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.
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.
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