Interesting exercise in AI-adjacent forecasting area (brain-computer interfaces). Curious if people want to specify some possible reveals+probabilities. https://twitter.com/neuralink/status/1149133717048188929
(if in the somewhat likely scenario you're relying on inside info please mention it)
I predict with moderate confidence that we will not see:
I predict with weak confidence that we won't see results in humans. (This prediction is stronger the more invasive the results we're seeing; a superior EEG they could show off in humans, but repair or treatment of strokes will likely only be in mice.)
(Those strike me as the next milestones along the 'make BCIs that are useful for making top performers higher performing' dimension, which seems to be Musk's long-term vision for Neuralink.)
They've mostly been focusing on medical applications. So I predict we will see something closer to:
I notice I wanted to put 'dexterous motor control' on both lists, so I'm somehow confused; it seems like we already have prostheses that perform pretty well based on external nerve sites (like reading off what you wanted to do with your missing hand from nerves in your arm) but I somehow don't expect us to have the spatial precision or filtering capacity to do that in the brain. (And also it just seems much riskier to attach electrodes internally or to the spinal cord than at an external site, making it unclear why you would even want that.) The main question here for me is something closer to 'bandwidth', where it seems likely you can pilot a drone using solely EEG if the thing you're communicating is closer to "a location that you should be at" than "how quickly each of the four rotors should be spinning in what direction." But we might have results where rats have learned how to pilot drones using low-level controls, or something cool like that.
The first half of #1 I got right, but I think the second half was more wrong than right. While this might be fast enough to be useful in a crisis, it looks like the design is focused more on getting useful information out of regions rather than the 'gross functionality' target I mentioned there.
I think the big result here was that they came up with a way to do deep insertion of wires designed for biocompatibility and longevity, which is impressive and along a dimension I wasn't tracking too much in my prediction. In retrospect, I might have ... (read more)