No no, they listen. How do you think the "Hey Google" feature works? It has to listen for the key phrase. Might as well just listen to everything else.
I spent some time with a friend and his mother and spoke in Spanish for about two hours while YouTube was playing music. I had Spanish ads for 2 weeks after that.
I've raged and seethed about Neuralink so many times. There are so many obstacles needed to be overcome for a true Brain Computer Interface to work. Unless the company has magically solved some of the hardest problems in bioengineering, they're just sacrificing monkeys for sport.
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) includes the laws governing the Food and Drug Administration. These laws are written in the blood of the exploited and vulnerable, like the victims of the Tuskeege Syphillis Experiment. Many of these regulations are specifically written to keep pharmaceutical and food companies from cutting corners in product development, testing, and manufacturing.
It's not a necessary disruption. It's going to kill a lot of vulnerable people.
The article describes the review process - you're right, these words just flag a paper for further review. I wonder if it's an automatic flagging system like you suggested.
However, it took me almost a decade of rigorous training to understand my research. I sure as hell don't trust an elected or appointed official with a political vendetta to critically read my grants. Leave politics out of peer review.
This is still an emergency situation, IMHO. Like you said, people's grants are being canceled. I see this as a direct attack against higher education.
ETA: It's also a waste of taxpayer money. These grants are already competing for meager funds. Why should we siphon away any resources to "investigate" them?
Here's a quick off-the-cuff list of neuroscience domains, not part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that will be impacted by this censorship. This is not an exhaustive list, it's just what I thought of after thinking critically for 10 minutes.
It goes without saying this practice is evil and reprehensible. No academic domain should be politically targeted. But it reaches more than their targets. It is dangerous. It is unscientific. It is book-burning. Contact your representatives. Take action. Donate to good causes.
Patient advocacy for people who have had a stroke, or have dementia, or have any number of disabilities, hereditary or acquired.
Any research about the blood brain barrier, including development of drugs that can cross it more efficiently.
Any research about the placental barrier, including development of safe medications for birthing people.
Research into cognitive bias.
Development of statistics (including Bayesian, the hot frontier), machine learning (that's AI for anyone who prefers that term), where the term bias is used to talk about parameters and model performance.
Basic visual and auditory science, where we talk about visual and auditory discrimination.
Sex differences research- this isn't just a social issue, we don't understand how differences in metabolism impact drug metabolism. Can't have female mice anymore, apparently.
Basic research in the function of neurons, which polarize, depolarize, hyperpolarize, etc.
Concussion research and, again, stroke research. The field is broadly known as traumatic brain injury.
Grapefruit interacts with specific metabolic pathways in the liver. Most medications are broken down by the liver. That's just how the body works, unfortunately
Shells or coral could serve as early tools, but (just my opinion) I feel it's a little human-centric to assume fire and metallurgy are required to progress. Just because we did it that way, doesn't mean another species would have to.
If anyone's interested in this sort of speculative sci fi, check out A Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. 10/10 world building, 9/10 science backing, 6/10 writing.
See Alk's comment above, I touched on medical applications.
As for commercial uses, I see very few. These devices are so invasive, I doubt they could be approved for commercial use.
I think the future of Brain Computer Interfacing lies in Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (FNIRS). Basically, it uses the same infrared technology as a pulse oximeter to measure changes in blood flow in your brain. Since it uses light (instead of electricity or magnetism) to measure the brain, it's resistant to basically all the noise endemic to EEG and MRI. It's also 100% portable. But, the spatial resolution is pretty low.
HOWEVER, the signals have such high temporal resolution. With a strong enough machine learning algorithm, I wonder if someone could interpret the signal well enough for commercial applications. I saw this first-hand in my PhD - one of our lab techs wrote an algorithm that could read as little as 500ms of data and reasonably predict whether the participant was reading a grammatically simple or complex sentence.
It didn't get published, sadly, due to lab politics. And, honestly, I don't have 100% faith in the code he used. But I can't help but wonder.
A traditional electrode array needs to be as close to the neurons as possible to collect data. So, straight through the dura and pia mater, into the parenchyma where the cell axons and bodies are hanging out. Usually, they collect local data without getting any long distance information - which is a limiting factor to this technology.
The brain needs widespread areas to work in tandem to get most complicated tasks done. An electrode is great for measuring motor activity because those are pretty localized. But, something like memory and language? Not really possible.
There are electrocorticographic devices (ECoG) that places electrodes over a wide area and can rest on the pia mater, on the surface of the brain. Less invasive, but you still need a craniotomy to place the device. They also have less resolution.
The biggest obstacle to invasive brain-computer implants like this one is their longevity. Inevitably, any metal electrode implanted in the brain gets rejected by the immune system of the brain. It's a well-studied process where a glial scar forms, neurons move away from the implant, and the overall signal of the device decreases. We need advances in biocompatibility before this really becomes revolutionary.
ETA: This device avoids putting metal in the brain and instead the device sends axons into the brain. Certainly a novel approach which runs into different issues. The new neurons need to be accepted by the brain, and they need to be kept alive by the device.
If they move the cell bodies into the brain and then had the device house axons and dendrites (neuron input and output), they could maybe let the brain keep the device alive. But that is a much more difficult installation procedure
Fantastic question, like Will_a said, I've never seen a device designed for input to the brain like this.
In this particular example, if someone were to compromise the device, even though it's not able to "fry" their brain with direct electricity, they could overload the input neurons with a ton of stimulus. This would likely break the device because the input neurons would die, and it could possibly cause the user to have a seizure depending on how connected the input was to the users brain.
That does bring to mind devices like the one developed by Battelle, where the device reads brain activity and then outputs to a sleeve or cuff designed to stimulate muscles. The goal of the device is to act as a prosthesis for people with spinal cord injuries. I imagine that device was not connected to the internet in any way, but worst case scenario and a hacker compromises the device, they could cause someone's muscle to sieze up.
Agree, fascinating question. To be precise, they used genetically modified neurons (aka optogenetics) to test if the device can deliver a signal into the brain. Optogenetics incorporates neurons modified with light-sensitive channel proteins, so the neuron activates when a precise wavelength of light is "seen" by the special protein. One of the coolest methods in neuroscience, in my opinion.
"To see if the idea works in practice they installed the device in mice, using neurons genetically modified to react to light. Three weeks after implantation, they carried out a series of experiments where they trained the mice to respond whenever a light was shone on the device. The mice were able to detect when this happened, suggesting the light-sensitive neurons had merged with their native brain cells."
My favorite AI fact is from cancer research. The New Yorker has a great article about how an algorithm used to identify and price out pastries at a Japanese bakery found surprising success as a cancer detector. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-pastry-ai-that-learned-to-fight-cancer