 It is a great honor for me to bring Milan and Adam tonight. I think that they are some of the foremost speakers, foremost thinkers and doers in the entire neurotech field. I've gotten to know them over many years. I've known Adam for, I think, probably over 10 years now. Milan, I think, only gotten to know over the last couple of years. Both of them are at the forefront of the field. And they're pushing the boundaries on several areas of neurotech. So they're not just taking on one project. They're trying to create an environment where they can help many different projects at the same time. And they've created a novel structure called the Focused Research Organization, which is a think of a combination between the intensity of inquiry and the long-term thinking of an academic lab with the fast-spaced, super-fast approach that startups are known for with the large-scale, organized resources of a larger corporation. So think of trying to replicate the kind of structure that maybe the early Apollo program had, or say the Manhattan Project or things like that, but really tackle some of the most important challenges of our time with this new structure. And I think it's been a fairly new structure, but it's already been tremendously successful, and you will hear more about it from them, especially Adam later on. So the setup of the evening tonight will be that Milan will come online and give a talk for, I think, about 40 minutes or so, 45. And then I will ask him some questions and take questions from the audience and from Twitter. If you're on Twitter, please use the hashtag PLBreakthroughs to ask a question for Milan. After that, kind of the hour mark, we will switch over to Adam and we'll do a fireside. So I'll interview Adam and ask a whole range of questions. And again, I'll take questions from the audience here and I'll take questions from Twitter, so PLBreakthroughs there as well. Super excited to hear from them. This is the cutting edge of BCI, and I think if humanity has a future in the long term, I think BCI is the best pathway. So hopefully we'll get there. I'll hand it over to Milan and we'll go from here. Hello, my screen sharing in any sort of way? Yeah, your screen sharing, but we can't see you. I think your video's off. No, that's not good. How's that? There you are. All right, great. Thanks so much for the introduction. I'll try to give some sort of overview of the field of neuro technology and some thoughts about it to lead into Adam and Juan in their fireside chat. One thing I'll flag at the outset is I will use the term probably neuro technology a little more than I use the term BCI. They nearly mean the same thing. Neurotechnology is maybe a slightly more expansive term, but don't be freaked out by my use of that term. Also a content warning, there is a distressing amount of bad stock imagery that I pulled from the internet for this talk. So just be warned if you're sensitive to that kind of bad visuals. So I'd love to start this talk with some kind of TED Talk level anecdote or cliche or something that drives home why neuro technology is in my opinion, tied for the most important thing that civilization needs to be working on right now. Unfortunately from a PR and field building perspective, neuro technology doesn't have a single intuitive goal, the way that climate technology or longevity research do. There are so many possibilities and possible use cases that it can be hard to make a succinct argument for neuro technologies importance without being so high level that you're risking a nosebleed. I would sort of liken the state of neuro tech today to the state of the web in 1990. I think it was self evident to the true believers who were building the web in 1990 that increasing communication and connectivity was important for society, but they couldn't point necessarily to a single killer use case that would justify the whole thing. Similarly, it's self evident to me how much value there is in increasing the precision and effectiveness with which we can interact with the brain and with our own minds. But I think that vision is a little vague for many people. And I think that vagueness is unhelpful. So I won't be able to do it justice here, but I wanna start via some sort of brute force examples to enumerate some of the goals of neuro technology because I think it's not only important to know what the stakes are for success in this field, but also I worry people's general conception of neuro technology is often limited to the idea of controlling our phones with our brains or something as great as that would be. But in fact, that's kind of a crushingly narrower vision than I think people like me who work on the field think about it. The first and most obvious thing to mention is the potential for neuro technology to cure disease and alleviate tremendous amounts of suffering. About 21% of global disease burden is caused by neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. And if you leave out malnutrition, treatable communicable disease, injuries by nature, it's closer to 40% of global disease burden as measured by disability adjusted life years. And that percentage has been steadily increasing. So concretely, we're talking about neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, ALS, epilepsy, Parkinson's, blindness, and paralysis. And on the neuropsychiatric side, we're talking about things like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, schizophrenia. The list goes on and on. The point is that even if you're inclined to roll your eyes at the more futuristic stuff that comes later in this talk, the therapeutic potential of neuro technology alone justifies it being a civilization level priority. Now you might be thinking, well, it already is. We have a whole medical research system. Surely someone's working on this. You may be surprised to learn that society is perhaps not maximally adequately deploying its efforts in developing new neuro technologies. I suspect Adam and Juan will touch on that later. I'll also just throw in a note here for the longevity fans in the audience. Brain is ultimately the thing you care about not dying. And I would contend that it is likely to require special care and attention in as much as it's more sensitive to treatment, at least if you want to be sure that the treatment is preserving whoever you are. Now at some point it has occurred to most people that what counts as a disease or disability is a little bit relative fatigue, for example. The vast majority of Americans, and I suspect people in the world, use a nanoscale neuro technology called caffeine every day to regulate their energy levels. It's so ubiquitous that fatigue in the morning is something we excuse as being before we've had our coffee rather than just the acceptable state of biology. I think you could say similar things about pain before painkillers. So the natural question is why leave the status quo where it is? Is what we consider a good life or even a normal life today going to be considered torture by the standards of a civilization with adequate neuro technology? Imagine how many people would benefit just from perfect control over their energy level. Imagine a degree far beyond what we can achieve with coffee or other drugs. Improvement in just that one dimension of our conscious experience would unlock massive amounts of wellbeing. On the other hand, how much wellbeing would be unlocked by a neuro technology that generated perfect control over sleep? Imagine perfect quality sleep every time or just being able to fall asleep whenever you wanted to or being able to lie down for a nap and setting your brain to wake up in exactly one hour. A dream neuro technology for me personally would be neuro technological earplugs. When I get onto an airplane, I wanna be able to turn on perfect reversible deafness until the snap cart comes. But of course we can imagine much more control over our sensory inputs than that from enhanced vision and enhanced hearing all the way to matrix level virtual reality. Things you can also imagine are flow on demand rather than a website blocker. What if you could just set a timer on your phone to block any distracting thoughts for 30 minutes? You can imagine enhancing working memory. What would it be like to be introduced to 15 people and effortlessly keep all their names in your head at once? Memory prostheses, what if you could literally commit something to memory in the GitHub sense of commit? Accelerated learning. I'm sure we would all love that. And of course, the thing that people usually think of when they hear the term brain computer interface, seamless communication with computers, devices, tools, digital content, but also in the future, hopefully seamless communication between people and who knows maybe even someday with animals. A particular category of neuro technology that's deeply important to me is giving ourselves the ability to behave like and hopefully become the sorts of people that we already wish we were on reflection, people with better impulse control, people who are more open-minded, people who are more honest and braver with each other and with ourselves. To be clear, this is not some feel good desire on my part. I would contend that a vast proportion of the problems we face individually and as a species, come down to failures to behave in the way that we already want to behave. A common factor in most arguably all existential risks to humanity is humans behaving in regretful ways or failing to coordinate or failing to look past their narrow self-interest even in ways that they agree are bad behavior of themselves. It is somewhat incredible to degree to which our instincts are not suited to the world we live in. Now, of course, our lesser instincts had some sort of evolutionary advantage or at least permissibility and we should be careful with meddling with them as we should be with any new technology. But all this is to say that my vote for the most underrated use cases of neurotechnology are things like control over mood and affect. We all recognize in cases like depression and bipolar that people's moods are not a well-calibrated function of their external circumstances. But outside these pathologized cases, how often are the state of our minds really matched that well with what we are doing in our lives and what kind of told us that take? We don't usually think to tally it up because it's just the way things are. Why is it that when you go to lunch with your boring uncle, you can't just dial up patience and kindness to the level that you're going to wish they were at as soon as you walk out of your boring uncle's house? I think there are absolutely ways to do this badly. We don't want people putting themselves into a stupor or running away from their problems. But I think these worries are evidence of an extremely impoverished vision of what we could achieve with adequate neuro technology. Another underrated use case, I think is improving rationality, for example, by the ability to flag or eliminate cognitive biases. Imagine thinking through whether to take a job offer and getting a ping from your phone that says, hey, it looks like your brain activity that you're suffering from status quo bias. Here's a note that you wrote to yourself last time you did this. Being able to install or uninstall motivations, habits, predilections, aversions, you can just imagine hypnosis, but a thousand times more effective. Or even being able to generate or guarantee actual empathy by literally experiencing what someone else has experienced or will experience. There are actually some pretty crazy proofs of concept of this that have been done with VR, but they could go so much farther. Because it's a crypto audience, I guess. Imagine if I feel your pain was a literally enforceable promise that you could make in a smart contract and not just something that people say. And lastly, and probably most importantly, let's talk about AI. I don't have to convince this audience. I don't think that artificial intelligence seems extremely likely to play a transformative role in society in the near future. And I don't have to convince you, I don't think that this transformation is not guaranteed to go well. But I would like to suggest something that I don't hear much in the AI discourse, which is that neuro technology, while not a silver bullet by any means, is an important part of a broader portfolio of AI safety and alignment efforts. The high level intuition for this is simply that human values come from here. No matter your thoughts on moral realism or meta ethics in general, this one and a half kilogram cluster of cells in our skulls is empirically the ultimate arbiter of morality. And if you think that that's wrong, consider whether that one and a half kilogram cluster of cells in your skull is playing a role in you forming that opinion. Now we have introspection and language to get access to some of what's going on in here, and those are very useful, but a few thousand years worth of attempts using introspection and language to operationalize the moral judgments of this one and a half kilogram cluster of cells hasn't yet produced anything that seems particularly suitable for aligning AI. So considering other approaches seems prudent. One potentially pivotal use case of neuro technology regarding AI is obtaining greater quantity and quality of data on human values than we can get from language or other conscious expressions of morality like voting. AI progress in the recent past has tended to be driven by large data sets. The progress broadly speaking is where the data are. If human values are the things we want an AI to learn, providing it with more higher quality data on human values might be wise. What are these better data? One could imagine a neuro imaging implant that passively observes the brain producing moral intuitions or making moral judgments, especially if that was combined with real world contextual data. It's one thing to verbally express a moral judgment about a situation, especially a hypothetical situation. It's another to watch it happen in real time in context and of course observing the brain's computations during these complex conscious moral deliberations gives more resolution on that process than can be expressed even if someone's just thinking aloud. Another interesting use case might be direct measurements of subjective wellbeing in the brain. Although first we'd have to disentangle what subjective wellbeing is at the neurological level in order to measure it. Now of course you have to avoid wire heading in such a case and that becomes extremely important but potentially possible. Another potentially valuable use case for neuro technology related to AI is for figuring out which aspects of any of the brain we would like an AI to emulate. The human brain may be the closest thing we have to an optimizer that is aligned with human values. And so emulating aspects of its operation might be very useful for designing safe AI. I'll give a shout out to Steve Burns here whose work on this I think is really great. In the limit of understanding everything about the brain and being able to simulate it, of course you'd have whole brain emulation which would be aligned with I guess at least one human's values by definition whoever's getting uploaded. But less than perfect mimicry, more attractable kinds of mimicry might still yield more aligned systems on shorter time scales. Or potentially AI is built to emulate the operation of the brain might be easier to test for alignment especially if you have a functioning human brain to compare them to. This would be kind of a partial emulation approach. This is obviously a big unknown and carries some risks of good ideas from neural computation accelerating AI progress but I think it's well worth exploring. I should make explicit the connection to neuro technology here rather than just neuroscience is that a neuro technology or neuroscience is bottlenecked mainly by tools I would argue. So better neuroscience to learn these things would require better neuro technology. And then finally there's this notion of merging humans with AI which for example Neuralink has cited as one of their long-term goals. It's not entirely clear how an AI human hybrid would be structured and it's generally thought that such hybrids would not be competitive with pure AI systems in the long run but they may be useful during early stages of AI development especially in takeoff scenarios that are sensitive to initial conditions that a lot to think about there. Again, none of the proceeding is guaranteed to make transformative AI go well and none of these things are likely to be relevant on a sub five year timescale. I do not think that we should be diminishing our efforts on large language model safety or interpretability or governance right now. However, now also does not seem like a great time for civilization to be prematurely limiting approaches toward AI safety that it's exploring. And as I've hopefully made some kind of case for here neuro technological approaches seem like a very worthwhile addition to civilization's portfolio of alignment approaches. Lastly on just this sort of goal section like any new technology there are absolutely uses that I don't personally advocate for. I think perfect lie detectors in the hands of authoritarian governments would be one addictive technologies that don't come bundled with the addiction tools, accidental corruption or reinforcement of bad values or giving AI systems additional attack surface on human minds. These are all outcomes I would not like to see. And I'll just say that I think good governance of potent future neuro technologies is an important part of avoiding these outcomes. And it's something that I hope the brilliant minds at places like protocol labs and those of you in the audience can help find solutions for in addition to society at large working on these problems. Okay, let's come down from the razzle dazzle a little bit now that I've hopefully painted something of a picture of the value of neuro technology. Let's look at the state of the field today and I'll just start by recapping some neuro technologies that are widely used either in medicine or in society in general. First, it's only fair to start by mentioning the OG and still most widely used type of neuro technology which is small molecule drugs. We're all familiar with drugs. You probably take them every day in some form. Drugs have a pretty good UX for neuro technology. Once they're in you, they last all day. Usually you don't have to wear or charge anything but they're hard to turn off once you take them and despite their profound and diverse effects they aren't particularly flexible or programmable. So while their historical importance should not be understated and they're very useful as demonstrations of the manipulability of consciousness drugs aren't going to get us to BCI on their own. Also just to shout out to cognitive techniques like meditation hypnosis, brain training software. I don't count these as neuro technologies per se but like drugs they're used by millions if not billions of people every day and the effects they have are instructive I think for neuro technology development. The category of neuro technologies that people probably most associate with BCI are methods that interact with the nervous system via electrical signals. EEG or electroencephalography is one of the most common methods you might have heard of. It's nearly a hundred years old. It's probably what's in most consumer products out there that brand themselves as neuro technologies. There are different flavors of EEG. The left is showing this non-invasive EEG like what you might buy in a consumer headset. The right showing invasive electrocorticography on the surface of the brain that's used for in epilepsy treatment for example to localize seizures. All of them work by measuring voltage changes produced by the activity of large groups of neurons near the electrodes. And of course electricity can be used to stimulate neurons as well as to record. And electrodes can be made small enough to record from and stimulate individual neurons or small groups of neurons. This has been used for cochlear implants shown on the left here since the 1970s. Tens of thousands of these cochlear implants are implanted every year. Similar idea is used in retinal implants although they had slower adoption. But the idea is that you have some kind of external camera or receiver microphone and that transmit signals to an array of different electrodes in case of a retinal implanted interface with the retina. On the right here, most people haven't heard of deep brain stimulation but it's the most commonly performed surgical procedure for Parkinson's and a number of other treatments. It's used if drugs don't work or stop working and it's around 150,000 deep brain stimulation implants are inserted or implanted every year. So it's also a very useful case study for bridging neuro technologies. Another widely used technology, I'm kind of surprised people don't know more about is transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS. It's a non-invasive method. It works by electromagnetic induction. It's FDA approved for depression, anxiety, OCD and smoking cessation. Useful statistics are a little tricky but it seems like 50,000 plus people a year use it. It's not super precise in terms of where it targets but lots of improvements are being made. Recently a new protocol called the SAINT protocol, SAINT, was developed that in its first trial had very high remission rates for depression and the startup is now commercializing that. Another technology to mention is MEG or Magnetic Neuroencephalography that measures magnetic fields produced by the currents in the brain. As you can see from this picture, it's not super widely used today because the hardware and shielding required is pretty hefty but the underlying physics are advantageous compared to EEG because magnetic fields are less distorted, distorted by the skull and the scalp. So in principle, you can read a lot of information from the brain from an advanced MEG system. And then we have MRI, which is what we're familiar with or functional MRI when you use it to detect neural activity. The changes in blood oxygen that FMRI picks up are slower than the electrical signals that move around the brain. They tend to be on the order of half a second to a second. So you're not gonna wanna control your phone using an FMRI anytime soon but FMRI is non-invasive and it can image the whole brain, which are great features. As you can see on the left, it's not particularly portable yet, but even with the slow time scales, you might be surprised what you can accomplish with these signals. Here is an example where researchers trained a deep generative model on FMRI activity and using that model, they were able to show a person an image of a face like the ones on the left, watch their brain activity with FMRI and then reconstruct the image with that model from only the FMRI data. Okay, so this is all stuff you've probably heard of. What does the frontier look like now? The frontier, I'm defining that by being used in humans, which is a critical milestone in any neuro technologies life. The next generation technology most people are familiar with are electrode-based motor brain computer interfaces. The basic idea here is to put a lot of small electrodes very near the neurons responsible for motor function in the cortex and the outer part of the brain and determine a user's movement intentions straight from those neurons, from the activity of those neurons. There are a variety of different form factors that this can take. ECOG is electrocorticography, that's what we saw on the slide before. The most widely studied systems for motor BCIs are these micro electrode arrays, which in the picture on the bottom here is what the patient has implanted into the cable coming out from her head. To date, there have been over 30,000 patient days of inpatient research with these micro electrode arrays. So there's really no question at this point that the principle works. It's a matter of improving the devices themselves in a variety of ways, making them smaller, having fewer adverse effects when implanted, and then of course getting them approved by regulators. Another approach you can take that's being explored is to place electrodes in the blood vessels near the neurons of interest and not directly in the brain, which you can see in the middle here, that's the endovascular approach. The advantages of approaches like this are that you don't have to drill holes in the skull, you can just go in through a vein somewhere in your extremities and drop these electrodes off near the neurons they need to listen to. Synchron is a company that's pushed this method the farthest at the moment. They have implanted, I think, five patients so far, all severely paralyzed, and four of them have had the implant for a little over a year, and supposedly have used them to send text messages and manage their finances and things like that. All four of those long-term patients are in Australia, where it's a little easier to do human research of this kind. It's also worth mentioning, you can make a motor BCI that doesn't involve the brain. So on the left is a prosthetic arm that reads signals from the nerves in the upper arm. On the right is a system from META, that is formerly Facebook META. They acquired a company called Control Labs that makes this hands-free gesture detector for use with VR systems. You don't have to hold anything while you're using VR. It's based off electrical signals from the muscles in the forearms. It's not exactly a BCI, but it's pretty close. Another emerging neurotechnology is ultrasound-based methods. One type of ultrasound neurotechnology is already FDA approved. I just didn't mention it in the previous section because it's more of a surgical technique. This technique is called high-intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU. In HIFU, waves as sort of depicted on the right here can be focused on a target in the brain and then used to destroy tissue, to ablate tissue like tumors or neurons that are damaged by Parkinson's disease. This is a non-invasive procedure in the sense that no physical matter is entering the body. The ultrasound waves are entering the body and it's used by at least hundreds of patients every year and maybe more. So that you would lie on this one on the left here, you basically lie with your head in this dome in an MRI scanner and then the ultrasound is targeted to the area of interest. But ultrasound is just a generally very useful physical phenomenon beyond ablating tissue because it propagates readily through soft tissue and it has a very long safety record. We're comfortable with imaging fetuses with it, among other nice properties. And it's currently in clinical trials for a lot of other things besides this surgical use case. For one, if you take these hyposystems and turn their power way, way, way down to the point where it's not damaging the tissue, it turns out that even when you do that, ultrasound has some kind of local effect on neural activity where that beam is focused. This goes by a few different names, but you can look up Transcranial Ultrasound Stimulation or TUS to find it. How this works isn't well understood yet. If you talk to people who have had it done, there are certainly some undeniable short-term effects, it seems, though of course it's not clear what those are indicative of or what they'll be useful for. But Transcranial Ultrasound is currently in trials for a number of things in humans. There's a trial going on for epilepsy, for depression, PTSD, a few other things. Ultrasound can also be used for imaging, similar to fMRI, shown on the right here. This is a mouse brain, not a human brain, but the spinny GIF was prettier. But it's being trialed in humans as well as in mice. Unlike in fMRI though, there's potential for people to actually be able to wear an ultrasound imaging system like this or have one implanted, which opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for the future. Near-infrared Spectroscopy or Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy, Fnears is another family of methods. Kind of like fMRI, they look at changes in blood oxygenation, although they can look at other things. But like ultrasound, it seems much more tractable to make into a wearable form factor than an fMRI machine. And I know that because people have done it. So on the right side here is a device made by Kernel. It's called the Kernel Flow. And they were at some point doing a clinical trial. You might actually be able to go use one of these if you're in the Los Angeles area. I went and tried one at one point. This uses a particular type of Fnears called TDFnears. Current Nears techniques don't allow imaging the entire brain. Like fMRI does, they're limited to like, I think about a centimeter of depth, but it's in clinical trials for a variety of applications, all as an imaging tool. And then lastly, gene therapy is a very hot area for biotech and therapeutic development in general, and is also being applied to the brain. A gene therapy, if you haven't heard of it, is a technique that introduces genetic material into a cell. There have been thousands of clinical trials for gene therapies for disease treatments at this point. Most of those are not targeted at the brain, but some are. The main challenge when you're making a gene therapy tends to be delivery. How do you get the genetic material into the cells that you want? One way to do that is to package the DNA or RNA into some kind of a lipid or polymer. If you have received an mRNA vaccine for COVID, then congratulations, you've had this type of gene therapy. But another kind of way of building these vectors is to, I think this is fair to say, has more research on it at the moment, is to use viruses to deliver the genes. These delivery vehicles are called viral vectors, shown here in this image on the top left. Viruses are nature's experts at sneaking around your body and inserting genetic material into cells. And so they can be engineered, hopefully, to do so with specific useful properties like selectively targeting certain types of cells or tissues. As I said, most of the gene therapies that are in clinical trials now are related to diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. We're talking about neuro gene therapy. But because you can fairly arbitrarily swap out the genetic information in a viral vector to whatever you want to encode different proteins, once some of these gene therapies are developed for neurological diseases, they're likely to be a massive enabler for neuro technology in general. It's kind of like having a general deployment platform like AWS and you can just swap out the code that's running on it. I guess in that metaphor, the VM is the viral vector and then the functional gene is the code. Okay, I wanted to pause here briefly and just empathize with possibly some members of the audience. If you're anything like me when I was when I started neuro tech, you might be thinking that this all just seems like a massively scattershot set of tools and techniques and might be wondering if there's a neat ontology that these all fall into. If there is, I don't know of it. A neuro technology isn't quite as simple as just fabricate more and more smaller electrodes and stick them more places, although it's not a bad approach necessarily. But brains are complicated biological systems and there are so many ways to interact with them, different physical forces, different biological substrates to interact with, different routes into the brain itself, the vascular, drill a hole, that kind of thing. So it's not clear which neuro technological approach is going to ultimately lead to which degrees of control over the nervous system and what effects each one will have. So I just wanted to acknowledge that feeling if you're feeling it. And also I wanted to suggest though that this huge frontier is one of the things that makes neuro technology so exciting. There are so many paths toward progress and good ideas to be tried. And with that framing, I can't predict the future, but I want to go over some general themes for the future of neuro technology. One big theme is basically ride on the coattails of the digital hardware revolution. On the right side here is a picture of a Neuralink prototype, which it is safe to say, would not exist without technologies taken from the smartphone, chip, automotive and other related industries that have created engineering marvels that are right for porting over into the domain of neuro technology. This includes making devices wireless that would have once been wired thanks to things like Bluetooth or wireless charging or powering, miniaturizing everything, lowering power requirements of integrated circuits in devices and using micro electromechanical systems or MEMS to enable ultrasound and other kinds of physical perturbations at a small scale. Another big theme is get biology to do your work for you. So why distribute metal electrodes throughout the brain when you can just tell neurons to make something that's basically as good? It's a little oversimplified, but a prototypical example of this is called optogenetics. This graphic is showing the idea here is to use gene therapy, like I mentioned before to make neurons express proteins that are sensitive to light. Now neurons normally aren't especially sensitive to light or not specific wavelengths of light, but you can use gene therapy to instruct a neuron to express a particular light-sensitive protein that isn't normally found in the human body at all. And then you can use light to make them fire. Optogenetics is one of the most commonly used techniques in neuroscience research. I'm not aware of it making its way into humans yet, but that is absolutely a hotly pursued goal and there's lots of animal work pursuant to it. If you've heard of a company called a Science Corp or science.xyz, I believe they're using an optogenetic approach, although I don't have any insider information on that. Optogenetics is just one clever bioengineering approach. There are many more that are being developed and will be discovered in the future. So kind of the general theme here is that, like with microfabrication, there's a useful tailwind where developments in bioengineering in general can be usefully ported over to use in neuro technology. A third big theme is combining modalities in clever ways. So for example, optogenetics actually, which I just talked about is an example of this. It combines optical methods and bioengineering. Another example is using ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier. If you haven't heard of the blood-brain barrier, you've obviously never watched the TV show House, that's fine. Basically, nearly every blood vessel in your brain is shrink-wrapped in an extra protective layer of cells that keeps most of the stuff in your blood from diffusing into your brain. So sometimes people hear blood-brain barrier and they think that it's like a sack that your brain is in, but it's actually, every blood vessel is surrounded by this blood-brain barrier. This can be, it's great for your immune system and probably other things, but it can be annoying for drug delivery because a lot of drugs don't go through the blood-brain barrier. They go everywhere else in your body, but not there. So one clever thing you can do is inject little micro-bubbles into your bloodstream and those circulate all over your body, including your brain. And then you can use ultrasound to vibrate those little micro-bubbles in a specific area of the brain, it's shown on the left of this big picture. And that little vibration gently pushes the cells of the blood-brain barrier apart and lets drug molecules sneak through into the brain. So this is a cool combination because it lets you combine the precise biological effects of drugs with the spatial precision of a focused ultrasound beam. And I should mention, this is also in clinical trials in humans right now. There's some very promising looking trial results for treating brain tumors, for example. I tried to avoid text slides, but I couldn't get away with it here. I talked at the beginning about how there isn't a single unifying goal of neuro-technology, and that's true for the effects that we want, but also to some degree on the technical side. So I guess one trivially could say that the technical objective of neuro-technology is to have constant control over every aspect of the state of every neuron all the time. That's maybe true, but frankly, a civilization that could do that probably doesn't have much need for biological brains anyway. That's pretty advanced. So practically speaking, as a general theme for the future, there are many performance characteristics of neuro-technologies that will have to be traded off with each other in different ways for different neuro-technologies. And the trade-offs that you want to make depend on what goal you're trying to achieve. So some of the big factors to think about with any neuro-technology, I'm not gonna just read these off, but things like spatial resolution, how finally in space can the neuro-technology sense or manipulate tissue? Spatial extent, so how much of the brain or the nervous system can the method access? So the Neuralink probe is useful to kind of compare to something like fMRI here. So the Neuralink probe has extremely high spatial resolution, but a very limited spatial extent. It only goes into one small part of the cortex. Whereas an fMRI has lower spatial resolution by quite a bit, but it can image the entire brain. So the general theme here is not that these trade-offs exist, that's true, but in general, we don't know in many cases what degree of performance on which of these dimensions will let us achieve what effects. And that's a challenge to some extent, but it's also part of what makes neuro-technology so exciting. We don't know what effects each new generation of neuro-technologies will unlock, but every new generation of neuro-technologies that pushes for some, you know, Pareto improvement along these various dimensions has revealed things that are completely unexpected and exciting. This is more of a macro point, but kind of a last theme I think is important. Neuro-technology, in my opinion, is not primarily bottlenecked by ideas. It's primarily bottlenecked by the pace of experimentation. There is no single point of blame here. I think people will often think to point their fingers at investors, regulators, institutional review boards, scientific and entrepreneurial conservatism. All these things probably play some contributing role, but the things that get me most excited in neuro-technology are ways of breaking this chicken and egg problem, which is that in order to build new tools, new neuro-technologies and run new experiments, you need to have data to guide that, but the data can't be obtained without these new tools or experiments being run. So, yeah, as I said, I think anything that kind of breaks this chicken and egg problem, even just a little bit, is hugely important for neuro-technology. Now, I have not done a thorough forecasting or timelines or anything for transformative neuro-technology partly because, as we've seen in this talk, neuro-tech is a very diverse area, but I do think that on the default current path, neuro-technologies that are currently in clinical trials, like some of the ones I described earlier, could have large-scale impacts in one to five decades with a mean estimate of, I don't know, 30 years. That's based on the translation and dissemination paths of previous neuro-technologies that have been developed. However, with concerted effort and entrepreneurial non-standard thinking focused on speeding up the cycle, I think that neuro-technologies currently in clinical and pre-clinical development could be advanced in five to 10 years to the point where there is some non-medical, non-drug neuro-technology with thousands of daily users. And I think neuro-technology in 10 to 20 years could be advanced to the point where these technologies might meaningfully benefit AI safety and other valuable goals that I mentioned at the top. Okay, so we come to the most important slide, maybe also the ugliest slide, which is getting involved. This exclamation is directed genuinely at everyone who is listening to this. The blessing of the high-dimensional frontier and the messy toolbox that I mentioned earlier is that there is useful work for nearly every skill set I can think of in neuro-technology on the technical side. Software engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, mathematicians, chemists, chem engineers, biologists, bio-engineers, physicists, surgeons, doctors, of course, neuroscientists, all of these things are extremely important skill sets that are needed to push neuro-technology forward. And if you're thinking, ha, he didn't mention geologists. Actually, no, some of the most exciting ideas around non-invasive ultrasound imaging are coming from geophysics. So you might be surprised that whether or not you can be useful in this field if you take a crack at it. Entrepreneurs and operators are just as critical by bringing together and managing all the technical skill sets required to build neuro-technologies, building real products in the real world, running clinical trials. This requires entrepreneurship and operational expertise just as much as the technical stuff. Lastly, content creators, as this talk has irrefutably demonstrated, neuro-technology needs better evangelists or even remotely competent evangelists, writers, designers, podcasters, what have you, all useful. You can save neuro-technology from my slide design. And so much needs to be done, a non-exclusive list of things that you can do. Right, start up a company, start a non-company, for example, a focused research organization. You can contribute to research that's going on right now. I cannot tell you how many neuro-technologists would kill for a volunteer web developer or dozens of other skill sets. You can study up on the field and help others learn by creating good content. There is as much less useful content to learn from on neuro-technology as there is for something like AI or crypto. And of course you can invest in neuro-technology projects. You can fund neuro-technology projects that aren't for profit ventures and you can incubate projects. You can lend your expertise to the people doing technical work in this space. If this sounds abstract, the best way I know of to make it concrete is honestly to email me. I can help route you to projects that might be of interest to you and there is an extreme dearth of writing that I would like to have done, but there is at least some more information on my website you can find that goes into more detail on I think pretty much all the stuff I talked about today. And with that, I think it's question time. Can I get just a round of applause? Thank you very much. This is an extremely useful overview. I have been thinking about BCI and learning about it for many years now and I learned a bunch of new things here. So thank you, this is extremely useful and helps us all update. So I have a couple of questions but I wanna kind of really enable a lot of the audience to ask their questions here. So I'll ask for questions from the audience but also Twitter. So if you're in the live stream and so on just send out a tweet with the hashtag PLbreakthroughs and I'll see it and be able to ask your question. So, and there will be a mic going around here in the space, just raise your hands and mic will come to you. So I'll start with a couple of questions. So how do you think, so it's extremely useful to see where the field is now and kind of where it's headed. How far do you think we are from starting to couple some of these systems to the more advanced computing systems that we have like some of the more advanced neural and architectures and so on to start and figure out how to enhance some of these applications. So a lot of the applications so far have been about like very basic kind of motor control and very basic use of existing personal computers and so on like moving a cursor, typing and so on. So you were trying to like map the brain signals into moving a mouse, mapping the brain signals into typing and then from there try to like operate through the existing interfaces which are designed for our eyes, not for our brains. And so like how far away do you think like actually starting to use computing systems that are more blended with how our brain thinks or can maybe we can maybe leverage neural nets to start learning how to communicate and so on but can start doing something much more meaningful where either I suspect it's gonna be dramatically easier to extract signals from the brain and then actuate something then maybe go the other way but if you were to sort of like guess what were some of the promising ways to kind of enhance the brain in the way that maybe like the neocortex enhances the limbic and retinalin brains, how would you go about doing it? Yeah, there's a lot there. I don't know if I can make two specific predictions but maybe some relevant thoughts here are, I do think that there's nothing really stopping the application of more advanced computing techniques to the data that are coming out of the brain at the moment that people are applying machine learning to all the modalities that I went over at the beginning that like there'll be no work and they're easy to access. So I do think it's much more of a question of just giving the information out and then the deep nets or whatever kind of just ripe to push the technology forward on that front. And again, to just sort of, I guess I'm just reiterating what I said in the talk but I do think a lot of this comes down to where can people flexibly experiment? So we know, the hippocampus is involved in memory just somehow, I mean, people who are experts in this know way more than that. I'm not saying that's the state of the field but there are certain areas of the brain that we know are implicated in certain aspects of thought but what you can't do really straightforwardly right now is just go drop a bunch of electrodes in there and see what happens at least in a human, I should say. And I guess maybe it's worth mentioning implicitly here of course animal research is extremely valuable for learning about nervous systems and for developing things but as people have probably realized there's a big jump from even from monkeys into humans in terms of creating use cases that people care about. And there's some question of is it even possible for non-humans to have, for example, diseases like depression in the same way that humans? Like is there a linguistic component? Open question. So again, this like flexibility of experimentation you know, it's obviously would be a fishing expedition but I wouldn't be surprised if you put, you know, some managed to get some electrode array into the hippocampus and could just play around. You would find some pretty interesting things. Question of course is can you tie that to something that will like generate revenue? Can you invest the upfront capital to go do that experiment? Not easy. But I mean, I only went through that one fMRI example but there are a lot of pretty crazy examples of what people will do during, you know, experiments in the middle of brain surgery where they have access to the cortex and things. So I guess I would say I don't know what the specific use cases are but I wouldn't be surprised if sometimes it feels like these really profound uses are just like one little tissue curtain away and we just haven't bothered to go in that direction. I'd almost, I mean, I think not to get too abstract I think psychedelics are kind of an example of this in a way where it's like, is this a little molecule and just gets into your brain and completely like puts you on a rocket ship to outer space, like nothing, you know, it's not like we're like ripping your head off to do this. It's just like we're tickling your serotonin receptors in a little bit of a different way and we happen to have access to that one thanks to plants trying to mess us up but it's probably true of all these electrode based methods and things too. So that experimentation pace I think is really the key driver of discovering these things but I think there are discoveries to be made for sure that are really close to hand, frankly with existing tech. If you were to sort of guess at some of the ways in which we can accelerate the experimentation and so on in, do you think that there's, my guess is one part is helping experimentation and especially in the US where a lot of the neuro tech experimentation is happening but do you see any other countries that might have a much better regulatory structure where regulators may be dramatically more aware of the massive human costs of not doing this R&D meaning the US just historically has been extremely focused on not, on kind of like harm to existing humans but not at all are really prioritizing that much future humans and so this is very common in most governments set up in the 1700s and so on because this was before we had a morality of future humans and so on but now when you start accounting for all of the potential people that don't exist yet and you think about weighing their preferences and so on you end up in a very different calculus let alone kind of the classic example of like doing R&D now for the greatest benefit of all and so on. Do you see any other kind of other governments that might be thinking ahead to this or much more kind of acutely aware of the importance of this? Well, yeah, I guess I would, certainly I'm not as much of an expert on this as I would like to be and I'm trying to educate myself more on this. It's the kind of thing that's not usually written down on the internet so it takes a while of talking to people to figure this out but I mean like some stylized facts I can give well one thing I'll say is I don't know if I would put it all on I guess depends what you count as regulatory there are a lot of factors that go into it I mean certainly regulatory rules are a important factor but also the culture of things like institutional review boards and no surgeons there's things that are not legal on the book that are really just norms-based so I guess maybe one kind of stylized fact here you know I don't know if this is usefully answer your question but just like an interesting fact is that while in the US drugs and biological therapeutics and medical devices are regulated by the FDA surgeries are not regulated there's no one ever got approved to like remove someone's wisdom teeth I don't know about dentistry but I assume it's the same as other surgeries. Instead surgery is regulated by surgical boards so basically you can just lose your license if the surgery board thinks that you're operating outside what's best for patients but there's no rule on the books anywhere that says plastic surgeon can't go do brain surgery they can sort of legally do that they just will be reprimanded in other ways so all this is just one example of sort of how complicated these things are like combination of regulatory factors norms things like that in terms of jurisdictions again I also I don't really know I mean the European medical device regulation was sort of famously more focused on safety rather than safety and efficacy which is what the US's standard tends to be but even in the US medical device regulation is quite different from drug regulation and actually I'm not sure that the European medical agency I think has maybe changed the rules so I'm not sure that still holds up Australia I think I mentioned earlier in the talk is also an interesting example and I don't think it's unique I think this may be true of like New Zealand and stuff too but Australia is where the first work on the Stent Road was done that like in blood vessel BCI I talked about and yeah certainly if you listen to interviews with the CEO of Synchron they mentioned how important it was to do that work in Australia they never would have been able to in the US so all this is not like I'm saying Australia is the best place to do anything I guess I'm just saying that I think there are actually there's like a lot of variants here that would be really usefully explored and again to shill for people to work on Neurotek if someone wanted to devote a month to studying this stuff and writing a blog I mean I would be massively appreciative of that so there's definitely it's not just that everything is totally locked down and we're never gonna get out of this I think there really are opportunities to be clever about how to accelerate this research Yeah all right any questions from the audience or Twitter? Raise your hands back there Hi I have a really weird ethics question and it's kind of the same when I asked Juan the first time I met him actually so when you see food manufacturing get a lot easier and all of a sudden agriculture gets a lot better we're able to produce all this corn and soy we're able to produce crazy amounts of chicken you see the nutrition content and the quality of the food go down so you see places like food deserts where all the kids are obese and they're also all malnourished and suffering from all these diseases and decreased lifespan and that's something that came out of we're able to really accelerate the growth in one dimension we're able to make a lot of crap and then that kind of has all these ramifications we weren't expecting do you know if anyone is thinking about the ramifications of what I'm really concerned about is speeding up education, having fast food education where it just gets downloaded into the brain maybe things get lost maybe all the socialization that happens in 18 years of school gets totally canned and you have these like cloned human beings who just haven't been shaped by social forces in the same way do you know if anyone's thinking about it do you have any thoughts about it yeah I would just love to hear you talk about it because that's my big worry No, I think those are really good points to bring up and I didn't spend enough time on the on the sort of risk side I was going to be a bit of a booster in this talk but I do think there are lots of ways that all of these technologies can go wrong which is I think true of any technology in terms of who is thinking about it when there is a field of neuroethics it's not so overwhelmingly full of people that all these ideas have been explored in detail and I mean I'm not a deep reader in that literature I've obviously read skimmed a lot of things from that field and my sense is that it tends to I haven't seen that much what's the word I'm looking for like people haven't looked at these frontier technologies as closely like I don't know maybe these exist and I haven't seen them but I haven't seen people who do like deep sort of neuroethics analyses of like just ultrasound or something like that or just focused ultrasound so I think that could be really useful in gaming these things out they tend to be sort of higher level but there is a whole field there and then of course there's ideas that are poured over from like general techno ethics that are still relevant I'm not sure exactly what the specific technical details would provide you it's just gonna be, it seems like it's case by case in terms of I don't know my specific thoughts again I guess I just said it but it's very case by case I think it's very hard for me to have general thoughts on what should or shouldn't be done it always comes down to the specific affordances of the technology and so I can certainly point to many bad things that I don't want to happen like I would not like to have the next neuro technology be the next opioid crisis or whatever like they're absolutely less than we should learn from the past and avoid but again it's very specific to each technology which is probably really not a useful answer but I think that's the best I got let's see I don't see any on Twitter is there any other question here? There we are, hand? Hi my name is Andreas I wrote a paper a couple of years ago about the potential of emotional bonding between digital assistants and people so that you know Alexa becomes your friend essentially and so basically it's a different interface between machine and people it's the emotional interface is that something you came across and have any thoughts on? The specific idea of emotionally bonding to AI? Yeah I think it's like you there are many kind of systems that were humans sort of a million emotional bonding responses are mapping and triggering and so on and you also have like AI systems that kind of like are compatible in that sense and you know like in games you see the salon and assistive technologies and whatnot. Yeah again I don't know if I have any really insightful high level thoughts there maybe a sort of related point is that I guess I do think that there's it's very useful to have sort of maybe you call them skewmorphic design principles or something where you really can like anneal society gently into these new technologies by making it very easy to turn off or unplug actually this is again as I think I mentioned like really annoying thing about drugs or medications you take is it really hard to turn off once you swallow them like and so if you have some kind of extremely high bandwidth interface to an AI assistant or something I think it'll be very important to design those things in ways that are like very easy to disconnect right somewhat reversible not necessarily explantable or anything but just you know being able to like easily power them off or things like that will be really critical for this kind of safety side of things and I think some of I'm not sure this is what you're getting at with the question but some of these issues of like emotional attachment or they border on the sort of safety side of things where you're sort of thinking about you know what are the what are someone's preferences and you know are we somehow subverting those things but as you can tell by this waffly answer I think this rapidly takes you into sort of just general ethics and like meta ethics territory where it's like well which person's preferences are we optimizing for is it like me yesterday or me today and I those people might not think the same thing and then I think very different things after I you know have some some neural implants so you know if I have my dream neuro technology that can you know when I'm when I'm just exhausted and like can't muster the amount of patients that I wish I could muster if I could just crank that up I mean I think I want that I think past me wants that and I think currently wants that but of course again it's all very case by case there's have to be ways built into these systems to like very carefully watch one's one's own behavior and reactions to these things and hopefully be able to have these irreversible technologies you can reset. And that the ethics of humanity once you have PCIs and any kind of high bandwidth is very very different to our current ethics I think this is an example of one technology that will just dramatically alter the species and how we operate and how we work and how we exist and how we are and so it is extremely difficult to try and adapt our current norms and our current thinking to a world kind of after that we're starting to hit on boundaries of a few technologies like that that are transcendental in that level I think another one is gene editing, AGI systems and yeah I think these systems and both like the scale of the impact on the change and the speed at which that change would happen like we've never encountered anything like this before so it'll be definitely require a lot of thinking ahead of trying to reason about those things and that makes me think of a question around BCI might be there maybe doesn't get talked enough about these days but it used to be is kind of how do you get into how hard might it be to get to some sort of telepathy type behavior where you have if you connect humans together you then have the same kinds of signals that you might be having through synapses and so on but now happening maybe in high density between two neocortices or something then you start getting into now it's extremely hard and difficult to actually get anything remotely close to thinking together or even something that is consciously where you can consciously be aware of but how do you think about that and how do you think about those kind of like co-processing questions? Oh, is that a question for me? Yeah, it's a question to you. Yeah, basically like how telepathy when? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was just a beautiful sort of question. And well, I don't know about when or how I mean a couple again random popcorn thoughts coming into my head. One is we do have some interesting case studies on this there are examples of conjoined twins that share parts of their brain. And so that's I don't know one interesting thing to look into with regards to this question. I do think again not to make this into a freshman philosophy class but like there is an interesting question of like what's the difference between really good persuasion and just me having a direct line into your neocortex and we're sort of averaging out our ideas. There's clearly a difference on how it's operationalized but I'm not sure how different it is on the ethical level. Or even just lying to someone I guess is another very peripheral neural technology, right? You're sort of influencing their brain in a way that is like a to your benefit. So maybe we could port some ideas over from general ethics in this way but in terms of like telepathy when? Again, I wouldn't I don't think I'd advocate exactly running this experiment right now but like there are no physical principles that are barring you from actually hooking up to people's neocortis. I mean, you have to do a little bit of engineering here but like these things are sort of conceivable to do now. I think the question is, you know, what would you be hoping to get out of them? And it becomes a question of, you know, risk and what what society is interested in learning and very reasonable questions. Like if you're going to do neurosurgery on someone should have a good scientific reason. I did have a picture I think earlier of people sometimes call a hyper scanning or people have had people communicate with noninvasive methods like EEG and things that just aren't they aren't very high, high bandwidth or high resolution but people have done prototypes of these. So yeah, I think I think maybe I'm speaking just only to myself here but I think when I very early on encountered, you know, kind of neuro technology and all I saw was like, you know, EEG headbands like didn't really work that well and you know, it was sort of disappointing and you'd see people do these experiments like, wow, we hooked up two people in a lab with EEG on and they like did interesting things. And you're kind of like, yeah, but like EEG is kind of not sexy and things like that. And it took me a long time to sort of realize that the experimental setups and the ideas people are working on with the existing tech are truly fascinating and they're just bottlenecked by the bandwidth here. So it's very worthwhile exercise if you're interested in this stuff to, you know, go and, you know, if you can, if you're me maybe speaking just to my own proclivities but like, if EEG is kind of boring to you, go look up some interesting weird stuff people have tried with EEG and probably failed at because it didn't work very well or fMRI and just imagine what that would be like with, you know, really, even just marginally 10%, you know, maybe 10x achievable with current technology higher bandwidth. And I think there's some pretty exciting stuff that can be done really soon with that technology. Great, one last question. I was wondering, what role do you think open source play here? And if it's possible at all, do the high cost I imagine all this research takes? Open source software or open source everything? Open source everything. Yeah, just everything. I will, I mean, I won't make any pronouncements about open source or governance in the presence of a brilliant protohab's minds on this. I think these people have thought about this a lot more than me. I certainly think the world could use, and neural technology could use much better software in lots of use cases. Broadly speaking to like first order, of course, things are great if they're open source. And of course, I guess there's this, with the distinguished sort of open source, as in you can see the source code versus what the license fees are and things like that, which again is way out of my area. But I will say that there is a slight, it's a slight complication in the world when things come to hardware and like biotech because investors in particular in the space, like intellectual property matters a lot. And in transcranial magnetic stimulation, if you remember from earlier on, those coils that I showed that's out of the brain. The early field of TMS, I was talking, you're interacting with one of the early pioneers in that space. And he says he really regretted open sourcing the hardware implementation of his first device because he thought it slowed investment in the field. And the companies that built the hardware had to go come up with weird new IP in order to like have a defensible company. So again, that's not to say like no open source by any means. I think there's lots of use for open source. But really, I think there's use for is like smart protohab's people and whoever you are on the audience for thinking of like better ways to, think about patents, intellectual property, things like that, I think that stuff could really move the needle in some of these spaces. And I think like Evan and, you know, David and people have talks on things like this. It's a great place to transition to talk to Adam and about our partners and so on. Milan, thank you so much. This was extremely enlightening. Thank you so much for the talk. Great, great to have you. And yeah, thank you.