The Exchanges

Q For people who are interested in working at or investing in science, if you are successful, you know, what will be the change to the human experience 20 years from now besides you not worrying about your pancreas as much?

A Yeah, I mean, that's it. Like, that's the, there's the, There's a sense, like a fragility that we all live, like there's this jeopardy that we all live under as part of the human condition. And I think that if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be, we will just become much less fragile. Um, we will have the ability to upgrade and replace parts of ourselves. So neurodegeneration, we don't know about that one still seems that's still difficult. That still needs like real investment. Um, the two leading causes of death though, are cardiovascular disease and cancer is not metastasized to the brain. And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work. Um, the other extreme is if we are serious about exploring the universe and going to the stars, we are going to have to adapt ourselves to that environment. We're not going to export earth with us everywhere we go. And these bodies are great, but they're designed for this planet. And it is going to be adapting ourselves to the hard vacuum of space is definitely going to be, um, I think the thing that we want to do in the long run, and ultimately those are the same, those are the same project.

AI assessment note: “if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade.”

Q Do you study consciousness, um, at science in a, like a sequential way or directly explicitly today when you talk about the operators that are part of it, let's say?

A So your conscious moment is a, you're experiencing a bunch of things in parallel. So you, you're seeing things and you're hearing things and you're feeling things and you're smelling things and these things happened just simultaneously together. But They are, they're kind of different elements of the experience, and we want to understand how does the brain construct each of those, and how does it cause them to be perceived together to the exclusion of other things? Like, you have your vision in your hearing, you never get my vision in your hearing. Um, and I, like, you kind of have this, like, you might think, like, that sounds, like, really obvious, like, it's in my brain, it's not in your brain, but we need some more fundamental explanation for really how that partitioning happens.

AI assessment note: “So your conscious moment is a, you're experiencing a bunch of things in parallel.”

Q Why do you think that's controversial? Or why is it in the field?

A There's some faction of people that kind of don't want this to be true for reasons that are not totally clear to me. Um, it is also not clear. We don't completely, we don't really understand fully understand the whatever phenomenon is happening here. It's unclear if the structure is global or if it's local in some sense that like there's You can recover relational structures between ideas, but it might be that this, this works locally. It doesn't like that where disconnected things might be placed. Like this gets fairly detailed, like tech technical quickly, but there's a bunch of stuff that we just don't know. And I think this causes, um, create space for people to wonder, is this as giving us this fundamental of like a hint as it might seem, I think that it is.

AI assessment note: “there's a bunch of stuff that we just don't know. And I think this causes”

Q when you were exploring both different signaling pathways and form factors and just conditions to go attack, um, or, uh, how you thought about scope of timeline and engineering cost and risk? Were you, were you just looking for like the, um, like big enough to be useful and feasible in some period of time, or how did you think about funding the project and how long it could take?

A So there's three elements to our pipeline. The first is our work in vision. Second is our bio hybrid neural interfaces. And the third is that our work in a different area of, of medicine, um, perfusion, a program called vessel. These three things together form kind of the minimum set of things that I think if they're successful in the timescale of. 10 to 15 years could really drive a, I think a significant revolution in medicine broadly. People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision, or to restore hearing, or to stop Parkinson's, or to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the, like, the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest. On the other hand, the brain is a computer, and when you deal with the brain as a computer, you get these, these things to work very, like, It's just, again, there, you don't see demonstration, you don't see things in medicine like a cochlear implant being turned on, or a deep brain stimulator being turned on, or, I mean, you can implant a quadriplegic patient in motor cortex and, and have them playing video games in like an hour. Like this, just, you just don't really see things like this in medicine, in most drugs.

AI assessment note: “minimum set of things that I think if they're successful in the timescale of. 10 to 15 years”

Q You said something that surprised me as a intermediate point between, um, vision and, you know, fully understanding consciousness. Um, how does oncology or other, like how do other indications fit into the picture in terms of what you might work on?

A I mean, the thing that makes you, you, the only organ that you can't even in principle transplant is the brain. The, like the heart, the pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters. They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and going. And I think we're going to get to a point where because the biology is so difficult, I mean, you've got this like alien nanotechnology that is around us that we are like completely surrounding us that we are completely dependent on that we understand still very poorly. Instead of needing to solve that, are there ways where we can accomplish the same fundamental goals You know, like using a toolbox that humanity is much more advanced in. And so I'm going to be ultimately fairly disappointed if I'm murdered by my pancreas. And that, I think that's, that's the worldview. It's that the thing that matters is the brain. The brain is the computer that gives us this. You could not, we talk about being a brain in a vat or have like these upload, uh, thought experiments, but you already, that's what the skull is. Like the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves, the optic nerve is nerve two, vestibular cochlear nerve that carries hearing and balances nerve eight. You've got these, these little cables that carry your interaction with the wor…

AI assessment note: “heart, the pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters”

Q What if I just want my brain to be a better computer or a richer one in terms of understanding other people's experiences?

A I mean, I think that you still, there is an important question here. So if I just like scanned your brain into a computer, And there is a software simulation of you. Is that, does that count as you? Like, would that make you feel better about dying of cancer? Like, if you were diagnosed with lung cancer, and so you said, okay, well, we'll scan you into a computer. Like, so imagine that we did like non, non-destructively. So you're still, you are still there, but then you're talking to the software replica of you. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to go to hospice, but this thing will keep doing my venture investing job. Like, does that make you feel better that much?

AI assessment note: “I mean, I think that you still, there is an important question here.”