"...we already have mind-machine interfaces." _Like button appears_ I see what you did there...

Jacked in as soon as the notification reached my sensorium!

Just came out of class discussing ERPs, had two classes yesterday on neurology and neuroimaging. Come home. First thing I do is watch a video on mind-machine interfaces. I am a nerd. And I love it.

Note: Make sure to vote in our poll on the SFIA KZfaq Community Tab :)

"Most people don't want to stick wires in their skull" Not me, I'd get a Datajack the day they came out.

" Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. " ;D I noticed, Isaac.

Isaac has engaged my mind-link. Happy Arthursday!!!!

Me when MMIs are commercially viable: _From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel, I aspired to the purity of the blessing machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you, But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal._ _Even in death I serve the Omnissiah._

I would just love to be reminded of peoples names and whether I have met them before. Additionally when and where the last time I saw someone would be nice.

"These already work on rat brains" I wonder if scientists will be able to dumb it down to my level

This is amazing technology. I am completely blind. This could give me my site back. Pretty amazing stuff

A car dealership that knows my mood? Never go there. Sounds like the movie "Minority Report"

This is probably the most interesting topic I can imagine. Thank you for making an episode on it!

Best show on the tube!!!! Keep up good work

"I don't want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter..." Battlestar Galactica

I always find it exciting to hear about major technological breakthroughs that we expect to see within our lifetime.

The "keyboard in the brain" approach is something I actually used in a story I never finished writing. A neural computer interface there is essentially a keyboard and monitor in the brain. Some sets of pads the neurons will latch onto and will communicate with like any other neuron. Getting used to the display involved having it take the video from a tablet computer that you'd also be using normally so you'd have some frame of reference for what the new signals were supposed to be.

"I know Kung Fu."

Me : Brain-app please search for pictures the serengeti. Brain-app : Display 1million hits found for pictures of spagetti.

Oh perfect timing. I was just poking around on the subreddit asking some MMI related stuff... Thanks for the video! 🙏

This is one of the technologies I’m most excited about. Soon I may finally have my robotic body with my brain stuck in it! (Cheers all around)

The solution is clear: Start training to be a zen-master now! Make yourself immune to future remote thought-reading by thinking only encrypted thoughts. Make sure your thought process is so convoluted that it can't be snooped upon. Additionally, train yourself to have good and fast instincts, someone can't mind-read that you're about to throw a punch if you don't know either.

KZfaq: Published 30 seconds ago. Me: Damn I'm late.

Just wanted to say how much I appreciate your videos. Thank you for doing what you do!

I’ve been waiting for this for a while now; thank you Isaac!

Issac's segways into advertising are always ridiculously on point.

This is my new favorite episode! This is why I want Neuralink so badly! I can think of so many things I would try to learn to do better and faster.

Can we get a video on the cultural implications of MMI and full immersion virtual reality?

Isaac, another great video! You clearly put a lot of effort into these.

Oh heck yeah! I've been waiting this topic for a while!

So keen to interface into this video!!

Good Morning everyone! Great job SFIA, looking forward to the live stream!!

Happy Arthursday folks! And thanks Isaac Arthur for uploading.

What a “Brillliant” way to recruit new minds; via games and training. Last Star Fighter.....

the most important thing to knwo about mind machien interfaces is that you need them to have helicopters in alpha centauri

Awesome way to start my day! Thank you again for great content!

I'm writing a personal statement for my university application this week, for a bioengineering course. Part of it is me demonstrating my outside knowledge on the topic, and I was writing about MMI's. And then this pops up.. Thanks, Isaac!

Excellent as always, thanks.

"... a union of flesh and steel, with the strenghts of both and the weaknesses of neither. And in doing so, I will save more lives than have ever existed!"

_I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen._

One of the very few channels where I can click the like button before even watching the video and know it won't be a mistake.

I’ve seen a lot of this MMI in the news lately. From a quadriplegic man walking with an exoskeleton using MMI and someone learning to control a mechanical prosthesis. Both had to practise using avatars before actually using the devices. I’m excited for my son who is in his first year, studying biomedical engineering.

This is frickin' amazing. Thanks Isaac

I'm really excited for this technology to become a reality, and really want to work on its development, eventually. Really good video on the subject, I can see how deeply this would change society over time, and am glad you managed to convey this through the video

Great content. Thought out, down-to-earth style. Keep it up.

Love your videos. Love your narration. Love your content. Thank you.

Happy Arthursday!

"Oh metal god! The union is fierce, like a maelstrom in black water, like a seething cauldron on a fire in which you boil and cook together, no start of one, no end of another, [to] be clutched by god! To feel the incendiary hungering in your marrow! Oh lucky man!" From "Titanicus" by Dan Abbnett. POV of a Princeps (the captain) mind-interfaced in the Manifold with a Warlord Titan, the giant walking war engines which are likened as an avatar of the God of Machines.

I would not be surprised if by the end of the century, you have kids growing up with shit like this casually waving their hands at home or school to control various aspects of the environment at a whim like a maestro directing a concerto. It is kind of beautiful to think about in all honesty.

An enjoyable birthday present, thank you Isaac!

*Eats lunch while watching video on Isaac's mental command.* A most informative episode as always Isaac.

In the US Department of Defense, they used the term MMI since at least the 1980s, it was just short for Man-Machine Interface.

I love your videos, keep up the good work

Ohh yeah, looking forward to next week

first IA video I've watched...very cool...will be checking out many more....

Isaac Arthur's deserves a Prize of sorts for his work on so many topics!!! No Isaac YOU have a great week.

Loved the video! Also I just found out that you did a voice pack for Stellaris notifications. Subscribed!

That robot driving the car...LOL

Interesting topic this week

neuralink: oh yeah this is big brain time

i like to explain mind machine interfaces by comparing it to learning to ride a bike without using your hands: -at first it's gonna be very hard and you'll only be able to let go of the steering bar for mere moments -as you get better, you'll be able to drive a couple meters when holding yourself perfectly still, but you'll lose speed and therefore also your balance sooner or later, so you'll have to grab the steering bar again -once you're good enough at it to readjust your balance on the fly by leaning or moving your entire body in one way or another (waving with arms will be considered to be fair game), you'll be able to finally learn how to speed up using the pedals, which means you can theoretically cycle forever without using your arms but your gluteus maximus by pushing your bike under you to one side or another, depending on what position your pedalling legs are in or what direction you wanna go or just balance out after a bump in the road -and once you're on a high enough level, you'll be able to dodge objects in traffic without much of a hassle anymore, go around corners and speed up at will, even going uphill if your body's mass permits it without you launching yourself off the bike and all this without having to look ahead but sideways to find what you're looking for or doing stuff on your phone, essentially being able to multi task on a bike

Probably one of the future technologies I'm most excited for.

Confident enough to hit the like button now e even though I won't be able to watch the full video for another 2 hours. Consistently great content has its rewards lol

Time to learn thank you sir. No snack but i have coffee :)

best content on youtube

New subscriber. New episode. Can't wait to dive in. Off topic question: Does Isaac play videogames or have any background in the videogame industry. He'd be the perfect advisor for companies looking to develop sci fi titles. I love the attention to all the fine details..in just about every vid I've watched so far. Awesome!

Johnny Mnemonic: "Hit me."

Just a note on the whole "ranged" mind reading, won't be a thing since each person's brain is wired differently and interpreting what's happening inside requires training of a neural network like with standard AI. So if you don't know the person's "brain blueprint" you won't be able to make sense of the data that you've collected. Unless you first hack her interface of course.

Ahh I missed this upload somehow!! I’m currently doing research in university in BCI/MMI technologies! Wish i saw this sooner

You always produce such thought provoking videos, thank you! I don't like the idea of hooking my brain up to a machine...in fact, when my times comes, I don't eve want a machine to keep me alive.

There are some additional papers that I think would interest people : > Electronic and Ionic Materials for Neurointerface (Standford, Melosh Group) > Neural Dust: An Ultrasonic, Low Power Solution for Chronic Brain-Machine Interfaces (Berkeley) > Multifunctional fibers for simultaneous optical, electrical and chemical interrogation of neural circuits in vivo (MIT) In all three of these papers, it is suggested that an immune response is only caused by a mechanical mismatch at the tissue scale and that devices below 100 microns may be able to go "unnoticed" by the immune cells. The primary cause of an adverse immune response, at least according to these papers, is implantation methods. We're almost there folks.

i need this now

For anyone interested in scientifically based languages. Take a look at Hangul (Korean). It was designed to specifically for ease of learning (takes about 3 hours to learn the basics) and is purely phonically driven (not hieroglyphic). The shape the tongue makes even dictated the shape of the characters. The text density is roughly 3 times that of a Latin based language. As an engineer, I find the language beautiful in its simplicity.

Isaac's videos are MMI's. They always tell me when it's time for a snack or drink. My stomach is obsolete

An interesting non-invasive MMI is featured in the anime series Toaru Majutsu no Index and its spin-offs. The so-called Testament is a system designed to download extreme amounts of information into the human mind. For that it uses all of a persons senses at the same time, bombarding them with information in a structured way to provoke the correct responses and program whatever is needed into their mind. It's basically a high-bandwidth full-body hypnosis. In the show they mainly use it to get mass-produced clones fully functional - loading them up with years worth of knowledge and experience. It's only useful for downloading into the human mind though, transfer from mind to machine would have to happen via different means.

great stuff for the mind

Back in the '80's I worked for McDonnell Douglas at the space center in Houston. One very interesting benefit, was the company sent around regular news,enters on interesting tech they developed. One was a mind (or rather brain) reading system. No joke, it was real. It was made out of a woven mesh of fiber optic cables, doped at points with material reacting to EM emissions of the brain. It was built for a Air Force study of how pilots react, and recover from high G, and was built so a pilot could wear it under the helmet. The AF wasn't happy what they found about pilot recovering from G induced loss of consciousness, or near loss. Basically the primitive parts of the brain wake up minutes before the high logic parts did. So for a while you had a talking monkey flying your fighter. Anyway. The company found the surface of the back of the brain mapped the images of what you were seeing, OR VISUALIZING IN YOUR MIND. So flash old esp test cards (star, circle, wavy line, etc) in front of a persons eyes, and the machine could see them seeing it on the back surface of their brain. Passing esp tests with laughable ease. Also if the person visualized the symbols. They were using the same parts of the brain, and generating similar readable patterns. The company proposed developing this into a heads up aiming system. Look at the target. Have the system recognize geometric markings on the canopy to figure out where your pointing your eyes. Then targets the weapons there, or at whatever is around there. You could add in heads up overlays where the machine displayed a bracket around where it figures you want the explosion as confirming feedback. It never went very far. There are obviously simpler ways to get a direction vector to a targeting computer. Also ?I think complex images would overwhelm it. Still interesting possibility. Fyi

Omg the house turret confirmation... I just about died lol 😂

To our brain, any tool we use is an extension of our body. The brain literally treats tools as being part of our members, and part of our "body plan" (even prioperception is altered). Our neurons used to orient ourselves in space (plan of the surroundings, path finding) are used when we are watching TV; that is, our brain locates ourselves within what we are watching. One fascinating conclusion is that possibly, using a "mind tool" like Wikipedia, video-conference, avatars, video games, etc., pushes our brain to integrate these tools as an immediate extension of our brain and body. Navigating the Web or playing a video game has us "located" within the virtual space. If you concentrate on your screen, you stop seeing the boundaries -- it feels as if you were sucked into it. This happens because our brain "locates" us within the contents.

can't wait for the cyber security episode. It's currently my filed of study and I am of them mindset that poor cyber security could prevent a future where cyborg technology becomes ubiquitous.

I submitted a patent on this a couple years ago. Small sensors would be injected and their location formatted in 3D in the body like we do for hard drives. Vibrations would then transmit information to and from nerve cells to little coils that would be relayed to the operating system.

21:43 Lol! I could definitely see a confirmation window like that in the future (the "House Defense Control Center")!

Happy Arthursday people!

Speech to text software so accurate it's amazing how many things they can just pick up like none other OK I was hoping that it would really mess up like a usually does but it did

This is all just treating consciousness as having an interface that interacts with the body, and extending the interface to be able to interact with other things. I like to imagine of a supercomputer that you can link to, not just as a calculator to let you answer sums quickly, but something that acts as an additional brain. Like upgrading a computer from 1 cpu to 2, but not really, more like adding a floating point co-processor to a cpu that didn't have one - it allows you to think more complicated, more accurate thoughts that you couldn't before, to think of every possibility at once and make better decisions. It would allow you to think like Isaac does. This was only hinted at the very end of the video, would love to hear more of Isaac's supercomputer enhanced thoughts on this.

Your opening remark reminds me of a quote from sid myres alpha chentari

I LOVE this topic! Though you really grossly understated the challenges involved in trying to do neuron-level mapping. I don't think anything short of radically advanced nanotech will be up to the task, and even then the constant changes in neural patterns, growth and death of cells, etc well make it a constantly moving target, to say nothing of the issues with the mapping system interfering with the brain's functioning. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I don't feel you really presented the whole story. One argument against invasive, implanted brain/machine interfaces that I'm surprised you didn't mention is the issue of obsolescence. Upgrading your computer or phone as the technology advances is enough of a hassle already, but when the system you're trying to replace is physically interwoven into your brain you may find yourself stuck with a legacy system and missing out on the new hotness.

Goddamn it - video was posted 5 minutes ago and I only JUST noticed? If I had MMI I would have been promptly notified.

Thanks Isaac, I miss the book recommendations.

Oh here we go

I got spooked hard when I read Yuval Harari mentioned computer brain interfaces in 'Sapiens' and 'Homo Deus'. This episode is gonna be one crazy half hour.

I just realized you have a link in the description for SoundCloud. You should mention it some time in some video so more people will know it exist

I'm always a fan of the acronym DNI; Direct Neural Interface.

The keyboard with only a few symbols: korean can be typed that way, it fits so neatly on a small screen! It's a little more than 8×8 though.

The training part is one reason invasive options might see better adoption. If you forget to put on your wizard hat in the morning, or it doesn't sit in exactly the same place every time, you won't get the best training experience. It's the reason wearable sensory substitution devices do so poorly compared to surface mounts or implanted ones, usually an implanted magnet that gets vibrated to make a signal. Implants are also harder to lose, forget, or have stolen.

...Did anyone accidentally nerd-snipe themselves by trying to figure out how to design a keyboard that could accidentally cut vegetables?

TBH if you have a smartphone IMO you're already halfway to cyborg. Do you remember when you had to wait to look up who sang that song or who starred in that movie without having a portable link to the entire fountain of human knowledge in your back pocket? I have one myself but I still like to keep my old fashioned meat memory in shape. I finished the NYT crossword yesterday without even looking at my phone. I was tempted though.

I like to try to convince people that we are already transhuman. It almost defines us _as_ human - we have been improving ourselves and our capabilities with tools since the dawn of our species. One of my favorite examples is that we have basically implemented telepathy technologically - it's not very advanced, yet, but we can already send each other words, images, audio, and video with the twitch of a finger... :)

Intresting.

Could you change your brain to a computer in a ship of thesius kind of way with the invasive method? Basically mapping, then replacing neurons slowly, getting used to the new ones, then get a new batch. Once you have everything, you can start changing transmission speeds etc