Will This “Neural Lace” Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI?
I love Elon, but this notion of a “bandwidth problem” in UI is what happens when someone with no training in UI whatsoever tries to extrapolate.<p>Imagine the neural lace already existed. Close your eyes, and picture what you would experience. Would it be 3D? Probably. Our brains have spatial hardware. Would it be auditory? Probably, our brains have hardware for that too. Would there be language? Ya, that’s part of our hardware too.<p>So it’s an experience of sights and sounds and language...<p>But think about an iPad... that already had sights and sounds and language. Actually it’s capable of beaming far more of all three to you than it does. And it’s capable of taking in far more input than you generally use. It can do 10 finger multitouch, plus sound recording. Newer devices will have full body tracking.<p>And yet... we don’t use all that available bandwidth. For the most part we stare at a few words, some boxes and lines... why?<p>If Elon is right that more bandwidth is the problem, why aren’t there more high bandwidth user interfaces on existing devices?<p>The answer is: we don’t have a bandwidth bottleneck. We have a design bottleneck. And if I dropped a fully functional neural lace at Elon’s office, he’d have exactly the same design bottleneck. And he’d realize that if he wants to solve his problem, he needs to hire 10 really good UI designers, and then 10 more, and then 10 more, and it’s going to be decades before they max out even the bandwidth of an iPhone.