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The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech’s campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk’s new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people’s brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to build a headset or headband that would allow people to send text messages by thinking — tapping them out at 100 words per minute. The company’s goal was a hands-free interface anyone could use in virtual reality. “What if you could type directly from your brain?” asked Regina Dugan, a former DARPA officer who was then head of the Building 8 hardware dvision. “It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you realize.”

Now the answer is in — and it’s not close at all. Four years after announcing a “crazy amazing” project to build a “silent speech” interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off. In a blog post, Facebook said it is discontinuing the project and will instead focus on an experimental wrist controller for virtual reality that reads muscle signals in the arm. “While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain-computer interface] technologies, we’ve decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market,” the company said. Facebook’s brain-typing project had led it into uncharted territory — including funding brain surgeries at a California hospital and building prototype helmets that could shoot light through the skull — and into tough debates around whether tech companies should access private brain information. Ultimately, though, the company appears to have decided the research simply won’t lead to a product soon enough.

Facebook told employees this week that it’s developing a tool to summarize news articles so users won’t have to read them. It also laid out early plans for a neural sensor to detect people’s thoughts and translate them into action. From a report:
[…] He [Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer] also detailed a neural sensor to read commandments from people’s brains. Having acquired neural interface startup CTRL-labs in 2019, Facebook demonstrated its progress in the field with a sensor that takes “neural signals coming from my brain, down my spinal cord along my arm, to my wrist” and allows a user to make a physical action. Schroepfer noted that it could be used for typing, holding a virtual object, or controlling a character in a video game. “We all get the privilege of seeing the future because we are making it,” he said. Still, Facebook’s chief technology officer seemed to anticipate any criticisms of the products — or past failures — by touting safety measures. “We have to build responsibly to earn trust and the right to continue to grow,” he said. “It’s imperative that we get this right so that people around the world get all these amazing technologies … without experiencing the downsides.”

With a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink’s technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink device showed the pig’s activity activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night.

The demonstration shows the the technology to be significantly closer to delivering on Musk’s radical ambitions than during a 2019 product debut, when Neuralink only showed photos of a rat with a Neuralink connected via a USB-C port. It’s still far from reality, but Musk said the US Food and Drug Administration in July granted approval for “breakthrough device” testing. Musk also showed a second-generation device that’s more compact and that fits into a small cavity hollowed out of a hole in a skull. “It’s like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” Musk said of the device. It communicates with brain cells with 1,024 thin electrodes that penetrate within brain c

Facebook is working on technology that allows users to type straight from their thoughts without having to lift a finger to work the keyboard. Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA and the ex-head of Google’s experimental ATAP research group, said that the brain-computer interface had the capacity to revolutionize how human beings use and interact with technology. Currently, such brain-computer interface technology only exists in medical research but the Building 8 team is committed to bringing it to reality.

“Late last year, you were introduced to real, live, remote-controlled cockroaches. Well, the insect hackers at the North Carolina State University are at it again, this time with a Microsoft Kinect and a software program that can boss the bugs around without human input. In other words, we have successfully co-opted cockroach sovereignty — and given it to the machines.

The goal is to ultimately use this kind of technology to create armies of biobots capable of things bio-inspired robots can only dream of.

Now, instead of those impulses being controlled remotely by a human, they’re tapped into the software program, which takes cues from the Xbox Kinect’s tracking data. If the cockroach veers away from the target, the Kinect observes the change and relays it to the software, which in turn makes a split-second decision about how much correctional impulse should be sent to the roach. Longer stimulation is designed to produce more drastic correction, just like pulling hard on a steering wheel.

The results are pretty impressive. Their previous work with remote control yielded only about a 10 per cent success rate, but the new technology has bumped them up to 27 per cent. You can see it for yourself below with a roach that really seems to want nothing in the world but to turn right.”