Bezos and Gates Back Synchron in Drive for Brain Implant Breakthrough 44
Bloomberg: Last March, brain-computing interface expert Tom Oxley sat down to dinner with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to talk about Oxley's nascent company, Synchron. That meal in Ojai, Calif., ended with something better than dessert: Bezos told Oxley that he wanted to invest in the business. Synchron said Thursday it completed a $75 million funding round, part of it from Bezos Expeditions. The financing was led by ARCH Venture Partners, and includes a check from Gates Frontier, the venture investment arm of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and others. Existing investors also participated, including Khosla Ventures -- whose founder, Vinod Khosla, introduced Oxley to Gates.
Brain-computer interfaces, known as BCIs, can interpret and stimulate parts of the brain and are seen as a possible treatment for brain injuries. New investors approached Synchron "through the lens of making an impact in neurology in an area of need," Oxley said in an interview. They "saw BCI as a future therapeutic." About 100 million people globally have upper limb impairment, he said, and could benefit from the technology. [...] Synchron's Switch device aims to help paralyzed people, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicate by controlling computer cursors with their minds. The company has already enrolled three patients in a six-person US feasibility trial and implanted the device in two of them. Oxley expects the remaining patients to enroll and receive their implants in the next few months.
Brain-computer interfaces, known as BCIs, can interpret and stimulate parts of the brain and are seen as a possible treatment for brain injuries. New investors approached Synchron "through the lens of making an impact in neurology in an area of need," Oxley said in an interview. They "saw BCI as a future therapeutic." About 100 million people globally have upper limb impairment, he said, and could benefit from the technology. [...] Synchron's Switch device aims to help paralyzed people, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicate by controlling computer cursors with their minds. The company has already enrolled three patients in a six-person US feasibility trial and implanted the device in two of them. Oxley expects the remaining patients to enroll and receive their implants in the next few months.
Well that's just nova (Score:3)
Yeah.. nah, mate (Score:2)
A brain interface technology company that can't maintain a website and is based in Brooklyn, NY is a bad investment.
Hard pass.
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The Internet is for p0rn? /cue song
hard pass (Score:1)
I don't care WHO is behind the tech or who is supporting it ( be it Gates, Musk or god him/her self ), I'm firmly against getting such an implant.
Not that I think the technology isn't neat, it is; 100%. I worry about it's exploitation, and that concern is more than enough for me to avoid it.
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Not that I think the technology isn't neat, it is; 100%. I worry about it's exploitation, and that concern is more than enough for me to avoid it.
The problem is every technology invented can be exploited for a negative gain in some way, the issue here is whether the positive gains are enough to offset the negative ones.
Personally if the wiring in my meat suit fails to a point where I'm no longer able to use my attached limbs, but my limbs are totally fine otherwise, and an implanted chip in the brain can fix the wiring enough to let me use my limbs again I'm all for it! Could someone with nefarious intent hack the chip and make me do something I'd o
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I'm not. I would rather die. Further, I would rather that people stuck in th
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yeah the internet sucks, you shouldn't use it.
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Neither does the internet have the same potential for electronic coercion and enslavement of humanity
Social Media has entered the chat.
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tiktok here, you are 100 percent correct, we are not a threat actor controlled by a authoritarian regime with agendas.
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Dumbest thing I've read all morning. EVERYBODY's perspective is relevant to the conversation. It's not just technological -- the topic is largely philosophical and ethical.
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Exactly what evil do you imagine could be done? They're not going to be able to read your mind or re-wire your brain, only record whatever motor signals your brain sends it, and feed you corrupted versions of whatever sensory data it's wired to provide.
The worst they could do is possibly trigger a seizure.
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Initially, you're probably right -- with the inclusion of being able to inflict intense, unimaginable pain as well.
Do you not see how this could be used as a means of coercion, conditioning... control? And, not just in a laboratory setting, but anywhere in reach of wireless data transfer. It sounds sci-fi, for sure, but it's certainly plausible. And, it's certainly within the realm of what humanity has historically demonstrated itself being capable
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Only if you had an implant installed specifically to be able to inflict extreme pain, and why would you do that? The brain itself has no pain receptors, and inflicting significant pain is going to require a MUCH larger and more expensive implant - only simulating a few hundred or pain receptors firing just isn't going to be all that unpleasant in the grand scheme of things.
More importantly, any even half-sane implant is going to have an off switch in case of malfunction, so if they try anything - pain, "ha
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I totally agree. I can't imagine anyone volunteering to have such a device installed. In a setting where all installations are voluntary, this technology could do a lot of good. I'm sure we all hope that's the only situation this tech would be used.
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If installations *aren't* voluntary, then we already have much worse problems on our hands.
Re: hard pass (Score:2)
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>though I'd hope the person putting it in would have some monster level of encryption on it so no one but me, my medical team, and the authorized company technicians can actually access the thing.
Better still, there should be a physical "accept update" button that needs to be pressed so that *nobody* can modify *anything* unless they're physically in contact with you. It's a trivial safeguard that renders any device almost completely immune to a wide range of persistent hacks, assuming it prevents such
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Yes, but I'd rather carry a portable phone. The only uses I have for it are combined phone+address book+alarm. And the address book was better when it was separate...but the paper things wear out, and they stopped printing new ones. The current phone is less useful as a phone than the one two decades ago was (though it's a lot lighter, and I like the improved battery life).
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Re: hard pass (Score:2)
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To be fair, it's not part of the current development either. Not in any integrated way. But it's worth worrying about.
P.S.: Replying to someone up-post: It won't have encrypted circuitry. That would make repairs extremely difficult and dangerous unless they were done by the exact same folks who did the original installation (and you sure can't count on that, especially a few years later). Even Dick Cheney didn't have his pacemaker encrypted.
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There are no exploits that control your thoughts.
Everybody with the implant says so.
Potential to monitor Amazon employees... (Score:2)
I think this technology might be very useful to Amazon to monitor employees..
Both remote workers and delivery workers...
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We already have ways to measure the production output of most employees. The problem is those metrics often suck and can be gamed. How many boxes can a warehouse worker fulfill with weights for item counts, mass, volume. How many packages and miles does a driver deliver, maybe some weights for packages that are farther harder for one reason or another. That's not too hard to do and certainty exists.
We've tried doing stuff like this for creative / software like fields with lines
I'm conflicted about this (Score:2)
On the one hand, if I or a loved one had need of this kind of technology to save a life or improve quality of life, I'd be grateful for it. Plus, it's cool geekery and it's sometimes satisfying to see Science Fiction become science fact.
On the other hand, I'm concerned about the potential here, both for mind-reading and for the development of cyborgs, both of these seem more than a little dystopian. And then there's the question of whether we really ought to be taking heroic measures to extend human life, w
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And then there's the question of whether we really ought to be taking heroic measures to extend human life, when arguably we need fewer humans on the planet.
I don't think there is a single problem which could be caused by overpopulation which is worse than death. I don't want to discount the downsides, but finding a way for humans to live more quality years will probably always be a net benefit to people. It quite possibly wouldn't be a net benefit to poor people (especially the global poor) but I don't see anyone in the developed world starting to care about that any time soon.
The overpopulation problem seems to be an irrational fear anyway, since as societies
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Really this, it takes the idea of waterboarding to a whole nuther level. Infinite pain with no physical marks. How long to break someone?
I accidentally turned on "Harry and Meghan" last night, only took a couple of minutes...
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Quite the contrary in this case, this technology is much more mature and less invasive than neuralink, it has already been used for humans in the form of treating blood clots/strokes - the only difference is that the inserted mesh has sensors.
It seems to be a great development for all the paralyzed or immobilized people, there were even studies on coma patients, where it seems they brain do function on a cognitive level, just no connection to the body.
Of course the law has to precede this technology to make
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