As an expression, La Interfaccia Uomo Macchina sounds a lot more sexy than HCI (or human computer interface), but then english speakers have often been suckers for Romantic Languages. Recently, however, the whole topic has become much more interesting as Elon Musk has started to hint about his interest in Neural Laces or direct brain to AI links.
He has now come into the open and announced his investment and interest in Neuralink, a startup specialising in brain to compute interfaces (see: http://bit.ly/2naV4sB ). This builds on progress in a number of areas around understanding the brain and development of a significant number of devices which interface with the central nervous system to enable things such as control of artificial limbs and to help manage the impacts of neurological conditions such as Parkinson's Disease.
Basically we are seeing the start of the next wave of Information Science and the next big thing after Digital. Although Digital is powerful and will continue to change the way the world operates for quite some time to come, it is limited by the siloed nature of current technologies. True they operate together, with a little integration effort, but they are constrained by the limits of the internet and existing graphical interfaces.
Others have also come into the open with their plans for human computer interfaces, e.g. Brian Johnson of Braintree discussed this at the Recode code conference and Steve Hoffman at TED.
Musk has now lit the fuse for next revolution. Although to be honest this will take a long time to mature in terms of capability, safety and comfort in using the technologies involved. There are a lot of issues to resolve before Neural Laces become something that people are comfortable to adopt.
Firstly, the operating systems of current technologies are just not robust enough. Anything that is intended to operate closely with the human brain should be as least as reliable as the human brain. Secondly, no only must it be safe to attach and integrate Neural Laces with the human brain, there needs to be a robust path for maintenance, upgrade and removal. As it is highly probable that some people's bodies or brains would reject such technology, no one would want to be locked into an inevitable obsolescence as the technology improves, and there are bound to be faults which need rectifying. So "graceful failure" must also be built in. Thirdly, there needs to be a high level of security and privacy built into the Neural Laces, otherwise the risk of being hacked, swamped with unwanted information or interrogated by thought police is too high. Fourthly, the Neural Lace needs to be able to take power from biological processes within the body and to operate at a temperature which will not damage the human brain. Finally, the Internet will need to be completely re-engineered to work safely and effectively with people. There already is a known challenge for the IoT, but this represents a complete step up for networking capability. This all assumes that the basic interface technology can be developed in the first place.
However, the biggest challenges are likely to lie in the human and societal arena. Putting aside the fact that some people would always oppose such technology as being against their religious beliefs, there is a need to address questions around ethics of use, legal issues around IPR, liability and things such as acceptability of evidence sourced via a Neural Lace. There may even be issues of disability if someone is not capable of adopting such technology. Finally, there is a need to develop psychological understanding of how to deal with the vast amounts of data (as opposed to information) associated with using a Neural Lace. If appropriate filtering of data and information feeds is not designed into a Neural Lace, the danger is that it will cripple its host or drive the person insane.
So it may be that the real beneficiaries of developing this technology will be the psychologists and lawyers needed to make it fit for people and society.
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