electrodes. Then this chip with some layer of neurons can be applied to the surface of the cerebral cortex in the hope that artificially grown neurons will grow together with natural neurons and thus it will be possible to achieve a much larger number of connection channels. In the future, it will be possible to create an entirely artificial skull lid, which will contain a battery, a signal processor and possibly even a neural network that will complement the work of the biological brain.
On the inner surface of such a skull lid, all layers of tissue between the skull and the brain and a small layer of neurons in a matrix of electrodes will be artificially grown for fusion of artificial neurons with the brain surface. All that remains is to cut out your own skull cap and replace it with a new pumped one. Who knows, maybe after the death of the biological body, you will continue to live in the processor built into this electronic cover.
Thus, the experiments of Neuralink are a breakthrough in the technology of neurointerfaces, but with the complete fusion of man and machine, difficulties can arise if biotechnologists do not intervene.