A wristband could control glasses without visible hand movement

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:58:16

   Well, you know, in terms of neural interfaces, there are two approaches to the problem, roughly, right? There's the kind of jack-it-into-your-brain neural interface, and there's the wrist-based neural interface thing that, you know, we showed you for Orion, the smart glasses. Yeah. And I would guess that, you know, I think it's going to be a while before we're really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain.

2. 1:58:42

   I think that there are a lot of people who don't want to be the early adopters of that technology. You want to like wait until that's pretty mature before you get that. I mean, that's basically going to get started in medical use cases, right? So if someone like loses sensation part of their body and now you have the ability to fix that. Like the first Neuralink patient. Yeah. So I think you'll basically start with people who have pretty severe conditions, who the upside is very significant before you start like jacking people in to play games better, right?

3. 1:59:10

   Right. But a wrist-based thing, I mean, that's something, I mean, like people wear stuff on their wrist all the time, right? So, and what we basically found there, that doesn't do input to you, but it's good for giving you the ability to control a computer. Because basically you have all these extra neurons that go from your brain to controlling your hand. Your hand is like super complicated. and there's actually all these extra pathways um because for a bunch of reasons i'm neuroplasticity in case you like lose the ability to use one they want to be able to have others um so you want the redundancy because being able to use your hand is super important so in normal use we've kind of all figured out some patterns of how we send signals from our brain to our hand and um i think the reality is there's like all these other

4. 2:00:00

   They're... patterns too that are unused today so you can put a wristband on your wrist that can measure activity across these neurons and today we're starting by basically measuring as you're doing as you're like moving your fingers but over a few versions of this we're going to get to is like you won't actually even have to move your hand you'll just like trigger these neurons in opposing ways it's like you probably can't see right now it's like i'm kind of flexing something in this finger and something here so like it's not actually moving but there's some signal that the neural interface wristband if i were wearing it could pick up and i just think we're going to be we're going to like have glasses and we're going to be able to be here and i'm like gonna be able to like you know text my wife or friends or something or text ai and like get an answer to

5. 2:00:47

   something it's like i forgot something while we were talking let me just text ai okay i just did that it's like and you can do it sitting there without anyone totally discreetly and you have glasses and like the answer just comes into your glasses i mean for me one of the one of the positive things when when covid hit everyone in software basically started working remotely for a while because you can't write software it's like okay whatever you don't have to be in the office so you can you can kind of be in different places and a lot of the meetings went on to zoom and one of the best things about that um was basically you you were able to politely have all these side conversations right so it's like when you're seeing someone in person it would be super rude if i like pulled out my phone and like just started texting someone it would just be really

6. 2:01:34

   weird right um but when you're like talking to someone online it's like i don't know i guess because they either can't tell your attention because it's like because there's not good presence or if it's just the norm but they're like you have like the main group conversation and then i was like at least the norm for me was i could just like text different people on the side It's like, okay, what do you think of this point that this person is making in this meeting?

7. 2:01:57

   Right. Like in normal life, it's like oftentimes I'd have, you know, some discussion that I'd have to like sync up with people afterwards about how'd that go. But now it's like I could just do that all at the same time, right? It's like you're having the group discussion and you're having the conversations with the people about the discussion that you're having in real time. But you can only do that over Zoom.

8. 2:02:14

   So I think being able to do that in kind of physical interactions where you're just, like, you're interacting with people and you can just, like, use an AI augmentation to be able to get extra context or help you think through something or remember something, just to be able to kind of have a better conversation, be able to, you know, not have to follow up on something after the fact, I think, like, it's going to be super useful for all these different things.