Neuroscience is mostly funded from a health perspective, but its implications are much wider
If we can advance neuroscience through new technological modalities that address the brain’s huge dynamic range of scales, the implications are big, and not just for brain diseases. It is worth considering long-term, big picture implications, even if they are highly uncertain.
Consider several diverse positive visions for the future. In the future, we’ll…
- Have better treatments for mental illness
- Understand and empathize with the minds of other species
- Make AI safe
- Spend much less energy on computing
- Create totally new approaches to education
- Live longer lives while remaining agentic
- Expand our consciousness
Rather than working on just one of those as a straight shot, can we find a common denominator? Here, the common denominator is that much improved neuroscience is required to make robust progress on these. What’s an example of a needed capability that bottlenecks neuroscience? Mapping big brain circuits quickly & cheaply.
The most transformational parts of basic and applied science are heavily intersecting and interacting. Biomedical advances leveraging physics could help us access the brain physically and biologically, which could help us understand neural algorithms that could advance AI, which could in turn advance math and physics, and so on.
We don’t understand consciousness, yet consciousness is central to ethics. This becomes especially important if we can create sentient AI during the coming decades. Improving our still largely pre-paradigmatic understanding of the brain may be key to this, and speeding up progress of the neural circuit analysis field by years could truly matter for how this plays out.
Mapping long-range circuitry in the mammalian brain at a single cell level could tell us about how the brain programs social instincts, which is in turn potentially relevant for the problem of AI alignment. While it is widely recognized that neuroscience insights could benefit AI, the amount of focused work dedicated to exploiting this remains small.
Forest Neurotech’s ultrasound technology will make treatments of neuropsychiatric disorders less invasive and more precise, but it also matters for the types of reasons articulated here and here, around the level of programmability of brains that we’ll have in the coming era of advanced AI, and how brain access can shape how we develop AI.
EvE Bio is mapping of the “pharm-ome” for many practical reasons, but consider whether a better understanding of neuro-pharmacology could expand our toolkit to modulate human thinking and consciousness
See some broader reflections on the ethical importance of steering neurotechnology development here from Milan Cvitkovic.