#brain-computer interface

The patient Gert-Jan Oskam said the breakthrough had given him "a freedom that I did not have" before.

The 40-year-old Dutchman has been paralysed in his legs for more than a decade after suffering a spinal cord injury during a bicycle accident.

However, using a new system, he can now walk "naturally," take on difficult terrain, and even climb stairs, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

The advance is the result of more than a decade of work by a team of researchers in France and Switzerland.

Last year, the team showed that a spinal cord implant -- which sends electrical pulses to stimulate movement in leg muscles -- had allowed three paralysed patients to walk again.

But they needed to press a button to move their legs each time.

Gert-Jan, who also has the spinal implant, said this made it difficult to get into the rhythm of taking a "natural step."

'Digital bridge'

The latest research combines the spinal implant with new technology called a brain-computer interface, which is implanted above the part of the brain that controls leg movement.

"The interface uses algorithms based on artificial intelligence methods to decode brain recordings in real time," the researchers said.

This allows the interface, which was designed by researchers at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), to work out how the patient wants to move their legs at any moment.

The data is transmitted to the spinal cord implant via a portable device that fits in a walker or small backpack, allowing patients to get around without help from others.

The two implants build what the researchers call a "digital bridge" to cross the disconnect between the spinal cord and brain that was created during Gert-Jan's accident.

"Now I can just do what I want -- when I decide to make a step the stimulation will kick in as soon as I think about it," Gert-Jan said.

After undergoing invasive surgery twice to implant both devices, "it has been a long journey to get here," he told a press conference in the Swiss city of Lausanne.

But among other changes, he is now able to stand at a bar again with friends while having a beer.

"This simple pleasure represents a significant change in my life," he said in a statement.

'Radically different'

Gregoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and a study co-author, said it was "radically different" from what had been accomplished before.

"Previous patients walked with a lot of effort -- now one just needs to think about walking to take a step," he told a press conference in the Swiss city of Lausanne.

There was another positive sign: following six months of training, Gert-Jan recovered some sensory perception and motor skills that he had lost in the accident.

He was even able to walk with crutches when the "digital bridge" was turned off.

Guillaume Charvet, a researcher at France's CEA, told AFP this suggests "that the establishment of a link between the brain and spinal cord would promote a reorganisation of the neuronal networks at the site of the injury."

So when could this technology be available to paralysed people around the world? Charvet cautioned it will take "many more years of research" to get to that point.

But the team are already preparing a trial to study whether this technology can restore function in arms and hands.

They also hope it could apply to other problems such as paralysis caused by stroke.

(AFP)

Learn about Elon Musk's Rygar Enterprises, its history, projects, and plans for the future of technology. Discover about rygar enterprises.

Introduction: Who hasn’t heard of Elon Musk? His name is practically inseparable from concepts such as innovation, ambition, and an unyielding pursuit of progress. This titan of the industry has a long and storied career, from his founding of PayPal to his more recent ventures like Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. But now, he’s made yet another move that’s sure to shake things up: the…

So with the job of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director having gone to Dr. Arati Prabhakar back in October, rather than Dr. Alondra Nelson, and the release of the "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights" (henceforth "BfaAIBoR" or "blueprint") a few weeks after that, I am both very interested also pretty worried to see what direction research into "artificial intelligence" is actually going to take from here.

To be clear, my fundamental problem with the "Blueprint for an AI bill of rights" is that while it pays pretty fine lip-service to the ideas of  community-led oversight, transparency, and abolition of and abstaining from developing certain tools, it begins with, and repeats throughout, the idea that sometimes law enforcement, the military, and the intelligence community might need to just… ignore these principles. Additionally, Dr. Prabhakar was director of DARPA for roughly five years, between 2012 and 2015, and considering what I know for a fact got funded within that window? Yeah.

To put a finer point on it, 14 out of 16 uses of the phrase "law enforcement" and 10 out of 11 uses of "national security" in this blueprint are in direct reference to why those entities' or concept structures' needs might have to supersede the recommendations of the BfaAIBoR itself. The blueprint also doesn't mention the depredations of extant military "AI" at all. Instead, it points to the idea that the Department Of Defense (DoD) "has adopted [AI] Ethical Principles, and tenets for Responsible Artificial Intelligence specifically tailored to its [national security and defense] activities." And so with all of that being the case, there are several current "AI" projects in the pipe which a blueprint like this wouldn't cover, even if it ever became policy, and frankly that just fundamentally undercuts Much of the real good a project like this could do.

For instance, at present, the DoD's ethical frames are entirely about transparency, explainability, and some lipservice around equitability and "deliberate steps to minimize unintended bias in Al …" To understand a bit more of what I mean by this, here's the DoD's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence Strategy…" pdf (which is not natively searchable and I had to OCR myself, so heads-up); and here's the Office of National Intelligence's "ethical principles" for building AI. Note that not once do they consider the moral status of the biases and values they have intentionally baked into their systems.

Auto Pilot

A burst tyre in the fast lane, a pocket of turbulence at 15,000 feet – human pilots are often thrown by unexpected events. To spot what happens to the brain in the split-seconds after a jolt, test pilots in this cockpit were rocked at random by a robotic arm. The unpredicted interruptions were designed to spot something predictable in a moment of chaos – the brain’s immediate response to a loss of balance. Researchers used electroencephalography to measure patterns of electrical activity called perturbation evoked potentials across each pilots’ scalp – spotting and later predicting patterns specific to jolts in different directions and angles. Quick detection of these patterns during real flying and driving might allow computers to temporarily take the wheel while the pilot recovers – an example of a brain-computer interface that may save lives.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Shayan Jalilpour and Gernot Müller-Putz

Institute of Neural Engineering, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Scientific Reports, April 2022

Elon Musk: ‘We Must Hack Our Brains or Be Destroyed by AI’

Check out this problem-reaction-solution bit.

Musk claims that, because artificial intelligence is coming, we have two choices. We either make ourselves symbiotically mandatory to the AI or we will basically be destroyed (or end up as pets, but he says that’s the “benign scenario”). Check out how he says we have to go about it…direct cortical interface. Sounds like every DARPA business proposal…

Engineers translate brain signals directly into speech

I found it incredibly hard to write about anything this week. For the first time in a long time, I found I really didn’t have that much to say.

Society is going the way of all those dystopic films. Willingly.

Not the ones about the police state or the panopticon; the omnipresent surveillance state is already here, has been for a while now. The death of privacy. The tyranny of total transparency…