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January 1, 2024: Mark discusses neurotech with station manager Ken

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Photo by listener herb.nyc.

Photo by listener herb.nyc.

Today: Discussing neurotech with station manager Ken Freedman

• May 8, 2023 Techtonic with Nita Farahany, talking about her book The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

• Portable, non-invasive AI turns thoughts into text (Verdadeufo, Dec 26, 2023): “Researchers at the GrapheneX-UTS Human-centric Artificial Intelligence Center at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) surprised the world by presenting an innovative, portable and non-invasive system capable of converting thoughts into text without the need for brain implants.”

    --> see also UTS HAI Research - BrainGPT (video claiming to show the technology in action)

• Other “post-phone” tech: Facebook’s Ray-Ban surveillance glasses, Facebook/Meta’s Quest VR goggles, Apple’s Vision Pro (see the June 19, 2023 Techtonic: Ridiculing Apple’s Vision Pro headset with Paris Marx)

• Elon Musk’s Brain Implant Startup Is Ready to Start Surgery (by Ashlee Vance, Nov 9, 2023): “Neuralink’s implant sits invisibly beneath the scalp, flush with the skull. It’s also packed with enough computing horsepower to handle jobs well beyond think-and-click. In the nearish future, the idea is to enable high-speed typing as well as seamless use of a cursor. Neuralink has also been working on a complementary spinal implant intended to restore movement and sensation in paralyzed people.” . . . “Two other companies, Synchron and Onward, have more than a year’s head start on human trials with brain implants and related technology.”

• How Neuralink Keeps Dead Monkey Photos Secret (by Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra in Wired, Oct 4, 2023): “Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup conducted years of tests at UC Davis, a public university. A WIRED investigation reveals how Neuralink and the university keep the grisly images of test subjects hidden.”

• Facebook acquires neural interface startup CTRL-Labs for its mind-reading wristband (The Verge, Sep 23, 2019): “Bosworth says CTRL-Labs’ wristband will be instrumental in developing new ways of interacting with machines without needing traditional mouse-and-keyboard setups, touchscreens, or any form of physical controller whatsoever.”

• Neuralink competitor Precision Neuroscience buys factory to build its brain implants  (CNBC, Oct 5, 2023): “The company has started testing its brain implant on human patients and believes it could ultimately help people with paralysis operate digital devices with their brain signals. Precision said the manufacturing plant is the only facility capable of producing its ‘sophisticated’ electrode array.”

• How brain chips can change you (Insider, Feb 15, 2023): “More than 200,000 people around the world already use some kind of BCI, mostly for medical reasons. Perhaps the best-known use case is cochlear implants, which enable deaf people to, in a sense, hear. Another preeminient use case is in epileptic-seizure prevention. . . . now BCIs are constrained to the medical domain, but a vast array of nonmedical uses have been proposed for the technology. Research published in 2018 described participants using BCIs to interface with numerous apps on an Android tablet, including typing, messaging, and searching the web just by imagining relevant movements. More speculative applications include playing video games, manipulating virtual reality, or even receiving data inputs like text messages or videos directly, bypassing the need for a monitor.”

• This is literally your brain on capitalism (Cory Doctorow, Dec 12, 2023):

Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants – which allow blind people to see – lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust.

Nano Precision Medical, the company’s new owners, aren’t interested in maintaining the implants, so that’s the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus’s ‘bionic’ eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems.

Having a bricked eye implant doesn’t just rob you of your sight – many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to ‘do our best to provide virtual support’ to people whose Argus implants fail – but no more parts and no more patches.