Category Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

‘Frozen smoke’ sensors can detect toxic formaldehyde in homes and offices

I love the fact that ‘frozen smoke’ is another term for aerogel (which has multiple alternative terms) and the latest work on this interesting material is from the University of Cambridge (UK) according to a February 9, 2023 news item on ScienceDaily,

Researchers have developed a sensor made from ‘frozen smoke’ that uses artificial intelligence techniques to detect formaldehyde in real time at concentrations as low as eight parts per billion, far beyond the sensitivity of most indoor air quality sensors.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed sensors made from highly porous materials known as aerogels. By precisely engineering the shape of the holes in the aerogels, the sensors were able to detect the fingerprint of formaldehyde, a common indoor air pollutant, at room temperature.
The proof-of-concept sensors, which require minimal power, could be adapted to detect a wide range of hazardous gases, and could also be miniaturised for wearable and healthcare applications. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
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A February 9, 2024 University of Cambridge press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the problem and the proposed solution in more detail, Note: Links have been removed,

…
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are a major source of indoor air pollution, causing watery eyes, burning in the eyes and throat, and difficulty breathing at elevated levels. High concentrations can trigger attacks in people with asthma, and prolonged exposure may cause certain cancers.
Formaldehyde is a common VOC and is emitted by household items including pressed wood products (such as MDF), wallpapers and paints, and some synthetic fabrics. For the most part, the levels of formaldehyde emitted by these items are low, but levels can build up over time, especially in garages where paints and other formaldehyde-emitting products are more likely to be stored.
According to a 2019 report from the campaign group Clean Air Day, a fifth of households in the UK showed notable concentrations of formaldehyde, with 13% of residences surpassing the recommended limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“VOCs such as formaldehyde can lead to serious health problems with prolonged exposure even at low concentrations, but current sensors don’t have the sensitivity or selectivity to distinguish between VOCs that have different impacts on health,” said Professor Tawfique Hasan from the Cambridge Graphene Centre, who led the research.
“We wanted to develop a sensor that is small and doesn’t use much power, but can selectively detect formaldehyde at low concentrations,” said Zhuo Chen, the paper’s first author.
The researchers based their sensors on aerogels: ultra-light materials sometimes referred to as ‘liquid smoke’, since they are more than 99% air by volume. The open structure of aerogels allows gases to easily move in and out. By precisely engineering the shape, or morphology, of the holes, the aerogels can act as highly effective sensors.
Working with colleagues at Warwick University, the Cambridge researchers optimised the composition and structure of the aerogels to increase their sensitivity to formaldehyde, making them into filaments about three times the width of a human hair. The researchers 3D printed lines of a paste made from graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon, and then freeze-dried the graphene paste to form the holes in the final aerogel structure. The aerogels also incorporate tiny semiconductors known as quantum dots.
The sensors they developed were able to detect formaldehyde at concentrations as low as eight parts per billion, which is 0.4 percent of the level deemed safe in UK workplaces. The sensors also work at room temperature, consuming very low power.
“Traditional gas sensors need to be heated up, but because of the way we’ve engineered the materials, our sensors work incredibly well at room temperature, so they use between 10 and 100 times less power than other sensors,” said Chen.
To improve selectivity, the researchers then incorporated machine learning algorithms into the sensors. The algorithms were trained to detect the ‘fingerprint’ of different gases, so that the sensor was able to distinguish the fingerprint of formaldehyde from other VOCs.
“Existing VOC detectors are blunt instruments – you only get one number for the overall concentration in the air,” said Hasan. “By building a sensor that is able to detect specific VOCs at very low concentrations in real time, it can give home and business owners a more accurate picture of air quality and any potential health risks.”
The researchers say that the same technique could be used to develop sensors to detect other VOCs. In theory, a device the size of a standard household carbon monoxide detector could incorporate multiple different sensors within it, providing real-time information about a range of different hazardous gases. The team at Warwick are developing a low-cost multi-sensor platform that will incorporate these new aerogel materials and, coupled with AI algorithms, detect different VOCs.
“By using highly porous materials as the sensing element, we’re opening up whole new ways of detecting hazardous materials in our environment,” said Chen.
The research was supported in part by the Henry Royce Institute, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Tawfique Hasan is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Real-time, noise and drift resilient formaldehyde sensing at room temperature with aerogel filaments by Zhuo Chen, Binghan Zhou, Mingfei Xiao, Tynee Bhowmick, Padmanathan Karthick Kannan, Luigi G. Occhipinti, Julian William Gardner, and Tawfique Hasan. Science Advances 9 Feb 2024 Vol 10, Issue 6 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk6856

This paper is open access.

Butterfly mating inspires neuromorphic (brainlike) computing

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Michael Berger writes about a multisensory approach to neuromorphic computing inspired by butterflies in his February 2, 2024 Nanowerk Spotlight article, Note: Links have been removed,

Artificial intelligence systems have historically struggled to integrate and interpret information from multiple senses the way animals intuitively do. Humans and other species rely on combining sight, sound, touch, taste and smell to better understand their surroundings and make decisions. However, the field of neuromorphic computing has largely focused on processing data from individual senses separately.
This unisensory approach stems in part from the lack of miniaturized hardware able to co-locate different sensing modules and enable in-sensor and near-sensor processing. Recent efforts have targeted fusing visual and tactile data. However, visuochemical integration, which merges visual and chemical information to emulate complex sensory processing such as that seen in nature—for instance, butterflies integrating visual signals with chemical cues for mating decisions—remains relatively unexplored. Smell can potentially alter visual perception, yet current AI leans heavily on visual inputs alone, missing a key aspect of biological cognition.
Now, researchers at Penn State University have developed bio-inspired hardware that embraces heterogeneous integration of nanomaterials to allow the co-location of chemical and visual sensors along with computing elements. This facilitates efficient visuochemical information processing and decision-making, taking cues from the courtship behaviors of a species of tropical butterfly.
In the paper published in Advanced Materials (“A Butterfly-Inspired Multisensory Neuromorphic Platform for Integration of Visual and Chemical Cues”), the researchers describe creating their visuochemical integration platform inspired by Heliconius butterflies. During mating, female butterflies rely on integrating visual signals like wing color from males along with chemical pheromones to select partners. Specialized neurons combine these visual and chemical cues to enable informed mate choice.
To emulate this capability, the team constructed hardware encompassing monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) memtransistors serving as visual capture and processing components. Meanwhile, graphene chemitransistors functioned as artificial olfactory receptors. Together, these nanomaterials provided the sensing, memory and computing elements necessary for visuochemical integration in a compact architecture.
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While mating butterflies served as inspiration, the developed technology has much wider relevance. It represents a significant step toward overcoming the reliance of artificial intelligence on single data modalities. Enabling integration of multiple senses can greatly improve situational understanding and decision-making for autonomous robots, vehicles, monitoring devices and other systems interacting with complex environments.
The work also helps progress neuromorphic computing approaches seeking to emulate biological brains for next-generation ML acceleration, edge deployment and reduced power consumption. In nature, cross-modal learning underpins animals’ adaptable behavior and intelligence emerging from brains organizing sensory inputs into unified percepts. This research provides a blueprint for hardware co-locating sensors and processors to more closely replicate such capabilities
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It’s fascinating to me how many times butterflies inspire science,

Butterfly-inspired visuo-chemical integration. a) A simplified abstraction of visual and chemical stimuli from male butterflies and visuo-chemical integration pathway in female butterflies. b) Butterfly-inspired neuromorphic hardware comprising of monolayer MoS2 memtransistor-based visual afferent neuron, graphene-based chemoreceptor neuron, and MoS2 memtransistor-based neuro-mimetic mating circuits. Courtesy: Wiley/Penn State University Researchers

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A Butterfly-Inspired Multisensory Neuromorphic Platform for Integration of Visual and Chemical Cues by Yikai Zheng, Subir Ghosh, Saptarshi Das. Advanced Materials SOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202307380 First published: 09 December 2023

This paper is open access.

Study says quantum computing will radically alter the application of copyright law

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I was expecting more speculation about the possibilities that quantum computing might afford with regard to copyright law. According to the press release, this study is primarily focused on the impact that greater computing speed and power will have on copyright and, presumably, other forms of intellectual property. From a March 4, 2024 University of Exeter press release (also on EurekAlert),

Quantum computing will radically transform the application of the law – challenging long-held notions of copyright, a new study says.
Faster computing will bring exponentially greater possibilities in the tracking and tracing of the legal owners of art, music, culture and books.
This is likely to mean more copyright infringements, but also make it easier for lawyers to clamp down on lawbreaking. However, faster computers will also be able to potentially break and get around certain older enforcement technologies.
The research says quantum computing could lead to an “exponentially” greater number of re-uses of copyright works without permission, and tracking of anyone breaking the law is likely to be possible in many circumstances.
Dr James Griffin, from the University of Exeter [UK] Law School, who led the study, said: “Quantum computers will have sufficient computing power to be able to make judgement calls [emphasis mine] as to whether or not re-uses are likely to be copyright infringements, skirting the boundaries of the law in a way that has yet to be fully tested in practice.
“Copyright infringements could become more commonplace due to the use of quantum computers, but the enforcement of such laws could also increase. This will potentially favour certain forms of content over others.”
Content with embedded quantum watermarks will be more likely to be protected than earlier forms of content without such watermarks. The exponential speed of quantum computing brings will make it easier to be able to produce more copies of existing copyright works.
Existing artworks will be altered on a large scale for use in AI-generated artistic works. Enhanced computing power will see the reuse of elements of films such as scenes, characters, music and scripts.
Dr Griffin said: “The nature of quantum computing also means that there could be more enforcement of copyright law. we can expect that there will be more use of technological protection measures, as well as copyright management information devices such as watermarks, and more use of filtering mechanisms to be able to detect, prevent and contain copyright infringements.
Copyright management information techniques are better suited to quantum computers because they allow for more finely grained analysis of potential infringements, and because they require greater computing power to be able to be applied both broadly to computer software and the actions of the users of such software.
Dr Griffin said: “A quantum paradox [emphasis mine] is thus developing, in that there are likely to be more infringements possible, whilst technical devices will simultaneously develop in an attempt to prevent any alleged possible or potential copyright infringements. Content will increasingly be made in a manner difficult to break, with enhanced encryption.
“Meanwhile, due to the expense of large-scale quantum computing, we can expect more content to be streamed and less owned; content will be kept remotely in order to enhance the notion that utilising such data in breach of contractual terms would be akin to breaking into someone’s physical house or committing a similar fraudulent activity.
Quantum computers allow enable creators to make a large number of small-scale works. This could pose challenges regarding the tests of copyright originality. For example story written for a quantum computer game could be constantly changing and evolving according to the actions of the player, and not just simply according to predefined paths but utilising complex AI algorithms. [emphasis mine]

Some interesting issues are raised in this press release. (1) Can any computer, quantum or otherwise, make a judgment call? (2) The ‘quantum paradox’ seems like a perfectly predictable outcome. After all, regular computers facilitated all kinds of new opportunities for infringement and prevention. What makes this a ‘quantum paradox’? (3) The evolving computer game seems more like an AI issue. What makes this a quantum computing problem? The answers to these questions may be in the study but that presents a problem.

Ordinarily, I’d offer a link to the study but it’s not accessible until 2025. Here’s a citation,

Quantum Computing and Copyright Law: A Wave of Change or a Mere Irrelevant Particle? by James G. H. Griffin. Intellectual Property Quarterly 2024 Issue 1, pp. 22 – 39. Published February 21, 2024. Under embargo until 21 February 2025 [emphasis mine] in compliance with publisher policy

There is an online record for the study on this Open Research Exeter (ORE) webpage where you can request a copy of the paper.

Resurrection consent for digital cloning of the dead

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It’s a bit disconcerting to think that one might be resurrected, in this case, digitally, but Dr Masaki Iwasaki has helpfully published a study on attitudes to digital cloning and resurrection consent, which could prove helpful when establishing one’s final wishes.

A January 4, 2024 De Gruyter (publisher) press release (repurposed from a January 4, 2024 blog posting on De Gruyter.com) explains the idea and the study,

In a 2014 episode of sci-fi series Black Mirror, a grieving young widow reconnects with her dead husband using an app that trawls his social media history to mimic his online language, humor and personality. It works. She finds solace in the early interactions – but soon wants more.
Such a scenario is no longer fiction. In 2017, the company Eternime aimed to create an avatar of a dead person using their digital footprint, but this “Skype for the dead” didn’t catch on. The machine-learning and AI algorithms just weren’t ready for it. Neither were we.
Now, in 2024, amid exploding use of Chat GPT-like programs, similar efforts are on the way. But should digital resurrection be allowed at all? And are we prepared for the legal battles over what constitutes consent?
In a study published in the Asian Journal of Law and Economics, Dr Masaki Iwasaki of Harvard Law School and currently an assistant professor at Seoul National University, explores how the deceased’s consent (or otherwise) affects attitudes to digital resurrection.
US adults were presented with scenarios where a woman in her 20s dies in a car accident. A company offers to bring a digital version of her back, but her consent is, at first, ambiguous. What should her friends decide?
Two options – one where the deceased has consented to digital resurrection and another where she hasn’t – were read by participants at random. They then answered questions about the social acceptability of bringing her back on a five-point rating scale, considering other factors such as ethics and privacy concerns.
Results showed that expressed consent shifted acceptability two points higher compared to dissent. “Although I expected societal acceptability for digital resurrection to be higher when consent was expressed, the stark difference in acceptance rates – 58% for consent versus 3% for dissent – was surprising,” says Iwasaki. “This highlights the crucial role of the deceased’s wishes in shaping public opinion on digital resurrection.”
In fact, 59% of respondents disagreed with their own digital resurrection, and around 40% of respondents did not find any kind of digital resurrection socially acceptable, even with expressed consent. “While the will of the deceased is important in determining the societal acceptability of digital resurrection, other factors such as ethical concerns about life and death, along with general apprehension towards new technology are also significant,” says Iwasaki.
The results reflect a discrepancy between existing law and public sentiment. People’s general feelings – that the dead’s wishes should be respected – are actually not protected in most countries. The digitally recreated John Lennon in the film Forrest Gump, or animated hologram of Amy Winehouse reveal the ‘rights’ of the dead are easily overridden by those in the land of the living.
So, is your digital destiny something to consider when writing your will? It probably should be but in the current absence of clear legal regulations on the subject, the effectiveness of documenting your wishes in such a way is uncertain. For a start, how such directives are respected varies by legal jurisdiction. “But for those with strong preferences documenting their wishes could be meaningful,” says Iwasaki. “At a minimum, it serves as a clear communication of one’s will to family and associates, and may be considered when legal foundations are better established in the future.”
It’s certainly a conversation worth having now. Many generative AI chatbot services, such as like Replika (“The AI companion who cares”) and Project December (“Simulate the dead”) already enable conversations with chatbots replicating real people’s personalities. The service ‘You, Only Virtual’ (YOV) allows users to upload someone’s text messages, emails and voice conversations to create a ‘versona’ chatbot. And, in 2020, Microsoft obtained a patent to create chatbots from text, voice and image data for living people as well as for historical figures and fictional characters, with the option of rendering in 2D or 3D.
Iwasaki says he’ll investigate this and the digital resurrection of celebrities in future research. “It’s necessary first to discuss what rights should be protected, to what extent, then create rules accordingly,” he explains. “My research, building upon prior discussions in the field, argues that the opt-in rule requiring the deceased’s consent for digital resurrection might be one way to protect their rights.”

There is a link to the study in the press release above but this includes a citation, of sorts,

Digital Cloning of the Dead: Exploring the Optimal Default Rule by Masaki Iwasaki. Asian Journal of Law and Economics DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ajle-2023-0125 Published Online: 2023-12-27

This paper is open access.

Striking similarity between memory processing of artificial intelligence (AI) models and hippocampus of the human brain

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A December 18, 2023 news item on ScienceDaily shifted my focus from hardware to software when considering memory in brainlike (neuromorphic) computing,

An interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers from the Center for Cognition and Sociality and the Data Science Group within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) [Korea] revealed a striking similarity between the memory processing of artificial intelligence (AI) models and the hippocampus of the human brain. This new finding provides a novel perspective on memory consolidation, which is a process that transforms short-term memories into long-term ones, in AI systems.
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A November 28 (?), 2023 IBS press release (also on EurekAlert but published December 18, 2023, which originated the news item, describes how the team went about its research,

In the race towards developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with influential entities like OpenAI and Google DeepMind leading the way, understanding and replicating human-like intelligence has become an important research interest. Central to these technological advancements is the Transformer model [Figure 1], whose fundamental principles are now being explored in new depth.
The key to powerful AI systems is grasping how they learn and remember information. The team applied principles of human brain learning, specifically concentrating on memory consolidation through the NMDA receptor in the hippocampus, to AI models.
The NMDA receptor is like a smart door in your brain that facilitates learning and memory formation. When a brain chemical called glutamate is present, the nerve cell undergoes excitation. On the other hand, a magnesium ion acts as a small gatekeeper blocking the door. Only when this ionic gatekeeper steps aside, substances are allowed to flow into the cell. This is the process that allows the brain to create and keep memories, and the gatekeeper’s (the magnesium ion) role in the whole process is quite specific.
The team made a fascinating discovery: the Transformer model seems to use a gatekeeping process similar to the brain’s NMDA receptor [see Figure 1]. This revelation led the researchers to investigate if the Transformer’s memory consolidation can be controlled by a mechanism similar to the NMDA receptor’s gating process.
In the animal brain, a low magnesium level is known to weaken memory function. The researchers found that long-term memory in Transformer can be improved by mimicking the NMDA receptor. Just like in the brain, where changing magnesium levels affect memory strength, tweaking the Transformer’s parameters to reflect the gating action of the NMDA receptor led to enhanced memory in the AI model. This breakthrough finding suggests that how AI models learn can be explained with established knowledge in neuroscience.
C. Justin LEE, who is a neuroscientist director at the institute, said, “This research makes a crucial step in advancing AI and neuroscience. It allows us to delve deeper into the brain’s operating principles and develop more advanced AI systems based on these insights.”
CHA Meeyoung, who is a data scientist in the team and at KAIST [Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology], notes, “The human brain is remarkable in how it operates with minimal energy, unlike the large AI models that need immense resources. Our work opens up new possibilities for low-cost, high-performance AI systems that learn and remember information like humans.”
What sets this study apart is its initiative to incorporate brain-inspired nonlinearity into an AI construct, signifying a significant advancement in simulating human-like memory consolidation. The convergence of human cognitive mechanisms and AI design not only holds promise for creating low-cost, high-performance AI systems but also provides valuable insights into the workings of the brain through AI models.

Fig. 1: (a) Diagram illustrating the ion channel activity in post-synaptic neurons. AMPA receptors are involved in the activation of post-synaptic neurons, while NMDA receptors are blocked by magnesium ions (Mg²⁺) but induce synaptic plasticity through the influx of calcium ions (Ca²⁺) when the post-synaptic neuron is sufficiently activated. (b) Flow diagram representing the computational process within the Transformer AI model. Information is processed sequentially through stages such as feed-forward layers, layer normalization, and self-attention layers. The graph depicting the current-voltage relationship of the NMDA receptors is very similar to the nonlinearity of the feed-forward layer. The input-output graph, based on the concentration of magnesium (α), shows the changes in the nonlinearity of the NMDA receptors. Courtesy: IBS

This research was presented at the 37^th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) before being published in the proceedings, I found a PDF of the presentation and an early online copy of the paper before locating the paper in the published proceedings.

PDF of presentation: Transformer as a hippocampal memory consolidation model based on NMDAR-inspired nonlinearity

PDF copy of paper:

Transformer as a hippocampal memory consolidation model based on NMDAR-inspired nonlinearity by Dong-Kyum Kim, Jea Kwon, Meeyoung Cha, C. Justin Lee.

This paper was made available on OpenReview.net:

OpenReview is a platform for open peer review, open publishing, open access, open discussion, open recommendations, open directory, open API and open source.

It’s not clear to me if this paper is finalized or not and I don’t know if its presence on OpenReview constitutes publication.

Finally, the paper published in the proceedings,

Transformer as a hippocampal memory consolidation model based on NMDAR-inspired nonlinearity by Dong Kyum Kim, Jea Kwon, Meeyoung Cha, C. Justin Lee. Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track

This link will take you to the abstract, access the paper by clicking on the Paper tab.

A March 15, 2024 performance with sound sculptor and roboticist Moritz Simon Geist at SxSW (Texas) and two April 2024 TED talks in Vancouver (Canada)

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SxSW 2024 (Austin, Texas, US)

Here’s a preview of what you’ll be seeing if you are in Austin, Texas at SxSW 2024 for Moritz Simon Geist’s March 15, 2024 performance,

I have more details from a March 11, 2024 SxSW announcement (received via email),

Innovative Sound Sculptor and Roboticist Moritz Simon Geist Plays the MUTEK/Houndstoooth Showcase at Central Presbyterian Church March 15th [2024]
Event Details Date: March 15th [2024], 8:00 pm
Lineup
7:30 pm – Doors
8:00-8:40 pm – Moritz Simon Geist
9:00-9:40 pm – JFDR
10:00-10:40 pm – Hinako
11:00-11:50 pm – Aisha
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“Geist’s handmade robots made movements as simple as a ping-pong table flapping or coiling up to shoot, but the contact microphones and sound processing documented a percussive, electro, mini symphony.”  – Austin Chronicle
There’s mystery in Geist’s music. It’s heady, ASMR-infused dance music — there’s something special happening here, but it’s not immediately clear what.” –– Engadget
“For Geist, the instruments represent not just a new way to make music, but a new way to experience it. The instruments each have a visual component, which makes it possible to watch the sounds as Geist creates them.” – Wired
The performance is fascinating and bewildering, but the music itself provokes one to want to dance in a dimly lit nightclub.”  – MixMag
“It doesn’t get geekier than this”  – New York Times.
“These robots play electrifying techno music.”– CNET
German sonic artist Moritz Simon Geist will showcase his latest work “Don’t Look At Me” at the Central Presbyterian Church March 15th. With his new robotic instrument Geist is presenting a contemplative ambient performance around the themes attention economy, spatial sound and sine waves. “Don’t Look at Me” was developed as an interactive installation in 2023 in South Korea and uses resonator tubes, light, and vibrato elements to create a fascinating ever-changing soundscape. For the SXSW event, Geist is showcasing his latest compositions with this instrument.
Moritz is returning to SXSW 2024 with a handful of performances and robotic interventions. His works and performances revolve around the questions: How do machines, algorithms and humans interact? How can we find a playful way to interact with non-human music players? And can robots play techno?
Moritz and his team have been developing sound machines and kinetic installations for more than 10 years already, and his works and performances have been shown at festivals and stages around the world. For this SXSW, Moritz is bringing both performances for several techno shows as well as a contemplative ambient show at the Central Presbyterian Church on March 15th [2024]. Here he will present compositions for his latest work “Don’t Look At Me”.
Geist is well known for his performances and self-developed instruments using robots and mechanics as the main sound source. His works have been shown internationally and have been awarded numerous awards in the last years.
Of his return to SXSW, Moritz says, “SXSW 2024 is only the second time I’m playing ‘Don’t Look at Me’ with my new robotic instrument! Playing with a new instrument this complex is always like this first walk outside with a toddler: You never know where you end up: manic laughter at the playground or existential crying in the supermarket.” Regarding his ongoing fascination with machines as instruments, Moritz muses, “When I was younger, I played in a punk rock band, but at some point, I got really annoyed by my fellow musicians, so I swore to myself that I would never play with human musicians again. Jokes aside, I think robotics is a wonderful tool to give a body back to the normally electronically generated sound of techno. The main reason why I’m using robotics as a musical instrument is that the computer is, in my opinion, not the best tool for creating electronic sounds.”
More about Moritz Simon Geist and “Don’t Look at Me” https://www.moritzsimongeist.com/dont-look-at-me https://cloud.moritzsimongeist.com/s/yp9ZYsieH8wwDPD

TED 2024 (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

Should you be considering a ticket purchase for the April 15 – 19, 2024 TED event in Vancouver, the cheap ($6250 [USD?]) seats are sold out. Tickets at the next level up are $12,500 and after that, they are $25,000. Should you have more money to burn, you are of course free to become a patron.

A look at the 2024 list of speakers will tell you it is an eclectic list with a significant proportion of speakers focused on the topic of artificial intelligence/robotics.

The three speakers being highlighted here are not focused on artificial intelligence/robotics and have nothing in common with each other (topic wise).

First up, Bill Ackman, a very, very wealthy man, has a messy backstory. Here’s the short description followed by the long one,

Bill Ackman
Founder and CEO, Pershing Square Capital Management
TALK TOPIC
The activist investor playbook (in conversation with Alison Taylor)
Bill Ackman is founder and CEO of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management and a storied activist investor. He is the chairman of Howard Hughes Holdings, a real estate development and management company based in Texas, and a member of the board of Universal Music Group. He is also the co-trustee of The Pershing Square Foundation, a family foundation supporting those tackling important social issues worldwide. At TED2024, Ackman will be interviewed by business professor Alison Taylor.

Mr. Ackman is not entirely self-made, from his Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

…
Ackman was raised in Chappaqua, New York, the son of Ronnie I. (née Posner) and Lawrence David Ackman, the former chairman of a New York real estate financing firm, Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group. [emphases mine] ^[10][11][12] He is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.^[13][14][15] In 1988, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard College. His thesis was titled Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions.^[16] In 1992, he received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.^[17]

As for the messiness, there’s this from from his Wikipedia entry, Note 1: Links have been removed, Note 2: All emphases are mine,

…
In October 2023, following the onset of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war after the October 7 attack, several Harvard undergraduate student groups signed a letter condemning the Israeli state. The statement held the “Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” declared that millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been “forced to live in an open-air prison,” and called on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
In response, Ackman called for the publication of the names of all students involved in signing the letter so that he could ensure his company and others do not “inadvertently hire” any of the signatories. Ackman posted, “One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists,” and the names “should be made public so their views are publicly known”.^[83] Ackman’s stance was supported by other CEOs such as Jonathan Neman, David Duel and Jake Wurzak.^[84] Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, though agreeing with Ackman on the need to look at employees’ political views, called Ackman’s request for a list of names “the stuff of Joe McCarthy”.^[85]
In November 2023, Ackman defended Elon Musk after the latter expressed agreement with a user who asserted that “Jewish communities” supported “hordes of minorities flooding their country” and pushed “dialectical hatred against whites”, describing it as “shoot from the hip commentary”.^[86][87]
Ackman also engaged in a campaign to remove Claudine Gay from her position as Harvard’s president. He argued that her response to antisemitism was insufficient and amplified allegations by conservative media that she engaged in plagiarism.^[88][89]
On January 3, 2024, Business Insider published an article alleging that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman*, plagiarized portions of her dissertation. A day after the article’s publication, Oxman apologized for plagiarizing portions of her dissertation.^[90][91] Ackman, in response to the article, pledged to conduct a plagiarism review of all MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] faculty, including MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, who, alongside Gay, attended a congressional hearing on antisemitism in higher education.^[90]
…
In 2018, Ackman became engaged to Neri Oxman.^[94] In January 2019, Oxman and Ackman married at the Central Synagogue in Manhattan,^[13] and they had their first child together in spring 2019.^[95] In August 2019, Ackman wrote to MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito to discourage him from mentioning Oxman when discussing convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had donated $125,000 to Oxman’s lab.^[96]
…

*There are more complications where Neri Oxman is concerned. She is an Israeli-American who came to the US in 2005 where she commenced PhD studies at MIT. After graduation she became a professor at MIT, a position she has left to found Oxman Architects in 2020. Despite the company name, the business seems more focused on art installations and experimental work. (sourced from Oxman’s Wikipedia entry)*

I wonder how Mr. Ackman characterizes the difference between activism and actions, which result in the destruction of other people’s careers because you disagree with them.

Ackman’s interviewer, Alison Taylor is an interesting choice given that she is a business professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of a February 6, 2024 article (Corporate Advocacy in a Time of Social Outrage; Businesses can’t weigh in on every issue that employees care about. But they can create a culture of open dialogue and ethical transparency [emphasis mine]) for the Harvard Business Review, The article is excerpted from Taylor’s book, “Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World,” published by Harvard Business Review Press, Feb. 13 2024.

This talk looks like an attempt to rehabilitate Mr. Ackman’s reputation while giving Ms. Taylor publicity for her newly published book in an environment where neither is likely to be strongly challenged.

The two speakers I’m most excited about are Tammy Ma, fusion physicist, and Brian Stokes Mitchell, actor and singer.

As there is a local company known as General Fusion, the topic of fusion energy has been covered here a number of times including a relevant to Ms. Ma’s TED appearance December 13, 2022 posting, “US announces fusion energy breakthrough.”

From the 2024 list of TED speakers,

Tammy Ma
Fusion physicist
TALK TOPIC
The future of fusion
LinkedIn
Tammy Ma is the lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she creates miniature stars in order to develop ways to harness their power as a clean, limitless energy source for the future. She was a member of the team at the National Ignition Facility that achieved fusion ignition in December 2022 — a reaction that, for the first time in history, released more energy than it consumed. [emphasis mine] A fellow of the American Physical Society, she serves on the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, advising the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science on issues related to fusion energy and plasma research.

Now for someone completely different, Brian Stokes Mitchell, from the 2024 list of TED speakers,

Brian Stokes Mitchell
Actor, singer
TALK TOPIC
A celebration of spectacle (with Lear DeBessonet [award-winning Broadway director who specializes in creating large-scale performances])
brianstokes.com
YouTube:
@brianstokesmitchell7280
Brian Stokes Mitchell is a Tony-winning actor, singer and music producer. A veteran of 11 Broadway shows and a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame, he has performed iconic roles including Frasier’s snarky upstairs neighbor Cam, Hillary’s bungie-jumping boyfriend on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Prince of Egypt (singing “Through Heaven’s Eyes”) and, most recently, Stanley Townsend in the 2024 feature film Shirley with Regina King. He has performed twice at the White House, serves on the board of Americans for the Arts and is one of the founding members of Black Theatre United.

Stokes Mitchell performed at the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song ceremony in 2017 when Tony Bennett was the honoree. The performances were top notch but something happened when Stokes Mitchell took the stage for his first number. The audience was electrified as was every performer who came after him, some of them giving their second performance of the evening. There is no guarantee that Mr. Stoke Mitchell can do that at his 2024 TED talk but that is the blessing and the curse of live performances.

Enjoy!

Chatbot with expertise in nanomaterials

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This December 1, 2023 news item on phys.org starts with a story,

A researcher has just finished writing a scientific paper. She knows her work could benefit from another perspective. Did she overlook something? Or perhaps there’s an application of her research she hadn’t thought of. A second set of eyes would be great, but even the friendliest of collaborators might not be able to spare the time to read all the required background publications to catch up.
Kevin Yager—leader of the electronic nanomaterials group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—has imagined how recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could aid scientific brainstorming and ideation. To accomplish this, he has developed a chatbot with knowledge in the kinds of science he’s been engaged in.
…

A December 1, 2023 DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory news release by Denise Yazak (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes a research project with a chatbot that has nanomaterial-specific knowledge, Note: Links have been removed,

Rapid advances in AI and ML have given way to programs that can generate creative text and useful software code. These general-purpose chatbots have recently captured the public imagination. Existing chatbots—based on large, diverse language models—lack detailed knowledge of scientific sub-domains. By leveraging a document-retrieval method, Yager’s bot is knowledgeable in areas of nanomaterial science that other bots are not. The details of this project and how other scientists can leverage this AI colleague for their own work have recently been published in Digital Discovery.
Rise of the Robots
“CFN has been looking into new ways to leverage AI/ML to accelerate nanomaterial discovery for a long time. Currently, it’s helping us quickly identify, catalog, and choose samples, automate experiments, control equipment, and discover new materials. Esther Tsai, a scientist in the electronic nanomaterials group at CFN, is developing an AI companion to help speed up materials research experiments at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II).” NSLS-II is another DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab.
At CFN, there has been a lot of work on AI/ML that can help drive experiments through the use of automation, controls, robotics, and analysis, but having a program that was adept with scientific text was something that researchers hadn’t explored as deeply. Being able to quickly document, understand, and convey information about an experiment can help in a number of ways—from breaking down language barriers to saving time by summarizing larger pieces of work.
Watching Your Language
To build a specialized chatbot, the program required domain-specific text—language taken from areas the bot is intended to focus on. In this case, the text is scientific publications. Domain-specific text helps the AI model understand new terminology and definitions and introduces it to frontier scientific concepts. Most importantly, this curated set of documents enables the AI model to ground its reasoning using trusted facts.
To emulate natural human language, AI models are trained on existing text, enabling them to learn the structure of language, memorize various facts, and develop a primitive sort of reasoning. Rather than laboriously retrain the AI model on nanoscience text, Yager gave it the ability to look up relevant information in a curated set of publications. Providing it with a library of relevant data was only half of the battle. To use this text accurately and effectively, the bot would need a way to decipher the correct context.
“A challenge that’s common with language models is that sometimes they ‘hallucinate’ plausible sounding but untrue things,” explained Yager. “This has been a core issue to resolve for a chatbot used in research as opposed to one doing something like writing poetry. We don’t want it to fabricate facts or citations. This needed to be addressed. The solution for this was something we call ‘embedding,’ a way of categorizing and linking information quickly behind the scenes.”
Embedding is a process that transforms words and phrases into numerical values. The resulting “embedding vector” quantifies the meaning of the text. When a user asks the chatbot a question, it’s also sent to the ML embedding model to calculate its vector value. This vector is used to search through a pre-computed database of text chunks from scientific papers that were similarly embedded. The bot then uses text snippets it finds that are semantically related to the question to get a more complete understanding of the context.
The user’s query and the text snippets are combined into a “prompt” that is sent to a large language model, an expansive program that creates text modeled on natural human language, that generates the final response. The embedding ensures that the text being pulled is relevant in the context of the user’s question. By providing text chunks from the body of trusted documents, the chatbot generates answers that are factual and sourced.
“The program needs to be like a reference librarian,” said Yager. “It needs to heavily rely on the documents to provide sourced answers. It needs to be able to accurately interpret what people are asking and be able to effectively piece together the context of those questions to retrieve the most relevant information. While the responses may not be perfect yet, it’s already able to answer challenging questions and trigger some interesting thoughts while planning new projects and research.”
Bots Empowering Humans
CFN is developing AI/ML systems as tools that can liberate human researchers to work on more challenging and interesting problems and to get more out of their limited time while computers automate repetitive tasks in the background. There are still many unknowns about this new way of working, but these questions are the start of important discussions scientists are having right now to ensure AI/ML use is safe and ethical.
“There are a number of tasks that a domain-specific chatbot like this could clear from a scientist’s workload. Classifying and organizing documents, summarizing publications, pointing out relevant info, and getting up to speed in a new topical area are just a few potential applications,” remarked Yager. “I’m excited to see where all of this will go, though. We never could have imagined where we are now three years ago, and I’m looking forward to where we’ll be three years from now.”
For researchers interested in trying this software out for themselves, the source code for CFN’s chatbot and associated tools can be found in this github repository.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Domain-specific chatbots for science using embeddings by Kevin G. Yager.
Digital Discovery, 2023,2, 1850-1861 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3DD00112A
First published 10 Oct 2023

This paper appears to be open access.

Portable and non-invasive (?) mind-reading AI (artificial intelligence) turns thoughts into text and some thoughts about the near future

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First, here’s some of the latest research and if by ‘non-invasive,’ you mean that electrodes are not being planted in your brain, then this December 12, 2023 University of Technology Sydney (UTS) press release (also on EurekAlert) highlights non-invasive mind-reading AI via a brain-computer interface (BCI), Note: Links have been removed,

In a world-first, researchers from the GrapheneX-UTS Human-centric Artificial Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have developed a portable, non-invasive system that can decode silent thoughts and turn them into text.

The technology could aid communication for people who are unable to speak due to illness or injury, including stroke or paralysis. It could also enable seamless communication between humans and machines, such as the operation of a bionic arm or robot.

The study has been selected as the spotlight paper at the NeurIPS conference, a top-tier annual meeting that showcases world-leading research on artificial intelligence and machine learning, held in New Orleans on 12 December 2023.

The research was led by Distinguished Professor CT Lin, Director of the GrapheneX-UTS HAI Centre, together with first author Yiqun Duan and fellow PhD candidate Jinzhou Zhou from the UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT.

In the study participants silently read passages of text while wearing a cap that recorded electrical brain activity through their scalp using an electroencephalogram (EEG). A demonstration of the technology can be seen in this video [See UTS press release].
The EEG wave is segmented into distinct units that capture specific characteristics and patterns from the human brain. This is done by an AI model called DeWave developed by the researchers. DeWave translates EEG signals into words and sentences by learning from large quantities of EEG data.

“This research represents a pioneering effort in translating raw EEG waves directly into language, marking a significant breakthrough in the field,” said Distinguished Professor Lin.

“It is the first to incorporate discrete encoding techniques in the brain-to-text translation process, introducing an innovative approach to neural decoding. The integration with large language models is also opening new frontiers in neuroscience and AI,” he said.

Previous technology to translate brain signals to language has either required surgery to implant electrodes in the brain, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink [emphasis mine], or scanning in an MRI machine, which is large, expensive, and difficult to use in daily life.

These methods also struggle to transform brain signals into word level segments without additional aids such as eye-tracking, which restrict the practical application of these systems. The new technology is able to be used either with or without eye-tracking.

The UTS research was carried out with 29 participants. This means it is likely to be more robust and adaptable than previous decoding technology that has only been tested on one or two individuals, because EEG waves differ between individuals.

The use of EEG signals received through a cap, rather than from electrodes implanted in the brain, means that the signal is noisier. In terms of EEG translation however, the study reported state-of the art performance, surpassing previous benchmarks.

“The model is more adept at matching verbs than nouns. However, when it comes to nouns, we saw a tendency towards synonymous pairs rather than precise translations, such as ‘the man’ instead of ‘the author’,” said Duan. [emphases mine; synonymous, eh? what about ‘woman’ or ‘child’ instead of the ‘man’?]

“We think this is because when the brain processes these words, semantically similar words might produce similar brain wave patterns. Despite the challenges, our model yields meaningful results, aligning keywords and forming similar sentence structures,” he said.

The translation accuracy score is currently around 40% on BLEU-1. The BLEU score is a number between zero and one that measures the similarity of the machine-translated text to a set of high-quality reference translations. The researchers hope to see this improve to a level that is comparable to traditional language translation or speech recognition programs, which is closer to 90%.
The research follows on from previous brain-computer interface technology developed by UTS in association with the Australian Defence Force [ADF] that uses brainwaves to command a quadruped robot, which is demonstrated in this ADF video [See my June 13, 2023 posting, “Mind-controlled robots based on graphene: an Australian research story” for the story and embedded video].

About one month after the research announcement regarding the University of Technology Sydney’s ‘non-invasive’ brain-computer interface (BCI), I stumbled across an in-depth piece about the field of ‘non-invasive’ mind-reading research.

Neurotechnology and neurorights

Fletcher Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article on salon.com (originally published January 3, 2024 on Undark) shows how quickly the field is developing and raises concerns, Note: Links have been removed,

One afternoon in May 2020, Jerry Tang, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, sat staring at a cryptic string of words scrawled across his computer screen:
“I am not finished yet to start my career at twenty without having gotten my license I never have to pull out and run back to my parents to take me home.”
The sentence was jumbled and agrammatical. But to Tang, it represented a remarkable feat: A computer pulling a thought, however disjointed, from a person’s mind.
For weeks, ever since the pandemic had shuttered his university and forced his lab work online, Tang had been at home tweaking a semantic decoder — a brain-computer interface, or BCI, that generates text from brain scans. Prior to the university’s closure, study participants had been providing data to train the decoder for months, listening to hours of storytelling podcasts while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine logged their brain responses. Then, the participants had listened to a new story — one that had not been used to train the algorithm — and those fMRI scans were fed into the decoder, which used GPT1, a predecessor to the ubiquitous AI chatbot ChatGPT, to spit out a text prediction of what it thought the participant had heard. For this snippet, Tang compared it to the original story:
“Although I’m twenty-three years old I don’t have my driver’s license yet and I just jumped out right when I needed to and she says well why don’t you come back to my house and I’ll give you a ride.”
The decoder was not only capturing the gist of the original, but also producing exact matches of specific words — twenty, license. When Tang shared the results with his adviser, a UT Austin neuroscientist named Alexander Huth who had been working towards building such a decoder for nearly a decade, Huth was floored. “Holy shit,” Huth recalled saying. “This is actually working.” By the fall of 2021, the scientists were testing the device with no external stimuli at all — participants simply imagined a story and the decoder spat out a recognizable, albeit somewhat hazy, description of it. “What both of those experiments kind of point to,” said Huth, “is the fact that what we’re able to read out here was really like the thoughts, like the idea.”
The scientists brimmed with excitement over the potentially life-altering medical applications of such a device — restoring communication to people with locked-in syndrome, for instance, whose near full-body paralysis made talking impossible. But just as the potential benefits of the decoder snapped into focus, so too did the thorny ethical questions posed by its use. Huth himself had been one of the three primary test subjects in the experiments, and the privacy implications of the device now seemed visceral: “Oh my god,” he recalled thinking. “We can look inside my brain.”
Huth’s reaction mirrored a longstanding concern in neuroscience and beyond: that machines might someday read people’s minds. And as BCI technology advances at a dizzying clip, that possibility and others like it — that computers of the future could alter human identities, for example, or hinder free will — have begun to seem less remote. “The loss of mental privacy, this is a fight we have to fight today,” said Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscientist. “That could be irreversible. If we lose our mental privacy, what else is there to lose? That’s it, we lose the essence of who we are.”
Spurred by these concerns, Yuste and several colleagues have launched an international movement advocating for “neurorights” — a set of five principles Yuste argues should be enshrined in law as a bulwark against potential misuse and abuse of neurotechnology. But he may be running out of time.
…

Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article provides fascinating context and is well worth reading if you have the time.

For my purposes, I’m focusing on ethics, Note: Links have been removed,

… as these and other advances propelled the field forward, and as his own research revealed the discomfiting vulnerability of the brain to external manipulation, Yuste found himself increasingly concerned by the scarce attention being paid to the ethics of these technologies. Even Obama’s multi-billion-dollar BRAIN Initiative, a government program designed to advance brain research, which Yuste had helped launch in 2013 and supported heartily, seemed to mostly ignore the ethical and societal consequences of the research it funded. “There was zero effort on the ethical side,” Yuste recalled.
…
Yuste was appointed to the rotating advisory group of the BRAIN Initiative in 2015, where he began to voice his concerns. That fall, he joined an informal working group to consider the issue. “We started to meet, and it became very evident to me that the situation was a complete disaster,” Yuste said. “There was no guidelines, no work done.” Yuste said he tried to get the group to generate a set of ethical guidelines for novel BCI technologies, but the effort soon became bogged down in bureaucracy. Frustrated, he stepped down from the committee and, together with a University of Washington bioethicist named Sara Goering, decided to independently pursue the issue. “Our aim here is not to contribute to or feed fear for doomsday scenarios,” the pair wrote in a 2016 article in Cell, “but to ensure that we are reflective and intentional as we prepare ourselves for the neurotechnological future.”
In the fall of 2017, Yuste and Goering called a meeting at the Morningside Campus of Columbia, inviting nearly 30 experts from all over the world in such fields as neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, medical ethics, and the law. By then, several other countries had launched their own versions of the BRAIN Initiative, and representatives from Australia, Canada [emphasis mine], China, Europe, Israel, South Korea, and Japan joined the Morningside gathering, along with veteran neuroethicists and prominent researchers. “We holed ourselves up for three days to study the ethical and societal consequences of neurotechnology,” Yuste said. “And we came to the conclusion that this is a human rights issue. These methods are going to be so powerful, that enable to access and manipulate mental activity, and they have to be regulated from the angle of human rights. That’s when we coined the term ‘neurorights.’”
The Morningside group, as it became known, identified four principal ethical priorities, which were later expanded by Yuste into five clearly defined neurorights: The right to mental privacy, which would ensure that brain data would be kept private and its use, sale, and commercial transfer would be strictly regulated; the right to personal identity, which would set boundaries on technologies that could disrupt one’s sense of self; the right to fair access to mental augmentation, which would ensure equality of access to mental enhancement neurotechnologies; the right of protection from bias in the development of neurotechnology algorithms; and the right to free will, which would protect an individual’s agency from manipulation by external neurotechnologies. The group published their findings in an often-cited paper in Nature.
But while Yuste and the others were focused on the ethical implications of these emerging technologies, the technologies themselves continued to barrel ahead at a feverish speed. In 2014, the first kick of the World Cup was made by a paraplegic man using a mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton. In 2016, a man fist bumped Obama using a robotic arm that allowed him to “feel” the gesture. The following year, scientists showed that electrical stimulation of the hippocampus could improve memory, paving the way for cognitive augmentation technologies. The military, long interested in BCI technologies, built a system that allowed operators to pilot three drones simultaneously, partially with their minds. Meanwhile, a confusing maelstrom of science, science-fiction, hype, innovation, and speculation swept the private sector. By 2020, over $33 billion had been invested in hundreds of neurotech companies — about seven times what the NIH [US National Institutes of Health] had envisioned for the 12-year span of the BRAIN Initiative itself.
…

Now back to Tang and Huth (from Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article), Note: Links have been removed,

Central to the ethical questions Huth and Tang grappled with was the fact that their decoder, unlike other language decoders developed around the same time, was non-invasive — it didn’t require its users to undergo surgery. Because of that, their technology was free from the strict regulatory oversight that governs the medical domain. (Yuste, for his part, said he believes non-invasive BCIs pose a far greater ethical challenge than invasive systems: “The non-invasive, the commercial, that’s where the battle is going to get fought.”) Huth and Tang’s decoder faced other hurdles to widespread use — namely that fMRI machines are enormous, expensive, and stationary. But perhaps, the researchers thought, there was a way to overcome that hurdle too.
The information measured by fMRI machines — blood oxygenation levels, which indicate where blood is flowing in the brain — can also be measured with another technology, functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, or fNIRS. Although lower resolution than fMRI, several expensive, research-grade, wearable fNIRS headsets do approach the resolution required to work with Huth and Tang’s decoder. In fact, the scientists were able to test whether their decoder would work with such devices by simply blurring their fMRI data to simulate the resolution of research-grade fNIRS. The decoded result “doesn’t get that much worse,” Huth said.
And while such research-grade devices are currently cost-prohibitive for the average consumer, more rudimentary fNIRS headsets have already hit the market. Although these devices provide far lower resolution than would be required for Huth and Tang’s decoder to work effectively, the technology is continually improving, and Huth believes it is likely that an affordable, wearable fNIRS device will someday provide high enough resolution to be used with the decoder. In fact, he is currently teaming up with scientists at Washington University to research the development of such a device.
Even comparatively primitive BCI headsets can raise pointed ethical questions when released to the public. Devices that rely on electroencephalography, or EEG, a commonplace method of measuring brain activity by detecting electrical signals, have now become widely available — and in some cases have raised alarm. In 2019, a school in Jinhua, China, drew criticism after trialing EEG headbands that monitored the concentration levels of its pupils. (The students were encouraged to compete to see who concentrated most effectively, and reports were sent to their parents.) Similarly, in 2018 the South China Morning Post reported that dozens of factories and businesses had begun using “brain surveillance devices” to monitor workers’ emotions, in the hopes of increasing productivity and improving safety. The devices “caused some discomfort and resistance in the beginning,” Jin Jia, then a brain scientist at Ningbo University, told the reporter. “After a while, they got used to the device.”
But the primary problem with even low-resolution devices is that scientists are only just beginning to understand how information is actually encoded in brain data. In the future, powerful new decoding algorithms could discover that even raw, low-resolution EEG data contains a wealth of information about a person’s mental state at the time of collection. Consequently, nobody can definitively know what they are giving away when they allow companies to collect information from their brains.
Huth and Tang concluded that brain data, therefore, should be closely guarded, especially in the realm of consumer products. In an article on Medium from last April, Tang wrote that “decoding technology is continually improving, and the information that could be decoded from a brain scan a year from now may be very different from what can be decoded today. It is crucial that companies are transparent about what they intend to do with brain data and take measures to ensure that brain data is carefully protected.” (Yuste said the Neurorights Foundation recently surveyed the user agreements of 30 neurotech companies and found that all of them claim ownership of users’ brain data — and most assert the right to sell that data to third parties. [emphases mine]) Despite these concerns, however, Huth and Tang maintained that the potential benefits of these technologies outweighed their risks, provided the proper guardrails [emphasis mine] were put in place.
…

It would seem the first guardrails are being set up in South America (from Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article), Note: Links have been removed,

On a hot summer night in 2019, Yuste sat in the courtyard of an adobe hotel in the north of Chile with his close friend, the prominent Chilean doctor and then-senator Guido Girardi, observing the vast, luminous skies of the Atacama Desert and discussing, as they often did, the world of tomorrow. Girardi, who every year organizes the Congreso Futuro, Latin America’s preeminent science and technology event, had long been intrigued by the accelerating advance of technology and its paradigm-shifting impact on society — “living in the world at the speed of light,” as he called it. Yuste had been a frequent speaker at the conference, and the two men shared a conviction that scientists were birthing technologies powerful enough to disrupt the very notion of what it meant to be human.
Around midnight, as Yuste finished his pisco sour, Girardi made an intriguing proposal: What if they worked together to pass an amendment to Chile’s constitution, one that would enshrine protections for mental privacy as an inviolable right of every Chilean? It was an ambitious idea, but Girardi had experience moving bold pieces of legislation through the senate; years earlier he had spearheaded Chile’s famous Food Labeling and Advertising Law, which required companies to affix health warning labels on junk food. (The law has since inspired dozens of countries to pursue similar legislation.) With BCI, here was another chance to be a trailblazer. “I said to Rafael, ‘Well, why don’t we create the first neuro data protection law?’” Girardi recalled. Yuste readily agreed.
…
… Girardi led the political push, promoting a piece of legislation that would amend Chile’s constitution to protect mental privacy. The effort found surprising purchase across the political spectrum, a remarkable feat in a country famous for its political polarization. In 2021, Chile’s congress unanimously passed the constitutional amendment, which Piñera [Sebastián Piñera] swiftly signed into law. (A second piece of legislation, which would establish a regulatory framework for neurotechnology, is currently under consideration by Chile’s congress.) “There was no divide between the left or right,” recalled Girardi. “This was maybe the only law in Chile that was approved by unanimous vote.” Chile, then, had become the first country in the world to enshrine “neurorights” in its legal code.
…
Even before the passage of the Chilean constitutional amendment, Yuste had begun meeting regularly with Jared Genser, an international human rights lawyer who had represented such high-profile clients as Desmond Tutu, Liu Xiaobo, and Aung San Suu Kyi. (The New York Times Magazine once referred to Genser as “the extractor” for his work with political prisoners.) Yuste was seeking guidance on how to develop an international legal framework to protect neurorights, and Genser, though he had just a cursory knowledge of neurotechnology, was immediately captivated by the topic. “It’s fair to say he blew my mind in the first hour of discussion,” recalled Genser. Soon thereafter, Yuste, Genser, and a private-sector entrepreneur named Jamie Daves launched the Neurorights Foundation, a nonprofit whose first goal, according to its website, is “to protect the human rights of all people from the potential misuse or abuse of neurotechnology.”
To accomplish this, the organization has sought to engage all levels of society, from the United Nations and regional governing bodies like the Organization of American States, down to national governments, the tech industry, scientists, and the public at large. Such a wide-ranging approach, said Genser, “is perhaps insanity on our part, or grandiosity. But nonetheless, you know, it’s definitely the Wild West as it comes to talking about these issues globally, because so few people know about where things are, where they’re heading, and what is necessary.”
This general lack of knowledge about neurotech, in all strata of society, has largely placed Yuste in the role of global educator — he has met several times with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, for example, to discuss the potential dangers of emerging neurotech. And these efforts are starting to yield results. Guterres’s 2021 report, “Our Common Agenda,” which sets forth goals for future international cooperation, urges “updating or clarifying our application of human rights frameworks and standards to address frontier issues,” such as “neuro-technology.” Genser attributes the inclusion of this language in the report to Yuste’s advocacy efforts.
But updating international human rights law is difficult, and even within the Neurorights Foundation there are differences of opinion regarding the most effective approach. For Yuste, the ideal solution would be the creation of a new international agency, akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency — but for neurorights. “My dream would be to have an international convention about neurotechnology, just like we had one about atomic energy and about certain things, with its own treaty,” he said. “And maybe an agency that would essentially supervise the world’s efforts in neurotechnology.”
Genser, however, believes that a new treaty is unnecessary, and that neurorights can be codified most effectively by extending interpretation of existing international human rights law to include them. The International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, for example, already ensures the general right to privacy, and an updated interpretation of the law could conceivably clarify that that clause extends to mental privacy as well.
…

There is no need for immediate panic (from Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article),

…
… while Yuste and the others continue to grapple with the complexities of international and national law, Huth and Tang have found that, for their decoder at least, the greatest privacy guardrails come not from external institutions but rather from something much closer to home — the human mind itself. Following the initial success of their decoder, as the pair read widely about the ethical implications of such a technology, they began to think of ways to assess the boundaries of the decoder’s capabilities. “We wanted to test a couple kind of principles of mental privacy,” said Huth. Simply put, they wanted to know if the decoder could be resisted.
In late 2021, the scientists began to run new experiments. First, they were curious if an algorithm trained on one person could be used on another. They found that it could not — the decoder’s efficacy depended on many hours of individualized training. Next, they tested whether the decoder could be thrown off simply by refusing to cooperate with it. Instead of focusing on the story that was playing through their headphones while inside the fMRI machine, participants were asked to complete other mental tasks, such as naming random animals, or telling a different story in their head. “Both of those rendered it completely unusable,” Huth said. “We didn’t decode the story they were listening to, and we couldn’t decode anything about what they were thinking either.”
…

Given how quickly this field of research is progressing, it seems like a good idea to increase efforts to establish neurorights (from Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article),

For Yuste, however, technologies like Huth and Tang’s decoder may only mark the beginning of a mind-boggling new chapter in human history, one in which the line between human brains and computers will be radically redrawn — or erased completely. A future is conceivable, he said, where humans and computers fuse permanently, leading to the emergence of technologically augmented cyborgs. “When this tsunami hits us I would say it’s not likely it’s for sure that humans will end up transforming themselves — ourselves — into maybe a hybrid species,” Yuste said. He is now focused on preparing for this future.
In the last several years, Yuste has traveled to multiple countries, meeting with a wide assortment of politicians, supreme court justices, U.N. committee members, and heads of state. And his advocacy is beginning to yield results. In August, Mexico began considering a constitutional reform that would establish the right to mental privacy. Brazil is currently considering a similar proposal, while Spain, Argentina, and Uruguay have also expressed interest, as has the European Union. In September [2023], neurorights were officially incorporated into Mexico’s digital rights charter, while in Chile, a landmark Supreme Court ruling found that Emotiv Inc, a company that makes a wearable EEG headset, violated Chile’s newly minted mental privacy law. That suit was brought by Yuste’s friend and collaborator, Guido Girardi.
…
“This is something that we should take seriously,” he [Huth] said. “Because even if it’s rudimentary right now, where is that going to be in five years? What was possible five years ago? What’s possible now? Where’s it gonna be in five years? Where’s it gonna be in 10 years? I think the range of reasonable possibilities includes things that are — I don’t want to say like scary enough — but like dystopian enough that I think it’s certainly a time for us to think about this.”

You can find The Neurorights Foundation here and/or read Reveley’s January 18, 2024 article on salon.com or as originally published January 3, 2024 on Undark. Finally, thank you for the article, Fletcher Reveley!

AR (smart) glasses skew power balance with non-wearers

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Just when I thought I was almost caught up, I found this. The study I will be highlighting is from August 2023 but there are interesting developments all the way into October 2023 and beyond. First, the latest in AI (artificial intelligence) devices from an October 5, 2023 article by Lucas Arender for the Daily Hive, which describes the devices as AI wearables (you could also them wearable technology), Note: Links have been removed,

Rewind.ai launched Pendant, a necklace that records your conversations and transfers them to your smartphone, creating an audio database (of sorts) for your life.
Meta unveiled a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses that include an AI chatbot that users can communicate with (which might make you look like you’re talking to yourself).
Sam Altman-backed startup Humane teased its new AI pin at Paris Fashion Week— a screenless lapel device that projects a smartphone-like interface onto users’ hands.
Microsoft filed a patent for an AI backpack that features GPS, voice command, and cameras that could… help us walk in the right direction?

The second item in the list ‘Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses’ is further described in an October 17, 2023 article by Sarah Bartnicka for the Daily Hive, Note: A link has been removed,

It’s a glorious day for tech dads everywhere: Meta and Ray-Ban smart glasses are officially for sale in Canada.
Driving the news: Meta has become the latest billion-dollar company to officially enter the smart glasses market with the second iteration [emphasis mine] of its design with Ray-Bans, now including a built-in Meta AI assistant, hands-free live streaming features, and a personal audio system.
…
This time around, the technology is better, and both Meta and Snap are pitching their smart glasses as a tool for creators to stay connected with their audiences rather than just a sleek piece of hardware that can blend your digital and physical realities [augmented or extended reality?].
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Yes, but: As smart glasses creep back into the limelight, people are wary about wearing cameras on their faces. Concerns about always-on cameras and microphones that allow users to record their surroundings without the consent of others will likely stick around. [emphasis mine]

So, are these AI or smart or augmented reality (AR) glasses? In my October 22, 2021 post, I explored a number of realities in the context of the metaverse. Yes, it gets confusing. At any rate, i found these definitions,

Happily, I have found a good summarized description of VR/AR/MR/XR in a March 20, 2018 essay by North of 41 on medium.com,
“Summary: VR is immersing people into a completely virtual environment; AR is creating an overlay of virtual content, but can’t interact with the environment; MR is a mixed of virtual reality and the reality, it creates virtual objects that can interact with the actual environment. XR brings all three Reality (AR, VR, MR) together under one term.”
If you have the interest and approximately five spare minutes, read the entire March 20, 2018 essay, which has embedded images illustrating the various realities.
…

This may change over time but for now, answering the question, “AI or smart or augmented reality (AR) glasses?” you can say any or all three.

Research from August 2023 and power imbalance

This August 28, 2023 Cornell University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Patricia Waldron uses the terms ‘smart’ and ‘augmented reality’, interchangeably or synonymously, Note: Links have been removed,

Someone wearing augmented reality (AR) or “smart” glasses could be Googling your face, turning you into a cat or recording your conversation – and that creates a major power imbalance, said Cornell researchers.
Currently, most work on AR glasses focuses primarily on the experience of the wearer. Researchers from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and Brown University teamed up to explore how this technology affects interactions between the wearer and another person. Their explorations showed that, while the device generally made the wearer less anxious, things weren’t so rosy on the other side of the glasses.
Jenny Fu, a doctoral student in the field of information science, presented the findings in a new study, “Negotiating Dyadic Interactions through the Lens of Augmented Reality Glasses,” at the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference in July.
AR glasses superimpose virtual objects and text over the field of view to create a mixed-reality world for the user. Some designs are big and bulky, but as AR technology advances, smart glasses are becoming indistinguishable from regular glasses, raising concerns that a wearer could be secretly recording someone or even generating deepfakes with their likeness.
For the new study, Fu and co-author Malte Jung, associate professor of information science and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, worked with Ji Won Chung, a doctoral student, and Jeff Huang, associate professor of computer science, both at Brown, and Zachary Deocadiz-Smith, an independent extended reality designer.
They observed five pairs of individuals – a wearer and a non-wearer – as each pair discussed a desert survival activity. The wearer received Spectacles, an AR glasses prototype on loan from Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat. The Spectacles look like avant-garde sunglasses and, for the study, came equipped with a video camera and five custom filters that transformed the non-wearer into a deer, cat, bear, clown or pig-bunny.
Following the activity, the pairs engaged in a participatory design session where they discussed how AR glasses could be improved, both for the wearer and the non-wearer. The participants were also interviewed and asked to reflect on their experiences.
According to the wearers, the fun filters reduced their anxiety and put them at ease during the exercise. The non-wearers, however, reported feeling disempowered because they didn’t know what was happening on the other side of the lenses. They were also upset that the filters robbed them of control over their own appearance. The possibility that the wearer could be secretly recording them without consent – especially when they didn’t know what they looked like – also put the non-wearers at a disadvantage.
The non-wearers weren’t completely powerless, however. A few demanded to know what the wearer was seeing, and moved their faces or bodies to evade the filters – giving them some control in negotiating their presence in the invisible mixed-reality world. “I think that’s the biggest takeaway I have from this study: I’m more powerful than I thought I was,” Fu said.
Another issue is that, like many AR glasses, Spectacles have darkened lenses so the wearer can see the projected virtual images. This lack of transparency also degraded the quality of the social interaction, the researchers reported.
“There is no direct eye contact, which makes people very confused, because they don’t know where the person is looking,” Fu said. “That makes their experiences of this conversation less pleasant, because the glasses blocked out all these nonverbal interactions.”
To create more positive experiences for people on both sides of the lenses, the study participants proposed that smart glasses designers add a projection display and a recording indicator light, so people nearby will know what the wearer is seeing and recording.
Fu also suggests designers test out their glasses in a social environment and hold a participatory design process like the one in their study. Additionally, they should consider these video interactions as a data source, she said.
That way, non-wearers can have a voice in the creation of the impending mixed-reality world.

Rina Diane Caballar’s September 25, 2023 article for IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Spectrum magazine provides a few more insights about the research, Note: Links have been removed,

…
“This AR filter interaction is likely to happen in the future with the commercial emergence of AR glasses,” says Jenny Fu, a doctoral student at Cornell University’s Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and one of the two lead authors of the study. “How will that look like, and what are the social and emotional consequences of interacting and communicating through AR glasses?”
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“When we think about design in HCI [human-computer interface], there is often a tendency to focus on the primary user and design just for them,” Jung says. “Because these technologies are so deeply embedded in social interactions and are used with others and around others, we often forget these ‘onlookers’ and we’re not designing with them in mind.”
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Moreover, involving nonusers is especially key in developing more equitable tech products and creating more inclusive experiences. “That’s one of the points why previous AR iterations may not have worked—they designed it for the individual and not for the people surrounding them,” says Chung. She adds that a mindset shift is needed to actively make tech that doesn’t exclude people, which could lead to social systems that promote engagement and foster a sense of belonging for everyone.
…

Caballar’s September 25, 2023 article also appears in the January 2024 print version of the IEEE Spectrum with the title ““AR Glasses Upset the Social Dynamic.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Negotiating Dyadic Interactions through the Lens of Augmented Reality Glasses by Ji Won Chung, Xiyu Jenny Fu, Zachary Deocadiz-Smith, Malte F Jung, Jeff Huang. DIS ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference July 2023 Pages 493–508 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595967

This paper is behind a paywall. For the curious, ACM stands for Association for Computing Machinery.

Neural (brain) implants and hype (long read)

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There was a big splash a few weeks ago when it was announced that Neuralink’s (Elon Musk company) brain implant had been surgically inserted into its first human patient.

Getting approval

David Tuffley, senior lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity at Griffith University (Australia), provides a good overview of the road Neuralink took to getting FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) approval for human clinical trials in his May 29, 2023 essay for The Conversation, Note: Links have been removed,

Since its founding in 2016, Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink has had the ambitious mission to build a next-generation brain implant with at least 100 times more brain connections than devices currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The company has now reached a significant milestone, having received FDA approval to begin human trials. So what were the issues keeping the technology in the pre-clinical trial phase for as long as it was? And have these concerns been addressed?
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Neuralink is making a Class III medical device known as a brain-computer interface (BCI). The device connects the brain to an external computer via a Bluetooth signal, enabling continuous communication back and forth.
The device itself is a coin-sized unit called a Link. It’s implanted within a small disk-shaped cutout in the skull using a precision surgical robot. The robot splices a thousand tiny threads from the Link to certain neurons in the brain. [emphasis mine] Each thread is about a quarter the diameter of a human hair.
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The company says the device could enable precise control of prosthetic limbs, giving amputees natural motor skills. It could revolutionise treatment for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and spinal cord injuries. It also shows some promise for potential treatment of obesity, autism, depression, schizophrenia and tinnitus.
Several other neurotechnology companies and researchers have already developed BCI technologies that have helped people with limited mobility regain movement and complete daily tasks.
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In February 2021, Musk said Neuralink was working with the FDA to secure permission to start initial human trials later that year. But human trials didn’t commence in 2021.
Then, in March 2022, Neuralink made a further application to the FDA to establish its readiness to begin humans trials.
One year and three months later, on May 25 2023, Neuralink finally received FDA approval for its first human clinical trial. Given how hard Neuralink has pushed for permission to begin, we can assume it will begin very soon. [emphasis mine]
The approval has come less than six months after the US Office of the Inspector General launched an investigation into Neuralink over potential animal welfare violations. [emphasis mine]
…

In accessible language, Tuffley goes on to discuss the FDA’s specific technical issues with implants and how they were addressed in his May 29, 2023 essay.

More about how Neuralink’s implant works and some concerns

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) journalist Andrew Chang offers an almost 13 minute video, “Neuralink brain chip’s first human patient. How does it work?” Chang is a little overenthused for my taste but he offers some good information about neural implants, along with informative graphics in his presentation.

So, Tuffley was right about Neuralink getting ready quickly for human clinical trials as you can guess from the title of Chang’s CBC video.

Jennifer Korn announced that recruitment had started in her September 20, 2023 article for CNN (Cable News Network), Note: Links have been removed,

Elon Musk’s controversial biotechnology startup Neuralink opened up recruitment for its first human clinical trial Tuesday, according to a company blog.
After receiving approval from an independent review board, Neuralink is set to begin offering brain implants to paralysis patients as part of the PRIME Study, the company said. PRIME, short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, is being carried out to evaluate both the safety and functionality of the implant.
Trial patients will have a chip surgically placed in the part of the brain that controls the intention to move. The chip, installed by a robot, will then record and send brain signals to an app, with the initial goal being “to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone,” the company wrote.
Those with quadriplegia [sometimes known as tetraplegia] due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) may qualify for the six-year-long study – 18 months of at-home and clinic visits followed by follow-up visits over five years. Interested people can sign up in the patient registry on Neuralink’s website.
Musk has been working on Neuralink’s goal of using implants to connect the human brain to a computer for five years, but the company so far has only tested on animals. The company also faced scrutiny after a monkey died in project testing in 2022 as part of efforts to get the animal to play Pong, one of the first video games.
…

I mentioned three Reuters investigative journalists who were reporting on Neuralink’s animal abuse allegations (emphasized in Tuffley’s essay) in a July 7, 2023 posting, “Global dialogue on the ethics of neurotechnology on July 13, 2023 led by UNESCO.” Later that year, Neuralink was cleared by the US Department of Agriculture (see September 24,, 2023 article by Mahnoor Jehangir for BNN Breaking).

Plus, Neuralink was being investigated over more allegations according to a February 9, 2023 article by Rachel Levy for Reuters, this time regarding hazardous pathogens,

The U.S. Department of Transportation said on Thursday it is investigating Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink over the potentially illegal movement of hazardous pathogens.
A Department of Transportation spokesperson told Reuters about the probe after the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-welfare advocacy group,wrote to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, opens new tab earlier on Thursday to alert it of records it obtained on the matter.
PCRM said it obtained emails and other documents that suggest unsafe packaging and movement of implants removed from the brains of monkeys. These implants may have carried infectious diseases in violation of federal law, PCRM said.
…

There’s an update about the hazardous materials in the next section. Spoiler alert, the company got fined.

Neuralink’s first human implant

A January 30, 2024 article (Associated Press with files from Reuters) on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) online news webspace heralded the latest about Neurlink’s human clinical trials,

The first human patient received an implant from Elon Musk’s computer-brain interface company Neuralink over the weekend, the billionaire says.
In a post Monday [January 29, 2024] on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk said that the patient received the implant the day prior and was “recovering well.” He added that “initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”
Spikes are activity by neurons, which the National Institutes of Health describe as cells that use electrical and chemical signals to send information around the brain and to the body.
The billionaire, who owns X and co-founded Neuralink, did not provide additional details about the patient.
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When Neuralink announced in September [2023] that it would begin recruiting people, the company said it was searching for individuals with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
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Neuralink reposted Musk’s Monday [January 29, 2024] post on X, but did not publish any additional statements acknowledging the human implant. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press or Reuters on Tuesday [January 30, 2024].
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In a separate Monday [January 29, 2024] post on X, Musk said that the first Neuralink product is called “Telepathy” — which, he said, will enable users to control their phones or computers “just by thinking.” He said initial users would be those who have lost use of their limbs.
The startup’s PRIME Study is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot.
…

Now for the hazardous materials, January 30, 2024 article, Note: A link has been removed,

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Earlier this month [January 2024], a Reuters investigation found that Neuralink was fined for violating U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) rules regarding the movement of hazardous materials. During inspections of the company’s facilities in Texas and California in February 2023, DOT investigators found the company had failed to register itself as a transporter of hazardous material.
They also found improper packaging of hazardous waste, including the flammable liquid Xylene. Xylene can cause headaches, dizziness, confusion, loss of muscle co-ordination and even death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The records do not say why Neuralink would need to transport hazardous materials or whether any harm resulted from the violations.

Skeptical thoughts about Elon Musk and Neuralink

Earlier this month (February 2024), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) published an article by health reporters, Jim Reed and Joe McFadden, that highlights the history of brain implants, the possibilities, and notes some of Elon Musk’s more outrageous claims for Neuralink’s brain implants,

Elon Musk is no stranger to bold claims – from his plans to colonise Mars to his dreams of building transport links underneath our biggest cities. This week the world’s richest man said his Neuralink division had successfully implanted its first wireless brain chip into a human.
Is he right when he says this technology could – in the long term – save the human race itself?
Sticking electrodes into brain tissue is really nothing new.
In the 1960s and 70s electrical stimulation was used to trigger or suppress aggressive behaviour in cats. By the early 2000s monkeys were being trained to move a cursor around a computer screen using just their thoughts.
“It’s nothing novel, but implantable technology takes a long time to mature, and reach a stage where companies have all the pieces of the puzzle, and can really start to put them together,” says Anne Vanhoestenberghe, professor of active implantable medical devices, at King’s College London.
Neuralink is one of a growing number of companies and university departments attempting to refine and ultimately commercialise this technology. The focus, at least to start with, is on paralysis and the treatment of complex neurological conditions.
…

Reed and McFadden’s February 2024 BBC article describes a few of the other brain implant efforts, Note: Links have been removed,

One of its [Neuralink’s] main rivals, a start-up called Synchron backed by funding from investment firms controlled by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, has already implanted its stent-like device into 10 patients.
Back in December 2021, Philip O’Keefe, a 62-year old Australian who lives with a form of motor neurone disease, composed the first tweet using just his thoughts to control a cursor.
And researchers at Lausanne University in Switzerland have shown it is possible for a paralysed man to walk again by implanting multiple devices to bypass damage caused by a cycling accident.
In a research paper published this year, they demonstrated a signal could be beamed down from a device in his brain to a second device implanted at the base of his spine, which could then trigger his limbs to move.
Some people living with spinal injuries are sceptical about the sudden interest in this new kind of technology.
“These breakthroughs get announced time and time again and don’t seem to be getting any further along,” says Glyn Hayes, who was paralysed in a motorbike accident in 2017, and now runs public affairs for the Spinal Injuries Association.
“If I could have anything back, it wouldn’t be the ability to walk. It would be putting more money into a way of removing nerve pain, for example, or ways to improve bowel, bladder and sexual function.” [emphasis mine]
…

Musk, however, is focused on something far more grand for Neuralink implants, from Reed and McFadden’s February 2024 BBC article, Note: A link has been removed,

But for Elon Musk, “solving” brain and spinal injuries is just the first step for Neuralink.
The longer-term goal is “human/AI symbiosis” [emphasis mine], something he describes as “species-level important”.
…
Musk himself has already talked about a future where his device could allow people to communicate with a phone or computer “faster than a speed typist or auctioneer”.
In the past, he has even said saving and replaying memories may be possible, although he recognised “this is sounding increasingly like a Black Mirror episode.”

One of the experts quoted in Reed and McFadden’s February 2024 BBC article asks a pointed question,

… “At the moment, I’m struggling to see an application that a consumer would benefit from, where they would take the risk of invasive surgery,” says Prof Vanhoestenberghe.
“You’ve got to ask yourself, would you risk brain surgery just to be able to order a pizza on your phone?”
…

Rae Hodge’s February 11, 2024 article about Elon Musk and his hyped up Neuralink implant for Salon is worth reading in its entirety but for those who don’t have the time or need a little persuading, here are a few excerpts, Note 1: This is a warning; Hodge provides more detail about the animal cruelty allegations; Note 2: Links have been removed,

Elon Musk’s controversial brain-computer interface (BCI) tech, Neuralink, has supposedly been implanted in its first recipient — and as much as I want to see progress for treatment of paralysis and neurodegenerative disease, I’m not celebrating. I bet the neuroscientists he reportedly drove out of the company aren’t either, especially not after seeing the gruesome torture of test monkeys and apparent cover-up that paved the way for this moment.
All of which is an ethics horror show on its own. But the timing of Musk’s overhyped implant announcement gives it an additional insulting subtext. Football players are currently in a battle for their lives against concussion-based brain diseases that plague autopsy reports of former NFL players. And Musk’s boast of false hope came just two weeks before living players take the field in the biggest and most brutal game of the year. [2024 Super Bowl LVIII]
ESPN’s Kevin Seifert reports neuro-damage is up this year as “players suffered a total of 52 concussions from the start of training camp to the beginning of the regular season. The combined total of 213 preseason and regular season concussions was 14% higher than 2021 but within range of the three-year average from 2018 to 2020 (203).”
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I’m a big fan of body-tech: pacemakers, 3D-printed hips and prosthetic limbs that allow you to wear your wedding ring again after 17 years. Same for brain chips. But BCI is the slow-moving front of body-tech development for good reason. The brain is too understudied. Consequences of the wrong move are dire. Overpromising marketable results on profit-driven timelines — on the backs of such a small community of researchers in a relatively new field — would be either idiotic or fiendish.
Brown University’s research in the sector goes back to the 1990s. Since the emergence of a floodgate-opening 2002 study and the first implant in 2004 by med-tech company BrainGate, more promising results have inspired broader investment into careful research. But BrainGate’s clinical trials started back in 2009, and as noted by Business Insider’s Hilary Brueck, are expected to continue until 2038 — with only 15 participants who have devices installed.
Anne Vanhoestenberghe is a professor of active implantable medical devices at King’s College London. In a recent release, she cautioned against the kind of hype peddled by Musk.
“Whilst there are a few other companies already using their devices in humans and the neuroscience community have made remarkable achievements with those devices, the potential benefits are still significantly limited by technology,” she said. “Developing and validating core technology for long term use in humans takes time and we need more investments to ensure we do the work that will underpin the next generation of BCIs.”
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Neuralink is a metal coin in your head that connects to something as flimsy as an app. And we’ve seen how Elon treats those. We’ve also seen corporate goons steal a veteran’s prosthetic legs — and companies turn brain surgeons and dentists into repo-men by having them yank anti-epilepsy chips out of people’s skulls, and dentures out of their mouths.
“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury,” Musk said at a 2023 tech summit, adding that the chip could possibly “make up for whatever lost capacity somebody has.”
Maybe BCI can. But only in the careful hands of scientists who don’t have Musk squawking “go faster!” over their shoulders. His greedy frustration with the speed of BCI science is telling, as is the animal cruelty it reportedly prompted.
…

There have been other examples of Musk’s grandiosity. Notably, David Lee expressed skepticism about hyperloop in his August 13, 2013 article for BBC news online

Is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop just a pipe dream?
Much like the pun in the headline, the bright idea of transporting people using some kind of vacuum-like tube is neither new nor imaginative.
There was Robert Goddard, considered the “father of modern rocket propulsion”, who claimed in 1909 that his vacuum system could suck passengers from Boston to New York at 1,200mph.
And then there were Soviet plans for an amphibious monorail – mooted in 1934 – in which two long pods would start their journey attached to a metal track before flying off the end and slipping into the water like a two-fingered Kit Kat dropped into some tea.
So ever since inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk hit the world’s media with his plans for the Hyperloop, a healthy dose of scepticism has been in the air.
“This is by no means a new idea,” says Rod Muttram, formerly of Bombardier Transportation and Railtrack.
“It has been previously suggested as a possible transatlantic transport system. The only novel feature I see is the proposal to put the tubes above existing roads.”
…

Here’s the latest I’ve found on hyperloop, from the Hyperloop Wikipedia entry,

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As of 2024, some companies continued to pursue technology development under the hyperloop moniker, however, one of the biggest, well funded players, Hyperloop One, declared bankruptcy and ceased operations in 2023.^[15]
…

Musk is impatient and impulsive as noted in a September 12, 2023 posting by Mike Masnick on Techdirt, Note: A link has been removed,

The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center
Back on Christmas Eve [December 24, 2022] of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees were quoted about how much work it would be to do that cleanly, noting that there’s a ton of stuff hardcoded in Twitter code referring to that data center (hold that thought).
That same day, Elon tweeted out that he had “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.”
…

Masnick follows with a story of reckless behaviour from someone who should have known better.

Ethics of implants—where to look for more information

While Musk doesn’t use the term when he describes a “human/AI symbiosis” (presumably by way of a neural implant), he’s talking about a cyborg. Here’s a 2018 paper, which looks at some of the implications,

Do you want to be a cyborg? The moderating effect of ethics on neural implant acceptance by Eva Reinares-Lara, Cristina Olarte-Pascual, and Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo. Computers in Human Behavior Volume 85, August 2018, Pages 43-53 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.03.032

This paper is open access.

Getting back to Neuralink, I have two blog posts that discuss the company and the ethics of brain implants from way back in 2021.

First, there’s Jazzy Benes’ March 1, 2021 posting on the Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics blog. It stands out as it includes a discussion of the disabled community’s issues, Note: Links have been removed,

In the heart of Silicon Valley we are constantly enticed by the newest technological advances. With the big influencers Grimes [a Canadian musician and the mother of three children with Elon Musk] and Lil Uzi Vert publicly announcing their willingness to become experimental subjects for Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implantation device, we are left wondering if future technology will actually give us “the knowledge of the Gods.” Is it part of the natural order for humans to become omniscient beings? Who will have access to the devices? What other ethical considerations must be discussed before releasing such technology to the public?
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A significant issue that arises from developing technologies for the disabled community is the assumption that disabled persons desire the abilities of what some abled individuals may define as “normal.” Individuals with disabilities may object to technologies intended to make them fit an able-bodied norm. “Normal” is relative to each individual, and it could be potentially harmful to use a deficit view of disability, which means judging a disability as a deficiency. However, this is not to say that all disabled individuals will reject a technology that may enhance their abilities. Instead, I believe it is a consideration that must be recognized when developing technologies for the disabled community, and it can only be addressed through communication with disabled persons. As a result, I believe this is a conversation that must be had with the community for whom the technology is developed–disabled persons.
…
With technologies that aim to address disabilities, we walk a fine line between therapeutics and enhancement. Though not the first neural implant medical device, the Link may have been the first BCI system openly discussed for its potential transhumanism uses, such as “enhanced cognitive abilities, memory storage and retrieval, gaming, telepathy, and even symbiosis with machines.” …

Benes also discusses transhumanism, privacy issues, and consent issues. It’s a thoughtful reading experience.

Second is a July 9, 2021 posting by anonymous on the University of California at Berkeley School of Information blog which provides more insight into privacy and other issues associated with data collection (and introduced me to the concept of decisional interference),

As the development of microchips furthers and advances in neuroscience occur, the possibility for seamless brain-machine interfaces, where a device decodes inputs from the user’s brain to perform functions, becomes more of a reality. These various forms of these technologies already exist. However, technological advances have made implantable and portable devices possible. Imagine a future where humans don’t need to talk to each other, but rather can transmit their thoughts directly to another person. This idea is the eventual goal of Elon Musk, the founder of Neuralink. Currently, Neuralink is one of the main companies involved in the advancement of this type of technology. Analysis of the Neuralink’s technology and their overall mission statement provide an interesting insight into the future of this type of human-computer interface and the potential privacy and ethical concerns with this technology.
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As this technology further develops, several privacy and ethical concerns come into question. To begin, using Solove’s Taxonomy as a privacy framework, many areas of potential harm are revealed. In the realm of information collection, there is much risk. Brain-computer interfaces, depending on where they are implanted, could have access to people’s most private thoughts and emotions. This information would need to be transmitted to another device for processing. The collection of this information by companies such as advertisers would represent a major breach of privacy. Additionally, there is risk to the user from information processing. These devices must work concurrently with other devices and often wirelessly. Given the widespread importance of cloud computing in much of today’s technology, offloading information from these devices to the cloud would be likely. Having the data stored in a database puts the user at the risk of secondary use if proper privacy policies are not implemented. The trove of information stored within the information collected from the brain is vast. These datasets could be combined with existing databases such as browsing history on Google to provide third parties with unimaginable context on individuals. Lastly, there is risk for information dissemination, more specifically, exposure. The information collected and processed by these devices would need to be stored digitally. Keeping such private information, even if anonymized, would be a huge potential for harm, as the contents of the information may in itself be re-identifiable to a specific individual. Lastly there is risk for invasions such as decisional interference. Brain-machine interfaces would not only be able to read information in the brain but also write information. This would allow the device to make potential emotional changes in its users, which be a major example of decisional interference. …

For the most recent Neuralink and brain implant ethics piece, there’s this February 14, 2024 essay on The Conversation, which, unusually, for this publication was solicited by the editors, Note: Links have been removed,

In January 2024, Musk announced that Neuralink implanted its first chip in a human subject’s brain. The Conversation reached out to two scholars at the University of Washington School of Medicine – Nancy Jecker, a bioethicst, and Andrew Ko, a neurosurgeon who implants brain chip devices – for their thoughts on the ethics of this new horizon in neuroscience.
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Information about the implant, however, is scarce, aside from a brochure aimed at recruiting trial subjects. Neuralink did not register at ClinicalTrials.gov, as is customary, and required by some academic journals. [all emphases mine]
Some scientists are troubled by this lack of transparency. Sharing information about clinical trials is important because it helps other investigators learn about areas related to their research and can improve patient care. Academic journals can also be biased toward positive results, preventing researchers from learning from unsuccessful experiments.
Fellows at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, have warned that Musk’s brand of “science by press release, while increasingly common, is not science. [emphases mine]” They advise against relying on someone with a huge financial stake in a research outcome to function as the sole source of information.
When scientific research is funded by government agencies or philanthropic groups, its aim is to promote the public good. Neuralink, on the other hand, embodies a private equity model [emphasis mine], which is becoming more common in science. Firms pooling funds from private investors to back science breakthroughs may strive to do good, but they also strive to maximize profits, which can conflict with patients’ best interests.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated animal cruelty at Neuralink, according to a Reuters report, after employees accused the company of rushing tests and botching procedures on test animals in a race for results. The agency’s inspection found no breaches, according to a letter from the USDA secretary to lawmakers, which Reuters reviewed. However, the secretary did note an “adverse surgical event” in 2019 that Neuralink had self-reported.
In a separate incident also reported by Reuters, the Department of Transportation fined Neuralink for violating rules about transporting hazardous materials, including a flammable liquid.
…
…the possibility that the device could be increasingly shown to be helpful for people with disabilities, but become unavailable due to loss of research funding. For patients whose access to a device is tied to a research study, the prospect of losing access after the study ends can be devastating. [emphasis mine] This raises thorny questions about whether it is ever ethical to provide early access to breakthrough medical interventions prior to their receiving full FDA approval.

Not registering a clinical trial would seem to suggest there won’t be much oversight. As for Musk’s “science by press release” activities, I hope those will be treated with more skepticism by mainstream media although that seems unlikely given the current situation with journalism (more about that in a future post).

As for the issues associated with private equity models for science research and the problem of losing access to devices after a clinical trial is ended, my April 5, 2022 posting, “Going blind when your neural implant company flirts with bankruptcy (long read)” offers some cautionary tales, in addition to being the most comprehensive piece I’ve published on ethics and brain implants.

My July 17, 2023 posting, “Unveiling the Neurotechnology Landscape: Scientific Advancements, Innovations and Major Trends—a UNESCO report” offers a brief overview of the international scene.

FrogHeart

Commentary about nanotech, science policy and communication, society, and the arts

Category Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

‘Frozen smoke’ sensors can detect toxic formaldehyde in homes and offices

Butterfly mating inspires neuromorphic (brainlike) computing

Study says quantum computing will radically alter the application of copyright law

Striking similarity between memory processing of artificial intelligence (AI) models and hippocampus of the human brain

Chatbot with expertise in nanomaterials

Portable and non-invasive (?) mind-reading AI (artificial intelligence) turns thoughts into text and some thoughts about the near future

Neurotechnology and neurorights