this is a brand new product just revealed by Mark Zuckerberg and meta it's a pair of fully holographic augmented reality glasses they call it Orion Mark's belief is that products like Orion The Meta Quest and the Apple Vision Pro will become the next major Computing platform an evolution beyond the smartphone and Zuck may be correct in his prediction but let's be real here for a second does anyone actually want to wear this thing on their face all day day long sure your weird glasses can augment reality that's cool and all but let's talk about how
we can alter reality break it if you will and that's a project that Elon Musk has been working on for the past 8 years now of course we are talking about neuralink if augmented reality is the next evolution of the computer then neuralink is the final form the Omega if you want to keep the ancient Greek references going while Zuckerberg was out filling his new glasses neuralink was busy securing approval for a new implant that will pipe computer vision directly into a person's brain blindsight was just classified by the Food and Drug Administration as a
breakthrough device this essentially means that it's been fast-tracked through the development and review process in order to get this device into human patience as fast as possible Elon Musk has said the blindsight device from neuralink will enable even even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve see it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time to accomplish this neuralink will replace human eyes with small digital cameras much like those that meta is using in their augmented reality glasses and then the difference comes in when
neuralink cuts a hole in the person's skull and sews a few dozen tiny wires into their brain you won't find that on the meta prodct road map what neuralink is doing here will be to create a wired connection directly into the visual cortex of the brain which spans both left and right hemispheres so really there will need to be two holes in the person's head again the process here is not so different from the Facebook glasses where those employ miniature projectors to take digital code convert that to electrical light energy and overlay it on the
lens as visual information neuralink will take digital information from the camera and convert that into an electrical signal that's transmitted into the brain which will then be stimulated into displaying that camera feed into the patient's field of view now that sounds a bit crazy and it is but we have to remember that our entire experience of the world is provided to us by input devices the eyes ears finger tongue they're all just a big network of sensors that pipe electrical signals into the semi-solid biological computer that's sits inside your skull that's you a gray wrinkly
lump plugged into a meat suit and that's existentially a little bit terrifying but we can either let that keep us up at night or we can use our knowledge of Science and biology to exploit the system to hack The Human Experience to break reality as we know it this is something that meta cannot do in an interview with Cleo Abrams Zuckerberg admitted that haptic feedback is not possible with augmented reality the glasses can show you any experience but they can't help you feel it Zuck also relented that smell is a critical component of an immersive
experience but would be an incredibly difficult challenge to bring to augmented reality I'd even argue that these aspects are just straight up impossible to ever deliver with a wearable device with a brain computer interface on the other hand there is no theoretical end to the possibilities now let's take another quick reality break here as fun as it is to harp on Zuck although got to admit his new haircut is a massive Improvement towards looking like a real boy easily the best decision he's made since the whole Facebook thing but these Orion glasses are definitely one
of the most insane products we've seen in a long time they are very impressive and they do exist in the real world even if they also make you look like a dwee and I'm not exactly doubting zuck's prediction that this kind of wearable augmented re reality AI interface technology definitely could overtake the smartphone as our mobile computer system of choice that could happen within the next 10 years So Meta has a very powerful Head Start they have time on their side on the other hand what neuralink is doing with blindsight is still pretty far from
being anything that will make for an impressive Tech demo Elon has even said this himself and when Elon Musk is not being ludicrously optimistic about one of his own products you know that this is real quote to set expectations correctly the vision will be at first low resolution like Atari Graphics but eventually it has the potential to be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared ultraviolet or even radar wave lengths like Jordi laforge and any kid who ever strapped a headband to their face and pretended to be Jordy knows how cool
that would be it's also important to remember that the metag glasses are a toy an incredibly expensive and Innovative toy while blindsight is first and foremost a medical device I couldn't help but notice this reply under elon's post by my fellow space YouTuber the goat Mr Marcus house he wrote this is my dream with my legally blind son I'd give anything to allow him to see clearly for the first time thanks to everyone involved in this project a bright future hopefully awaits for all those out there with low or no vision that's what what actually
matters and hopefully that's what nurlink can deliver for those people who need it but if we wanted to shift gears back into optimistic mode if dweeb glasses are the next big Tech thing of the 2030s then maybe we are looking at neuralink as the next next big thing a technological Revolution for the 2040s because realistically it's going to be hard enough to convince average people to wear these damn glasses on a daily basis imagine then selling the masses on two new holes in their head my expectation is that after a decade of wearing the glasses
brain surgery will sound like a merciful relief as long as you get to take the damn things off neuralink is also a more sustainable option in the long term by that I mean there is definitely a hard physical limitation on how small you can make this stuff and I think we're already pretty close to hitting that wall and smaller is great but it usually means more expensive and more fragile as well as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time wearing glasses I know how easy it is to just accidentally damage or misplace a
pair of glasses anyone who's ever sat on their frames I'm trying to Fathom what weather and temperature will do to these over years of ownership at least you can put a phone in your pocket you can't just put glasses in your pocket when you aren't using them what are we all going to walk around with glasses hanging on neck straps like a bunch of librarians not that there's anything wrong with being a librarian but you know what I mean with neuralink the biggest investment is the surgery but it's an automated surgery that's done by a
robot so it won't be cheap but it shouldn't be outrageously expensive either and now that you've done it the only thing you would ever want to upgrade would be the chip and the battery cell they can just pop that out and pop a new one in that's already been done with monkeys although they do have to cut your skin flap and peel that back first then sew it back down afterwards so you probably want to keep the upgrade Cycles to a minimum but it is an option and the upside is that you can use this
device anywhere at any time without anyone knowing that you have one and in theory you could use the link to interface with any other device or technology everything would go straight from the computer to your brain and from your brain to the computer and if things keep going the way that they are right now there's not going to be a computer in the world that isn't running on some class of artificial intelligence Elon Musk has in en visioned this AI interface working like a third layer of functionality in the human control center the primary layer
is your limic system this is kind of your Bas level behavioral instincts food sex fight ORF flight responses caring for babies all of those deep-seated behaviors that are Universal among pretty much every living thing on the planet Primal stuff the secondary layer is your cerebral cortex that's the wrinkly outer layer of your brain that kind of works like your CPU your consciousness thought emotion reasoning language and memory all originate in this gray matter sometimes your lyic system overrides your conscious thought most times it's the other way around the give and take Keeps Us Alive and
functional and then the third layer or your tertiary layer is artificial intelligence Elon thinks that there is room for optimism that this can all work out given that the cortex is very intelligent but the lyic system is not yet they work together in harmony so perhaps there could be a tertiary layer where a digital super intelligence lies that would be vastly more intelligent than the cortex but still be able to coexist peacefully with the cortex and the lyic system and at that point what is real if you can have a fully immersive sensory experience in
virtual reality that you can taste touch smell and feel would that really be any different than something that happened in the real world is that already what we are experiencing right now we just haven't fully realized it yet do you feel your own reality beginning to crumble and break just thinking about this stuff remember you're not actually a human being you're a gray wrinkled lump of bioelectric tissue plugged into a meat suit or you could buy Zuckerberg's dorky glasses and be perfectly happy that's cool too
