Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: Well, this is going to sound somewhat esoteric and maybe
a bit strange, but I was actually trying to figure
out how to mitigate the risk of digital superintelligence to
the agree that that we can improve our bandwidth to
our digital tertiary self. I think we can better align
artificial intelligence with a collective human will.
Speaker 1: That's going to sound very strange, but so.
Speaker 2: You could think of like, basically our intelligence is being
divided into roughly three areas. That's sort of like a
like you know, Olympic system, like like like the sort
of instinctual elements that this sort of like the cortex
and the planning part. Then we also have a tertiary layer,
which is only computers and bones applications software that we use,
so that you have a digital tertiari self.
Speaker 1: Basically we were already an android.
Speaker 2: Defictively, I think people feel this when they forget their phone.
Forgetting a phone, leaving a phone behind, it is like
having missing limb syndrome. You're missing your part of your
digital tertiaries. The constraint on human machine symbiosis is bandwidth.
Speaker 1: What is the especially output bandwidth?
Speaker 2: The output bandwidth of a human is less than one
bit per second over the course of a day.
Speaker 1: So if you have eighty six four hundred.
Speaker 2: Seconds in a day, the number of output bits that
you produce. Maybe there's some rare cases where it's above
one bit per second, but very few people produce eighty six.
Speaker 1: Thousand, four hundred output bits.
Speaker 2: So most people like our averaging less than one bit
per second over twenty four hour period. And when we
do speak, they say the number of symbols per second
of speech typing is quite low, especially if it's going
through a phone. Then you just sort of have two
slow moving meatsticks that are trying to type letters on
a phone, so you really have just a few per
second of characters, so that your phone is like a
supercomputer in your hands and it is desperately trying to
figure out what you want to say.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you I've personally experienced that phantom limb syndrome
when I actually can't find my phone. And I hadn't
thought of myself as a cyborg until you challenge.
Speaker 4: Me to think that way. But you're in a room
of folks who've devoted their.
Speaker 3: Lives to neurologic disease, and I must confess to you
that I had never actually thought of the output of
the brain in terms of bits per second. But when
you frame it that way, it makes it really clear
why there may be a broader opportunity to make that
virtual cyborg that we have now with our phone a
little bit more efficient. So that's as a starting point,
what prompted your interest in neuralink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so basically I thought.
Speaker 2: Okay, in order to have better human AI semiosis, we
must solve the bandwidth problem. Below a certain bandwidth, we
are basically just stationary to a computer and at one
bit per second. Know, that's the very low data rate
when computers are doing brillions of bits per second.
Speaker 3: So when you think about brain machine interface, why did
you select the technical approach you did?
Speaker 4: I know a lot of thoughts gone into that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So if you say, like, okay, we need to have
ultimately a million bits per second or a billion bits
per second to gig a bit per second interface, then
that means you really you can't.
Speaker 1: You need an implant and.
Speaker 2: Ultimately will need to replace the skull and it's going
to be a zillion wire. I mean, this is some
sci fi, bizarre sci fi stuff, and I'm not this
is certainly optional.
Speaker 3: Plan mandatory replacement of my skull whatever problem.
Speaker 1: Mandatory chip and brain is not what we're saying, Yeah,
for sure.
Speaker 2: But at some point you're you say like, okay, how
many electrodes are needed in order to interface with have
a whole brain interface?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I've heard you mentioned that larger goal
of whole brain interface. One thing that's really me by
the approach that's been taken is, I think as a resurgence,
we often contemplate the natural history of the disease and
competing risk and benefit in neuralink as a company has
started with folks who have als and spinal cord injury.
These kind of first steps in terms of technical approach.
So we'd love to hear a little bit more about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, long tem goal, like I said, is mitigating civilizational
risk associated with a divergence of biological and digital intelligence.
That's the long tim goal. Obviously. Then you've got to
parse that, h L, Well, what are we going to
do tomorrow? Yeah, So the starting point with the first
new link device is a thousand electrodes, and with just
one hundred of those electrodes are active, if it takes
up our first few patients, you know, we're also having
world records. Admitically, these are world records that are pretty low,
but we're getting around.
Speaker 1: Ten ves per second, and that does a path to
one thousand us per.
Speaker 2: Second, which would be literally one hundred times more than
the next record. So we want to do the implants
in where there's the highest gain and the least risk.
So we call the first implant to telepathy, which really
just interfacing with the motor cortex, and it's basically looking
at signals as though somebody moved their own and just
reading that signal and then sending that signal to the
patient's phone or computer so they can then move the
cursor around just by thinking. If you will have seen
the videos of Noland, that's pretty impressive what he can do.
In fact, shortly after getting the implant, he spent all
night playing video games just by thinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and those are the records you're talking about in
those first two prime patients, where you're able to extract
signals from their brain at record bits per second and
enable them to work in the world.
Speaker 4: Is those of us who lose their phone would use today.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And I think we'll get to the point pretty
quickly where someone with a neuralink implant will outperform somebody
who's using their hands play a video game.
Speaker 4: What do you think the timeline for that is? We
won't hold you to it.
Speaker 2: Sure, I mean I do have a habit of being
optimistic with respect to timelines. But if I wasn't optimistic,
I wouldn't be starting these companies.
Speaker 4: Probably, Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1: But I think given that we're already.
Speaker 2: Pretty much out a point where we're pretty close to
on par with the video game. Basically you can play
a video game at a comparable competent level to someone
with hands. I think with our second generation device, which
we'll have three thousand electrodes, and we'll get a lot
better at placing those electrodes so only it's only one
hundred electrodes being effective, we'll both improve the yield and
will increase the number of electrodes. So we'll go from
say one hundred electrodes that are reading to I don't know,
out of three thousand electrodes, maybe fifteen and a half,
So like fifteen hundred are reading. So at that point
the data rate is far in excess of what someone
video game with their hands could do, and we can
reduce the latency the moment you think of a move,
it happens instantly on the computer, as opposed to for
you know, currently, if you're a human play a video game,
you have to move your hand so that that's like
you've got to send signals to the muscles.
Speaker 1: The muscles have to move.
Speaker 2: Your finger takes a certain amount of time to move,
so you've got to be you basically got to move
the meat puppet. If you don't have to move actuate
the muscles in your hand or your finger's going to
move at a certain rate and set like milimeters per second.
But if you don't have to do any of that,
you can literally think it immediately with no latency.
Speaker 1: You'll outperform someone who has to use a hands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think as surgeons we really take
pride in being efficient and using your hand. But when
you're a reductionist like that, it actually makes me feel
like I'm actually not particularly efficient. You could just if
you just think and do it, I think I'd probably
get a lot I'll get a little lot more done.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: One of the things that struck me in terms of
the technical approach is obviously you have the implant and
then you're extracting those signals and have a recording algorithm,
and then you're actually affecting an action and you know,
in one of the patients you actually had a lead
or traction. But then we're able to tune the recording
algorithm to actually recover that function.
Speaker 4: Could you maybe say a little bit about.
Speaker 3: That kind of vertically integrated approach and how that's going
to let you scale a little bit?
Speaker 2: Sure? Well, since you know, really none of this stuff
existed before, we had to design and build everything from scratch,
and I mean it's basically like having an apple watcher
a fit, but that replaces a piece of skull. And
then you've got these electrodes, very very fine electrodes that
are implanted with a surgical robot.
Speaker 3: I mean, we can share a little bit about the robot,
the R one robot.
Speaker 4: That two is to implant the threads.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the threads are really too small to be
manipulated by hand, and they need to be placed with
extreme precision, very quickly. The brain is moving all the
time due to breathing and heartbeat or just not just
sitting there. It's like a pulsing thing, and you're trying
to get an electrode to a specific depth, while this,
you know, jello balloon is just moving around all over
the place. So it's it's it's kind of an impossible,
really an impossible thing to do by hand. These these
spades are just too tiny and the level of precision
required is beyond what people can do. I maybe liken
it to be being similar to computer controlled machining or
three D metal printing with we've better a lays of
welding tiny bits of metal dust. It's just there's just
no way that humans just do not have the level
of precision necessary to implant the electrodes, you know, to
fractions of a millimeter of x y z position.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what's interesting obviously is a group of surgeons,
many of us to varying stages, have incorporated robotics into
our practice. When you hear a precision exceeding human capacity,
do you think is this going to be a disruption
or is this an augmentation to what surgeons do? And
I know you have some thoughts around that, and there's
maybe some analogies and ophthalmology, so it would love to
hear that perspective.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I think the ophalmology analogy is the right
one with laseric and ophthalmologists will oversee perhaps half a
dozen or a dozen laser machines and to make sure
the machine is is the patient getting the right operation
in the correct eye, and is the is the machine
operating properly. But thereafter the you know, patils in the
laser chair and the robots going to basically laser rival.
And now this is much better than someone getting a
hand laser and laid hand lasering arrival, which would have
varying results. I think it will be something similar to LASIC,
where you perhaps a neurosurgeon overseeing half a dozen or
a dozen of the neuralink robots that are doing the
implants and just obviously making sure it's the right implant
and the right location for the right purpose, and that
everything's okay with the patient. So it would be like
a massive amplification, I think, and it's kind of necessary
that it'd be a massive appiplication because there's simply not
enough neurosarchence to do this whole by hand.
Speaker 1: It's like physically impossible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we're talking about ultimately doing tens of millions
of these things, like maybe this eight billion people in
the world.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe at.
Speaker 2: Least a few billion are going to want this, maybe
more so, then how do you get billions of devices
unless you got the robots.
Speaker 1: It's not happening.
Speaker 3: I've heard you frame the introduction of the robot is
not just a precision issue, but an interest of workforce
and scale. And there's obviously a little over three thousand
of us nationally, so that would be a little bit challenging.
Can you share a little bit in this early journey
with BCI what some of the challenges have been, what
you've encountered technically, I know, a biological environment, the saltwater
problem is very hostile.
Speaker 4: Things with energy treaties.
Speaker 3: Would love to hear your thoughts on that and how
your team's taking those things on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, yeah, as everyone obviously talking to people
that know a lot more about the brain and that
than I do, but I accidentally come to understand more
than most people. The challenge is You've got a device
that's going to live there for years. It's an electrical
device that has to transmit radio essentially, you know, it
has to transmit photons to your computer.
Speaker 1: It's subcutaneous, it's got to be charged.
Speaker 2: It's got electrodes that are reading and writing, so it's
not like it can't just be electrically isolated.
Speaker 1: In fact, you're fighting two things. You want.
Speaker 2: You really are desperately trying to read these neurons, but
you also don't want to be corroded. So it's like
the very difficult thing to have just the minimum amount
of insulation necessary to not be corroded, but not be
so insulated that you can't hear the neurons. So there's
a very challenging materials problem with our latest electrodes that
will be silicon carbide coded, but even the silicon cartibide is.
Speaker 1: A very difficult material to work with.
Speaker 2: It's awesome, but it's very difficult, and you've got to
make sure the coding is extremely precise. It's be you know,
canvy tooth thin or tooth thick anywhere. It's going to
be very evenly you applied to the threads. So it's
the cher number of iterations necessary to actually have this
device be medically sealed and survived in the body and
not fail in some way, and then have to be
able to transmit to your phono computer at a high
data rate without burning down the battery is very difficult.
I'd say there's many many technical challenges in that. So
I mean I do have slightly criviolized by saying it's
sort of like a fitbit or an Apple Watch in
your brain. But if you actually put those things in
your brain, neither your brain nor the Apple watch or
fitbot would be happy.
Speaker 3: So this feels like the right place to ask. I
think one of the more interesting questions we received. So
as someone who's in a position of authority to comment
on both, can you settle the age old question, what's
actually more difficult brain surgery or rocket science?
Speaker 2: Well, both of my challenging. It's bizarre that I'm in
bold in both. I mean, I think there are similar
magnitude of difficulty.
Speaker 4: Especially story the story checks out.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think nobody's out there thinking, you know, what's
easy brain surgery and rockets.
Speaker 4: Okay, perfect, Thanks, thanks for backing us up. We appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and unmercent, Now that's a legit. Rain surgery is
super hard, and rockets it's super hard. And there's a
reason that there are idiomatic expressions. This is no accident,
especially as you try to scale the electrodes number of electrodes,
and I don't we don't know how to say.
Speaker 1: Like ultimately get to say, how do we do a
million electrodes?
Speaker 2: This is we don't know how to do that yet
except that hopefully it is physically possible. If you want
to have a hind Man with a whole brain interface,
then I think probably the right automagtude is something like
a million electrode and that that still has a very
high ratio of neurons to electrodes, So that means you've
got to read you try to add like any given
electrode has to be able to read neurons from you
know several like I don't know one hundred or one
thousand neurons. So if you can do if you've got
a million electrodes and each electroid can read a thousand neurons,
so you've got access to a billion neurons.
Speaker 3: Well, the goal with a whole brain interface is this
potential for long term augmentation or symbiosis. But you know,
in the more immediate term, something that we think a
lot about as surgeons is how is technology can allow
us to treat problems that we aren't able to treat
now and there's this whole family of diseases, psychiatric conditions,
neurodevelopmental conditions, you know, folks who are neurodiverse and nerd
degenerative conditions like Alzheimer's and so as we get a
better picture of not just the structure of the brain,
but you know, for lack of better term, the music
of the brain.
Speaker 4: Do you see those as intermediate steps? Would love to
hear your perspective on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think we should be able to
solve any problem over time that is a result of
you know, like if you think of the brain like
a computer effect, like a circuit board or something like that,
you can say, like if you're given a circuit board
and there were some short circuits or some circuits that
should be there but aren't there. If there are any
circuits that shouldn't be there, and and some that that
are there but shouldn't, we can fix those. So basically,
if if if it's it's like fixing a circuit board. Now, now,
if the circuit board is all melted, it's going to
be hard to fix a melted circuit board. You can
fix the circ board with a few issues, but you
can't fix it if it's been melted. But the vast
majority of diseases or brain issues I think are fixable
with your within your rolling device. It's it's a it's
a fine grained means of reading and writing electrical signals
in the brain at a road with high precision. And
so that means like if there's an electrical storm, some
kind of apilepasy or something, you can interrupt that storm
if you can, if there are a set of signals
to like in the case of blindness, that if somebody's
lost their optic noble both eyes, you can still stimulate
the visual cortex.
Speaker 1: Basically anything that is a function of signals in er out.
Speaker 2: If that is the nature of the problem, it can
be fixed ultimately with a neuraling device.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I know you.
Speaker 3: Neuralink just got FDA breakthrough designation for blindsight week and
a half before this meeting. One thing that I heard
you talk about that I thought was so interesting when
I think about neurodiversity or NeuroD degenerative disease, is this
idea of imagine, if someone of the intellective of Stephen
Hawking was able to communicate more efficiently, how much more
would society have benefited from those insights, and so when
I think of people with neurodiverse conditions, I always think
that they have this amazing potential to potentially be unlocked,
and maybe this implant could be a digital bridge to that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, so I think it can help a lot of people,
like really ultimately help tens millions of people, maybe one
hundreds of millions of people. I should say, also this potential,
we'll go beyond the brain to like if somebody's got
a sort of spinal cord injury, that being able to
transmit the signals, so.
Speaker 1: You know, like the ideal. I think what most people
that have blusted the.
Speaker 2: Connection between their brain and their body would like is
to reanimate their body. Sure you know there are there
are there are some approximations of that where you can
animate see a robot suit or a robot arm or
something like that. But if I think most people will
be asking them, like, what would you prefer, I'd like
my body to work again if provided the neurons are
still kind of there, It's it's simply physically possible to
shunt the signals, frown the motor cortex past the point
where the damage has occurred to the neurons that then
interface with your muscles and your.
Speaker 1: Arms and legs.
Speaker 2: If you think of it just like an electrical and
communication system, like if you severed some ethernet cables, what
would you do?
Speaker 1: Well, you bridge the signal?
Speaker 2: Okay, great, that the same thing can be done with
the human body is bridge the electrical signals and the
communication signals. So you've got sensors and actuators and the
signals the bi directional signals for sensors and actuators are
being interrupted, and I said, if you shunt the signals,
you will be able to renovate the body.
Speaker 3: One other issue that comes up with implants that you
were mentioning our iPhones when you're committing someone to an implant,
obviously there's a whole issue around upgrades or the cycle
time or iteration and technology. So you can maybe say
a little bit about reversibility and how we should be
thinking about these things as we enter an era where
bci'll become more widespread.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we do think upgrades are pretty important, just
as you would not once an iPhone one stuck in
your head when there's an iPhone sixteen or whatever version
iPhone and are on these days but I think it's
like six it's pretty high.
Speaker 3: I've lost track of what not for they're on I
think you're I think you're up to date on the sixteen.
Speaker 1: I think, okay, you know so so.
Speaker 2: But I mean, now there's this, there's some sort of
logarithmic you know, there's like as kind of goes by,
the incremental gains from one, say iPhone to the next
are are less.
Speaker 1: It's kind of logarithmic gain, it would appear.
Speaker 2: But that means that well, like I say, the first
five or six versions, there are actually big jumps, and
certainly that would be that is the case with your link.
Speaker 1: So if somebody has say production design.
Speaker 2: Version one, I think five years later they'll one to
have production design version three or four. And so we
designed the implant such that it can be removed but
with hopefully minimal strip damage to the area, so that
you can then then replace it with another one. And
we have with in our animal studies, we've done I
think three implants, and the third implant still worked quite well, meaning.
Speaker 4: You've replaced the implant three times in the same.
Speaker 2: Place three times. Yeah, and the third one was still
working was working great.
Speaker 3: So we've talked about the robot addressing the workforce problem.
Speaker 4: We've talked about interchangeability.
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of what your vision involves is
being high performing but also affordable, so it would be
accessible to people. How do you see bridging that gap?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the device itself in volume should should not
be super expensive. I mean hopefully it's like, I don't know,
five to ten thousand dollars and very high volume. It
should sought to approximate the cost of an Apple watch
or a phone, so maybe it's a thousand or two
thousand dollars something like that. And then the if it's
implanted with a robot, then that that surgical procedure should
be fast. Like we do have a game plan for
what I call this six hundred second surgery. So ten
minutes you sit in the chair, in ten minutes the
data you have an implant, and we're not violating physics.
So it I mean just just has with laser. You know,
it goes in a laser to a whole munch of
things to rival. Now you'd have to automate basically everything here.
But if you break it down second by second, date
is possible to have a six hundred second or ten
minute surgery. And so at that point, if it's being
done by a robot and it's the whole thing takes
ten minutes, I think it probably that the whole thing,
all inclusive, ends up being you know, on the order
of five thousand dollars maybe similar to Lasic.
Speaker 3: You invoked physics, And one interesting insight that I gained
in our time together is this idea that there's often
a debate about the.
Speaker 4: Possible and what's possible and what's not.
Speaker 3: And I know you have the perspective that that shouldn't
really be subject to debate, because if something's impossible, it's
because it's a function of physics, and if not, then
it is and you just have.
Speaker 1: To figure it out.
Speaker 2: If something like if you're breaking conservation of energy or
momentum or charge or something like that, then you either
have a Nobel prize or you're wrong, and most likely
you're wrong. But provided you're not sort of trying to
break the sound barrier or something like that, like you're
not moving.
Speaker 1: That fast that then you should come visit. Okay, that's
probably going to be bad for the brain. If it's
going super.
Speaker 4: Sadic, that actually is starting to make a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, but provided you're still subsonic and you're not
just doing things so fast that it causes physical disturbances.
That then you can get things don very quickly. Basically
if you look at the things at a bind grain
level and say, well, what is the size of the
voltage difference that you're trying to detect in a neuron
and how so that for like, how far away from.
Speaker 1: An electrode could you detect a pulse? You know? And
can you.
Speaker 2: Distinguish one neuron from another neuron based on its signature,
So like if one neuron has almost like an accent
or a voice, if your sensors are precise enough, you
can say, okay, that sort of faint voice we hear
that faint signal is this neuron, This loud signal is
a nearby neuron.
Speaker 1: And you can actually figure out especially where these neurons
are based on on slight differences and how they they fire.
Speaker 3: And that's and that's how you're going to map the
function of the brain and get a step closer to
that whole brain interface.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we definitely are venturing into deep sci
fi here. If people are interested in some sci fi
book recommendations I would recommend in banks, the culture books
and in banks actually just have this concept of a
neural lace where there's all the humans have a neural
link or neural lays throughout their brain, and when somebody dies,
their memories are being dynamically uploaded to.
Speaker 1: The cloud or whatever the internet is.
Speaker 2: In the future, they can reinstantiate into human body if
they want.
Speaker 1: Well, they can live in simulation, which we might be
in right now.
Speaker 2: If so, I'd just like to applaud the simulators on
the excellent work they are doing.
Speaker 3: This feels very immersive and high fidelity. So thank you
to simulator.
Speaker 1: Thank you simulators. Please don't turn us off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, well listen, Elana, this has been a terrific conversation.
You have all of neurosurgery in the room here, and
so what are maybe some last thoughts you'd like to
leave us with.
Speaker 2: Well, I think this is going to be something that
is an incredible powerful tool for neurosurgeons for helping fix
things that are rare related issues. It's sort of like,
you know, it might be like the difference between if
it was a weapon situation, difference between like bows and
arrows and jet airplanes, Like, it's a big difference, you know,
so we want to give you.
Speaker 4: I hope I have the airplane in that Yeah, in.
Speaker 1: A positive constructive way.
Speaker 2: I mean, one can only do as well as the
tools that want to get you know what.
Speaker 1: It's like, what tools do you have?
Speaker 2: And I think with my essentially giving neurosurgeons a much
more sophisticated, powerful tool like the neuralink device, you could
really help a lot of people terrific.
Speaker 3: And I know that's why we're all here to better
characterize in our logic disease and to help people. So
really value your perspective. Thank you for being are a
puzzle lecturer for creativity innovation