Max Hodak, CEO of Science Corporation, discusses the clinical achievement of their retinal prosthesis on No Priors with Sarah Guo.
Insight
Hodak: Vision, hearing, balance, and 1 kbps motor control unlock radical neurotech
“If you can, if you get vision, hearing, balance, and a kilobit per second of motor control, you're halfway to the matrix. And this takes you into some like really trippy interpret reinterpretations of medicine.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Aug 2029
Hodak: Science aligns animal brain recordings with AI model representations
“We use that constructively at science like that. So we know that that is. That is true because we can get alignments between animal brain neural recordings and AI model internal representations.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hodak: Cardiovascular disease and non-brain cancer are attackable via organ replacement
“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.”
Insight
Hodak: The brain and the universe are literally physical computers
“I mean, to me, I don't mean that metaphorically, like the brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer in, in my understanding of the world. I also view the universe generally as a computer. Like we can solve pro like you can solve computational p…”
Opinion
Hodak: Most people will not accept digital brain replicas as survival
“If I could make a copy of you, and you can talk to that copy, and you're like, okay, I will go away now. I just don't think that many people are going to be like, this is it.”
Opinion
Hodak: The most fertile path for neuroscience is working on AI
“Well, I mean, ironically, it's probably working on AI. Yeah, I have some, I have a couple of neuroscience friends at OpenAI and Anthropic, who, it's like, we would joke, like, oh, you left neuroscience. Like, no, no, no. It is just way easier to do neuroscienc…”