Neuralink’s Implant and Game-changing Robot
By: Neura Pod - Neuralink
Tags: Brain Machine Interfaces, Elon Musk, Neuralink, Robots, Artificial Intelligence

According to Neuralink President, Max Hodak’s personal website, “Neuralink is working on, “developing the world’s most advanced brain-machine interfaces” or devices that send and receive information back and forth between a brain and a computer. Because of the order of magnitude or two difference in speed, these devices will have many applications in the future. People may be able to stream movies directly to their brain or play video games in a more intense way than with augmented reality (AR) headsets or virtual reality (VR). With a fully developed device, humanity can continue progress of merging man with machine.

In order to make this future a reality, Neuralink has been actively continuing their efforts to try and find good talent. They’re hiring for most roles you’d likely expect, including: electrical engineers, embedded systems, microfabrication, mechanical, software, and neuroengineers. On the company website, Neuralink has segmented the company’s hiring needs into two primary departments. One is “implant,” and the other is, “robotics.” The implant team is related to what you’d expect- this team works on making sure the actual “stuff” like the electrodes and the coin-shaped link device going into the brain are not only safe, but effective as well. They wanna make it so that it’s possible to read and record electric signals from the neuron cells in the brain and then send translated versions of those signals wirelessly to a phone or other smart device.

I don’t claim to know all the steps it’ll take to accomplish creating the brain-machine interface, but if we truly take some time to really think about and conceptualize the steps it takes to make this happen, it’s pretty incredible. Making the physical placing of the link device set flush with the skull already seems riddled with challenges. Then that link itself requires designing the hermetic packaging, which is just a fancy way of saying an airtight and completely closed off enclosure. The link obviously needs to be completely sealed, not have any poor material interactions with the head, and be able to contract/ expand with temperature and movement. Just think about how much a person’s head moves when they go on a hike, swim at the beach, or ride in a car. Think about the craziest driver you know. Now think about how he (*she :)) twists and turns. People that have a link implant are gonna have to withstand that movement!

Really though, I’m pretty curious how all this is gonna unfold. If you have any theories, please lemme know in the comments.

The other department Neuralink is hiring for is the robotics team. I strongly urge anyone remotely interested in robotics to really think about applying to join the team. Although the individual teams within the implant department of Neuralink will be able to use their tech in a variety of different ways, I can see how developing medical robots could really speed up progress in so many areas of the medical field.

https://www.intuitive.com/en-us#

It’s already been more than five years since the company, Intuitive Surgical came out with their da Vinci Surgical Robot. This robot and system can enable surgeons to perform surgeries on a pretty small scale. There are even some videos of surgeons using the robot to perform surgery on a grape or fold Origami cranes that are smaller than a penny.

Da Vinci Surgical Robot. [Play from 00:52–01:07]

This robot has probably advanced since 2015, but relative to what Neuralink’s shown previously, Intuitive Surgical has quite a bit of work to do to catch up. I should note however that I’m personally extremely supportive of Intuitive Surgical and basically any company that makes significant progress in the medical field. Their robots help surgeons perform a wide variety of surgeries, whereas at the moment, it seems like Neuralink’s robot performs specialized tasks specifically designed for Neuralink.

This situation reminds me almost exactly of what’s happened at Tesla and Nvidia. For quite some time, Tesla was using Nvidia chips to support driver assistance technology. Several years ago, Tesla decided to create their own custom chips from scratch. This obviously takes significantly more effort and engineering resources, but over the long run, the entire design of the chip is way more efficient. Simply put, it’s optimized in every way for Tesla’s specific use case. So to bridge the metaphor, I think Neuralink is doing the same thing- they’re working on developing a highly customized robot that’s optimized for their needs. Eventually, the team’s gonna be great at creating robots and I could see them expanding to make other types of highly specialized robots for a variety of use cases.

At the most recent public update event this past August, Elon shared the team is aspiring to have their robot perform the entire surgery. Here’s what he said:

Elon wants the robot to do a lot. [Play from: 00:07–00:26]

Similar to the way LASIK would not be as scalable of an eye surgery without a highly advanced machine, Neuralink wants to scale up this procedure to millions of patients. If neurosurgeons had to take time and perform every surgery manually, the supply of neurosurgeons would not be nearly enough.

Additionally, being able to insert the electrode threads would not be possible without the robot anyway. As stated on the Neuralink website:

https://neuralink.com/careers/

“the threads are smaller than a human hair and cannot be grasped, manipulated, and accurately inserted by a human surgeon. Doing this requires micron precision for the grasp, tens of microns of precision for localizing and tracking the moving brain during insertion, and high speed in order to get hundreds of threads in quickly.”

In the future, it wouldn’t surprise me if people start referring to Neuralink as a medical robotics company as much as an AI company, similar to how people are starting to finally refer to Tesla as an energy company as much as a car company.

The Neuralink team is still small and still growing. If you have relevant skills and you’re as passionate about Neuralink as I am, check out the careers page on the Neuralink website. In prior instances, Elon has mentioned publicly it’s not necessary to have prior experience in the field of neuroscience; and if anyone needed proof in writing, there it is on the Neuralink website.

I’ve recently seen a pretty substantial bump up in viewership, so a big thanks goes out to every one of you who’s listened, viewed, shared, liked, commented- all that good stuff.

Thanks,

Ryan Tanaka

Neura Pod is a YouTube and podcast series covering all things related to Neuralink. https://www.youtube.com/c/neurapod

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