discord wrote:moon: reason is simple, very few rich people with that kind of problems.
Which kinds of disease are you talking about here? Motor function disorders that leave cognitive functions intact, like, say, Parkinsons? Just specifically ALS, as Stephen Hawking and Lou Gehrig have had? Or just any sort of disease or disorder that gradually but inevitably eliminates motor function? Which includes ubiquitous things like severe arthritis?
Because, for all of the above, yes they do. And yes the relevant corporations are paying for research for neural interfaces. There is a LOT of research, some of it even decent research, in that field. The sheer profit potential of a genuinely high-function, high precision neural interface is staggering, especially one that could be just worn as a cap like the Emotiv without requiring intrusive wiring.
It's not just something that would only be useful for serious cases, like advanced motor-neuron disease. It's something that could be sold to
everyone who owns a digital device. Who wouldn't want to be able to change the channel on their television just by thinking about the show they want to watch, while turning off their household lights with a thought, and turning off the radio? Then there are things like 3d modeling, which have no real useful 3d tools to be performed with so we mostly settle for mouse and keyboard approaches. What if you could change the shape of a model to mold it like clay with a thought, instead of our clumsier current approaches? Hell, just think about text messaging. What person wouldn't want so be able to write their IMs with their mind instead of their thumbs? It's all possible with neural interface devices roughly analogous to the sort that would let an advanced-stages ALS patient freely use a personal computer.
The relevant companies are
heavily invested in furthering neural interface technology, because when it goes somewhere it is going to be one of the most profitable series of patents and copyrights in the entire tech industry.
The reason we haven't developed sufficiently good neural interfaces is because neuroscience is
hard. Not because nobody's trying. Not because nobody's trying hard enough. And definitely not because of lack of money; everybody knows that there are
trillions to be made off of a development in the field, that it would be at least as big as, say, smartphones or tablets. Hell, every smartphone or tablet user will want one; if you're willing to pay $600 for a phone you can play Tetris on, wouldn't it be worth another $600 to make calls and play Tetris
with your mind?. Neural interfaces are a huge research field with a lot of interested parties, and the first steps towards showing that the research eventually WILL pay off for
someone have already been made; the Emotiv is an excellent proof of concept. A lot of very large wallets are salivating at the concept, not just in the medical field, but even in things as simple as the videogame industry.
Money is always a problem in any field of research, but it is less of a problem in this one than in, say, Type 1 Diabetes research. Because you can't make a common household appliance out of an artificial insulin pump and A1c monitor, but they're already talking about making videogames with the Emotiv as-is, without the sorts of refinements and adjustments necessary to make it into something as useful and precise as a keyboard or mouse (or even an X-Box controller).
I'm no expert on this subject, not by any means. I'm not even remotely attached to the field; I probably have more knowledge about nuclear engineering than I do about this particular field of biology, and I know fuck-all about nuclear engineering. I don't know what all the actual complications and problems are with the development of good neural interfaces, but I do know that if it were just a matter of spending a few billion more, it'd already be done, because there are
trillions to be made here and the sooner one corporation does so the sooner they can get a lock on it and the less competition they have to face, and the less chance there is that they'll get beaten to the punch. This isn't something that just applies to severe ALS cases, this is something that
everyone will want as soon as it actually really works well; making a good neural interface, and then making it affordable and mass-producible, isn't necessarily the top priority in any hardware or biotech firm's to-do list so far as I know, but it's nowhere near the bottom.
Feedback is a problem. A lot of motor function and other brain functions work off of afferent and efferent feedback loops; if you can't feel your legs, even if every nerve sending a signal TO the legs still works, then you can't coordinate them, can't walk, and all of that. Smiling makes you measurably happier, because your brain doesn't know what's going on until it checks with your face (this is a profound oversimplification). I can type with my eyes closed while not looking at the screen in the dark on a keyboard without any bumps on the home row, but I can do that because I can still feel my fingers and the keys; without that feedback right now, I would be unable to type, even though I've already learned how to type and been doing it for years and years and my eyes are open in broad daylight with a screen right in front of me. Learning how to type for the very first time without tactile feedback would be really really difficult, and it would become impossible to do it in the dark and without a visible screen. So actually using a neural interface requires that you have some immediate feedback and train your brain to use it properly. Visual and aural feedback are all you'll have to go on, so it's like typing in the dark without any feeling in your fingers, with just the screen to look at. It's possible to overcome this problem, it's just a matter of training and conditioning, but the problem is still there and still adds to the other problems inherent in direct brain interfaces.
Adjusting a brainwave-reader for the individual's brainwaves might be another problem, but, I'm probably just exposing my ignorance by saying that.
There are also the problems Arioch mentioned with wired-in neural interfaces for artificial limbs a few threads back; yes, there are people who can coordinate current artificial limb systems and such perfectly, but there are also blind humans who can navigate by
echolocation; if I or most other people were to go blind we would not join that number.
Beyond that, I really have no knowledge of what sorts of problems there are that hold development back. But, again, since neuroscience isn't the easiest thing in the world, I'd bet there's a lot of them, many of which are probably a lot bigger and a lot more difficult than you or I are prepared to even understand.
Again, lack of funding is
always a problem in
every field of research. More resources, more money, more eyes and brains on the problem, ALWAYS preferable. But lack of corporate interest isn't the biggest problem here; at least, not nearly as much as it is in, say, autoimmune diseases or cancer research or any of the other trillion-dollar medical research industries. Because you can't package a cure for cancer with every iPhone, you can't make a Lupus treatment that sells to every kid who wants to play Unreal Tournament, and you can't perfect a post-organ-transplant therapy drug that can be sold as a professional specialty item to wealthy studios in the burgeoning 3d animation field. You can with a decent surgery-free neural interface, all while also developing more advanced and expensive (probably surgery-using) related items to sell to people with more advanced needs.
As soon as you get a decent-quality neural interface to play
Halo with, you'll have all sorts of people regaining their mobility with the aid of technology, at some fairly affordable prices because the cheaper a good neural interface can be made the more iPad users and X-Box players will buy them and the more profit the patent-holders will make.
But brains aren't really easy or simple matters, guys. You're all making it sound like it's someone's
fault that hard things take time.
Every computer company in the 1980s would have
loved to have been able to make the sort of laptop I'm writing this post on right now, but it took another thirty years for the technology to actually advance to this level despite all the money and effort and thought that was getting poured into such developments and despite pretty much all of the involved theoretical sciences having actually been nailed down by that point. We can't really say that here.
Biologists and biotech companies, people in the field, they're doing the best that they can, and the men with the really big bank accounts see quite a bit of profit to be had in this particular field. There are a LOT of important branches of biology where they don't, places that are actually genuinely neglected and where al the issues with funding and corporate interest are actually relevant, but here? Not so much.
ThatsNoMoon wrote:...then you bring in patents and it all goes to hell. Don't even look into patents on biology; you'll only make yourself sick with disgust.
This is a truth that has driven better men than I to drink. And it's such a severe problem that it's really very likely holding bigger things than neural interface development back by quite a bit. The problems with patents in other hardware related industries only add to this in this specific case.
But patent and copyright issues, to my knowledge, only become really severe when people realize that there's a lot of money at stake, and when a number of developments have actually been made.
I'm not saying that the system isn't at fault here, but if it's capitalism's fault, it's probably due to overinvestment and information control for the purposes of profit in what promises to be a very important field, rather than underfunding and lack of interest.