Nielsen: Photons offer higher spatial precision than electrodes for brain interfaces
Alec Nielsen · The Future Will Be Genetically Engineered · Feb 24, 2020 · at 16:52
Alec Nielsen, CEO of Asimov, discusses how genetic engineering tools like optogenetics can improve brain-computer interfaces over traditional hardware electrodes.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Photons have higher spatial precision than electric fields like you would get from an electrode, and so it may be the more precise way to read and write brain states.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alec Nielsen
Nielsen: Everything in the world will eventually be genetically engineered
“Everything in our world is going to be genetically engineered, and I mean everything. Our food, our therapeutics, our materials, our manufacturing infrastructure, our consumer goods.”
Nielsen: Humans will design complete genomes from scratch within decades
“And so, the trajectory of synthetic biology is, decades from now, we will be able to design entire genomes from the ground up. We will have complete control over the flow of information, matter, and energy inside living systems.”
Nielsen: Biology, not rocket science, is the true bottleneck for space exploration
“Everyone talks about rocket science being the hard problem about outer space, but biology is the really hard thing about outer space.”
Nielsen: Existing commercial biotech products rely on primitive genetic engineering
“Well, I hope it's not too controversial to say that while those products are amazing, they've all been made using relatively primitive genetic engineering.”
Nielsen: Genetic engineering will transition to designing proteins directly
“While right now we mainly do genetic engineering by repurposing things from nature, eventually we may be able to design these genetically encoded molecules like proteins directly.”
Nielsen: Treating DNA as software is an imperfect but useful analogy
“A favorite analogy of our field is that DNA is kind of like software. It's code that you can program, and then when you put that custom DNA into a cell, the cell boots it up kind of like software. It's an imperfect analogy, and it often gets taken too far, but…”