A look at autonomous boat tech as ocean research nonprofit Promare says it will unveil in September a fully autonomous ship called Mayflower with IBM as partner — Driverless ships don't have to worry about crowded roads. And they don't need bunks—or toilets. — TEXT — 1 RESPONSE
tktktk
The front of the 4a looks better than any other Google phone, no matter what the price. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]
The Pixel 4a sure has had a rough path to market. The leaks, rumors, and common sense all pointed to a Google I/O 2020 launch, but the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to that and every other major real-life gathering. Many were still hoping for an online launch, but Google ended up canceling two of its attempts at an I/O replacement event, the first due to logistics and the second out of respect for the nationwide protests against police brutality. The delay meant we had seen fully working prototypes five months before the actual release of the phone. Just like everyone else, the Pixel 4a has had a rough 2020.
Now that the Pixel 4a has finally arrived, it feels like it's built for the era. It's a cheap, functional, utilitarian design that arrives at a time when the economy is not doing so hot. This phone is just the cure for people who are sick of $1000 smartphones. You can do better, but for the price, the Pixel 4a is a great entry-level phone that won't leave you wanting for much.
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Okta, which provides identity management service for companies, has been a big beneficiary of remote work during lockdown with its stock rising 106% since March — - Businesses, schools tap firm's tools to secure online access — McKinnon stays cautious on outlook as investors seek growth
Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.
While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.
“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”
Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.
Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”
Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.
As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.
In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species. Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.
The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.
A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.
In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.
The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.
To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.
The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.
The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.
Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.
Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.
A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”
It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.
“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.
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Enlarge / Lick Observatory (credit: Bill Dally | Getty Images)
On the morning of Sunday, August 16, freak summer thunderstorms rolled into the Bay Area, peppering the ultra-dry landscape with lightning, setting nearly 400 fires across Northern California. Ten miles to the north of the historic Lick Observatory, atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose, one such blaze was closing in, and fast: By Tuesday morning, the flames were 6 miles away. That night, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, made the call to evacuate the facility’s 30-odd residents and staff members, save for the superintendent, Kostas Chloros, who’d stay on to coordinate the defense of one of the world’s most cherished observatories.
It was here that in 1969 astronomers made the first laser lunar ranging, calculating the precise distance to the moon. The observatory has helped scientists explore the structure of the universe, finding the masses of nearby galaxies, as well as black holes and quasars. Its Automated Planet Finder robotic telescope has been instrumental—literally and figuratively—in sniffing out the exoplanets that orbit distant stars.
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Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.
While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.
“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”
Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.
Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”
Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.
As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.
In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species. Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.
The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.
A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.
In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.
The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.
To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.
The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.
The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.
Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.
Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.
A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”
It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.
“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.
https://ift.tt/3jy5M9r https://ift.tt/2DfqiMsWelcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. (You can sign up for the newsletter here!)
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
During Monday’s IPO wave I was surprised to see Asana join the mix.
After news had broken in June that the company had raised hundreds of millions in convertible debt, I hadn’t guessed that the productivity unicorn wouldn’t give us an S-1 in the very next quarter. I was contentedly wrong. But the reason why Asana’s IPO is notable isn’t really much to do with the company itself, though do take the time to dig into its results and history.
What matters about Asana’s debut is that it appears set to test out a model that, until very recently, could have become the new, preferred way of going public amongst tech companies.
Here’s what I mean: Instead of filing to go public, and raising money in a traditional IPO, or simply listing directly, Asana executed two, large, convertible debt offerings pre-debut, thus allowing it to direct list with lots of cash without having raised endless equity capital while private.
The method looked like a super-cool way to get around the IPO pricing issue that we’ve seen, and also provide a ramp to direct listing for companies that didn’t get showered with billions while private. (That Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s trust led the debt deal is simply icing on this particular Pop-Tart).
This brief column was going to be all about how we may see unicorns follow the Asana route in time, provided that its debt-powered direct listing goes well. But then the NYSE got permission from the SEC to allow companies to raise capital when they direct-list.
In short, some companies that direct-list in the future will be able to sell a bloc of shares at a market-set value that would have previously set their “open” price. So instead of flogging the stock and setting a price and selling shares to rich folks and then finding out what public investors would really pay, all that IPO faff is gone and bold companies can simply offer shares at whatever price the market will bear.
All that is great and cool, but as companies will be able to direct-list and raise capital, the NYSE’s nice news means that Asana is blazing a neat trail, but perhaps not one that will be as popular as we had expected.
The NASDAQ is working to get in on the action. As Danny said yesterday on the show, this new NYSE method is going to crush traditional IPOs, provided that we’re understanding it during this, its nascent period.
Look, this week was bananas, and my brain is scrambled toast. You, like myself, are probably a bit confused about how it is only finally Saturday and not the middle of next week. But worry not, I have a quick roundup of the big stuff from our world. And, notes from calls with the COO of Okta and the CEO of Splunk, from after their respective earnings report:
Over to our chats, starting with Okta COO and co-founder Frederic Kerrest:
And then there was new McLaren F-1 sponsor Splunk, data folks who are in the midst of a transition to SaaS that is seeing the firm double-down on building ARR and letting go of legacy incomes:
And finally for Market Notes, my work BFF and IRL friend Ron Miller wrote about Box’s earnings this week, and how the changing world is bolstering the company. It’s worth a read. (Most public software companies are doing well, mind.)
We’re already over length, so I’ll have to keep our bits-and-bobs section brief. Thus, only the brightest of baubles for you, my friend:
And with that, we are out of room. Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes,
A look at the rapid growth of TikTok in Southeast Asia, where the app has been downloaded 360M times, up 151% YoY, according to Sensor Tower — SINGAPORE (Reuters) - At 19, Sandy Saputra is big on TikTok Indonesia. Within a year, he's leapt from quiet, small-town life to star influencer status …
Cory Doctorow highlights the conceptual limitations of Shoshana Zuboff's “surveillance capitalism” and details how to dismantle it — The most surprising thing about the rebirth of flat Earthers in the 21st century is just how widespread the evidence against them is.
Eva Dou / Washington Post : The FCC warns that rural areas may lose cell service if Congress does not fill a $3B funding shortfall for US...
