In a previous post, I talked about how we don’t understand the brain. We’ve built machines that mimic it, but these machines are opaque and don’t give us a view into how the brain works. The machines we’ve built are something
In a previous post, I talked about how we don’t understand the brain. We’ve built machines that mimic it, but these machines are opaque and don’t give us a view into how the brain works. The machines we’ve built are something I’d call Cheap AI. From observing cheap AI consume input and produce output, we can get an idea of how the brain consumes input and produces output. From making the substructures on which we allow cheap AI to grow, we can infer that the brain must grow on similar structures. For example, neural networks. But this doesn’t tell us what actually grows on those structures. Really understanding the brain is not building machines that can build the brain; it’s actually building the brain ourselves.
The first step in building a brain is building an brain-augmenting interface. What’s that? It’s hypothetical. Remember Google Glass? (Uh, no?) Google Glass projected stuff onto a screen that you had outside your eyes, and your eyes would then see more stuff than they would see without Google Glass. That’s a type of augmenting. But the augmenting is happening outside of your eye. It’s happening on the light that hits your eye. In terms of brain-augmenting technology, that’s the same as a flashlight. So when the light from the world + Google Glass hits your eye, your eye sees the world + Google Glass cookie recipes, and it transmits that stuff to the brain. A brain-augmenting interface would let the light from the world hit your eye normally, then augment the signal AFTER your eye transmitted it to the brain. If you could build that, it would be a brain-augmenting interface.
Have you thought about what it means to build this interface with a brain? Like in Terminator. When you see those red wireframe overlays on motorbikes, clothes, boots and underwear as Schwarzenegger passes his eyes over them? Think about what it would take to get those red overlays.
I started thinking about this, and despite the fact that I know nothing about even the terminology for the parts of the eye, even less about terminology for nerves, and very little about what you call parts of properties of light like photos or whatever, I realized that just by thinking logically, you can get really far into designing the system you’d need to have a visual brain-augmenting interface. A brain-augmenting interface behind the eye. Let’s think that through. Let’s design that system logically.
We want you to look at something with your eyes: say you look at a cement truck. We want you to fully see that cement truck very clearly. Whether you need glasses or not it doesn’t matter: we want the image that you get in your brain to be clear, like it is today if you have good eyesight or good glasses. And… we want you to see a red wireframe overlay on the tank part of the truck, with statistics running down the side in a tiny font analyzing capacity, speed of rotation, probable weight, et cetera. Let’s assume we have a phone that already did all the statistics and figured out coordinates to draw the right shape of the truck. What would it take for you to see that red overlay on the truck?
Here’s what it would take. We would need to cut the cable between your brain and your eye. Now that cable has two dangling ends: the eye end and the brain end. We would need to attach the dangling eye end to the input of a chip, let’s assume a chip we could comfortably embed in your skull. And we would need to attach the brain end of that cable to the output of that chip. So let’s assume this is all small and nicely hidden in your head. Bone is thick right so there’s plenty of room to hide this in there, right? (I’ve actually read it’s not thick at all, but we’re not really thinking through aesthetics today.) So we’ve got a chip intermediating in the “eye cable.”
What would that chip need to do? That chip would need to see what you see, add red wireframe overlays, and output exactly what you see plus the red wireframe overlays perfectly aligned over w