Why Silicon Valley is Interested in Mind Machine Interfaces
Although there are those who argue that Silicon Valley is an oversaturated overpriced destination, it still lies at the center of much of the venture capitalist money. In light of this, it still remains that the Waterloo moments of many technologies, looking to be adopted around the world, occur when they gain recognition from Silicon Valley. From Electric Scooters to Ride Sharing the list is long and most recently includes mind-machine interfaces.
When not one but three of the Silicon Valley elite showed a marked amount of interest in this technology, heads turned. Matt Angle, founder of Paradromics, a mind-machine interface company working to develop more efficient and effective sensors, shared with me how the attitude of venture capitalists has changed in the past years. He explained how initially allocating funding was extremely difficult and he would find himself explaining the technology to ever board he presented to. Then, around 2016, all of that changed. He told me how investors were showing a great deal more interest and actually trying to find mind-machine interface companies to invest in.
So… what happened that changed their minds? The recent public interest really came about in 2016 after the formation of the three companies you will read about in this chapter: Neuralink, started by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk; Kernel, started by millionaire visionary Bryan Johnson; and Facebook’s Building 8, started by Facebook, helmed by Mark Zuckerberg. By investing huge sums of money into the BCI field, these Silicon Valley titans provided all the credibility necessary for the field to receive more funding from a variety of sources.
What are these three companies/founders promising? Neuralink, as I wrote about in ….. is working to develop an implantable sensor that drastically increases the bandwidth of data transfer into and out of the brain. Kernel, formed by Bryan Johnson, is based around the idea that If the root problems of humanity begin in the human mind, let’s change our minds. After an astonishing turn of events Kernel’s new mission is to develop more efficient non-invasive sensors. Johnson recognizes that no consumer good can take off if it requires the user to drill a hole in their head, and he is structuring Kernel’s goals from this recognition, looking into less invasive ways of monitoring the brain’s function.
Lastly, Facebook.
In 2016, Facebook surprised many people by announcing its new research and development enterprise, Building 8.With this announcement, Facebook was hoping to break into a development phase, producing new technological improvements, much like Google. Google has spun off companies like Waymo and Google Glass from their own development teams, so it would make sense for Zuckerberg to want to diversify Facebook’s options similarly.
Shortly after Zuckerberg announced Building 8, it became public knowledge that there were four projects going on there, including augmented vision, drones, a project regarding early stage medical devices, and a neuroscience division. That last one is the one that interests us. They have snapped up a lot of talent from various areas, including Mark Chevillet, former manager of applied neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. Chevillet replaced the previous manager, Regina Dugan, who came to Facebook after serving as a former executive at both Google and DARPA. She shared that Building 8 is hoping to create a speech decoding device using some form of fNIRS. As Dugan stated at a public Facebook conference on the matter, “This isn’t about decoding random thoughts. This is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech [production] center of your brain.” There are two speech processing areas in your brain: Wernicke’s area, responsible for the speech production and Broca’s area, responsible for the muscle movements that result in that speech.
So what does this mean for the technology? Coupled with the Defense Departments extensive funding, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), this public showcasing is extremely promising for the industry by providing not only a stage but also the resources to push forward in research and development, while allowing smaller companies to try their hand too.
Stay tuned to hear more incredible stories of how these interfaces are changing people’s lives and our perception of the human mind. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect you can reach me here via email admangan2018@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. If you like what you read and want to learn more about this amazing technology, please buy the paperback or ebook version on amazon! Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7RJLYC
