The brain is extremely receptive to input so in theory the technology sounds easy to develop, but what exactly is the reason this still hasn’t been done?
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Easy to develop? Martian?
Because the ethical hold up of widespread human-brain interface testing. If it were ethical to, say, experiment on millions of people against their will without regard to the safety of human life and psyche, you can learn a lot… such is much of modern medicine and rocket science predicated on information gathered by Nazi experimentation.
Neuralink is pretty much what you are describing, and is, since recently, in a first phase of clinical trials. Give or take a few years, and it should start being in use in medicine.
The human body (or any animal’s body really) is probably one of the most complex things out there, and the brain is probably the most complex part of it. So not easy to develop at all
The brain is a complex compact analog chemical and quantum computer. We don’t fully understand how it works, let alone how to interface with digital technology. We’ve only begun to have success with blocking or stimulating certain regions that are dysfunctional. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but rather really difficult and requires many disciplines to accomplish.
But there are some ethical boundaries, protections, or questions that need to be considered. Such as, if you can upload information into the brain, what stops the technology from downloading information out of the brain? And, if a person can interface with a computer, are they human anymore? Where does the human end and the computer start?
Because we haven’t yet come up with a technology that works as well as the natural input senses we already have.
It’s easy to wire up one neuron, but what you need is several hundred million firing in a familiar from early childhood learned/response pattern to visually identify an apple.
It’s hard work mastering the feedback from a sense much less actively using a hand. The incredibly complex action of bipedal walking is mindless for most people, we don’t remember how to do it, we just do it. It took hard work to master that skill. It would likely take a similar effort to learn a new sense and relate it to the world.
There is. I had a colleague who was working on this exact problem. If backwater universities are working on it, no question the U.S. military and others are light years ahead. Here is my though about it: make an incision through the white matter of the brain, perpendicular to the axions, then insert an array of electrodes connected to a weak transmitter/receiver. This could even be powered by a device external to the brain. Now it’s just a matter of training the interface. There have been several successful attempts making brain-computer interfaces in recent years.
Make no mistake, once they become available, people will be lining up for them, despite the potential dangers.
It is very hard to develop a safe connection which would not be attacked by immune system of yours.
I’m pretty sure this is the main reason: if we had that we would be able to develop a system to communicate with the brain using the neuroplasticity phenomenon.
A lot of technologies that sound cool in theory suffer from the fact that no one really wants them in practice. We could, for instance, have had flying cars as far back as the 50s, but what with most people’s atavistic fear of heights, the difficulties in setting up highways with no geographical delineators, and the issue of any accidents raining death on innocents below, they were never developed.
A human brain interface suffers from this, too. Most people don’t really want to undergo invasive brlain surgery, risk infection in the brain, make their mind hackable, etc. It’s cool to imagine in a sci-fi scenario, but in practice the benefits aren’t worth the trouble.
That same tech could in theory be engineered to allow people to interface directly with each other’s brains. That’s a huge risk.
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