Blogs

Neuralink brain implant

Neuralink announced the first successful implantation of its product called ‘Telepathy’ using a surgical robot. Press announcements suggest control of a phone or computer by thinking and the potential for helping quadriplegics and the blind. Hyperbole aside, this is a step forward for a company that has been beset by delays and regulatory investigations. Yet, Neuralink is far from a pioneer in this field. In 1968, a device of 80 platinum electrodes (now known as a brain-computer interface – BCI) was implanted in a blind patient to stimulate their visual cortex. BCI research continued to develop and in 2020, Synchron (a University of Melbourne spin-out) implanted a BCI called a ‘Stentrode’ non-invasively via the jugular vein, with participants subsequently demonstrating control of a computer with thought alone.

Other research has successfully experimented with the control of prosthetic limbs connected directly to the nervous system. Since 2001, nearly 500 UK service personnel have suffered a traumatic or surgical amputation due to injury (with most occurring during service in Afghanistan). The development of BCI technologies may further increase the quality of life for those with prostheses.

Deepfake scam

An employee of a Hong Kong company transferred £20 million to fraudsters across five bank accounts. Though wary of fraudulent requests from senior staff to transfer funds, the employee joined a video call with the other participants being deepfaked senior staff, including the CFO. The deepfakes – which included audio – were high quality and convincing enough for the transfer request to be authorised.

This first of a kind fraud method is unlikely to be the last we see of it. Such a method could be used to impersonate senior military officers to give fraudulent orders or directions to subordinates to alter the outcome of operations.

Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Force

On 6 Feb, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced a new branch of the armed forces: the Unmanned Systems Force. This announcement is significant not because of the use of drones, but because of the formal recognition of the impact and importance of drone warfare. The conflict in Ukraine has catalysed drone warfare at scale, and it has quickly proliferated to other conflicts, such as use by the Mandalay People’s Defence Force (fighting the Junta in Myanmar), and the airborne and underwater drones deployed by Houthis in the Red Sea.

Drones are rapidly and cheaply closing the firepower gap, especially between conventional militaries and militias. As they proliferate, cheap and effective counter-measures need particular attention. In the Red Sea, Western forces intercept drones with missiles costing exponentially more than the drone itself; and the first-person view drones that can loiter and chase enemy soldiers presents a new threat and psychological impact.

The UK and Latvia have signed an agreement to send thousands of first-person-view drones to Ukraine. The £200 million package will complement the estimated 50,000 drones produced domestically by Ukraine. Ukraine uses FPV drones extensively and the UK Civil Aviation Authority has issued proposals (for consultation) to allow for beyond visual line-of-sight drone operations in the UK.

Augmented reality glasses

Brilliant Labs has launched “Frame” – a pair of glasses incorporating augmented reality lenses. Linked to a smart phone, the glasses use video and audio input to feed a generative AI app which displays answers and feedback on the lens. Compared with the glitzy ads promoting outwardly similar products such as Ray-Ban Stories, some Frame promotional material shows a basic and somewhat laggy augmentation of the field of view. However, this product is differentiated by aiming at the developer market. Both the hardware and software are open-source with extensive documentation already available on Brilliant Labs’ website.

It has been 10 years since the launch of Google Glass; arguably a product before its time, with users termed ‘glassholes’. Brilliant Labs’ aesthetically pleasing form-factor is much less obtrusive and at US$418, Frame might now, a decade on, become publicly acceptable augmented reality. The open-sourced and regular sized glasses may also be a challenger to bulkier products such as Hololens (still in trials with the US Army).

Text to video AI

OpenAI launched Sora, a text to video generative AI model. As with image generators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, Sora creates minute-long videos based on text prompts. Camera angles, movement and shooting styles can all be explored. Recognising the potential for this to be abused, Open AI have limited the release of Sora to a few researchers able to probe the model for susceptibility to extreme violence, sexual content, etc.

As with other generative AI applications, creating video from text is almost certain to have a wide range of beneficial use cases. However, the data on which Sora has been trained may become the subject of scrutiny, as the sourcing and use of training data used by large language models is currently debated in court as copyright infringements.

Military innovation

The US Defense Innovation Board published ‘Lowering Barriers to Innovation’, aimed at tackling barriers to innovation at speed. Among other things it discusses leadership, security and contracting process, with associated recommendations to reduce the barriers. With humbling honesty, it recognises the DoD is not a preferred business partner and must align its bidding practices to industry standards. In the UK, the MoD Commercial X construct will allow its commercial officers to use new freedoms and approaches to risk to exploit technology opportunities that develop at speed.

Semiconductor technology developments

As the size of transistors on silicon chips has shrunk, the death of Moore’s Law has been predicted for a few years now, due to the behaviour of electrons when transistors are measured in single-digit nanometres. Despite an approaching transistor density physical limit, there are other advances in microchip manufacturing. The use of graphene as a replacement for silicon is being explored by Paragraf in the UK and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Semron are exploring replacing transistors with memcapacitors. This approach is useful for AI model building, using the memory of the chip to store model weights and doing calculations with electric fields, rather than current flow in a transistor. This is significant considering the voracious growth in AI hardware, estimated to be 20% of total semiconductor sales next year. Finally, researchers at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore have demonstrated weaving semiconductors into fabrics, capable of detecting and processing signals.

Optical disc storage

The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics have published a paper in Nature, outlining optical disc storage of up to 200 Terabytes of data; a traditional CD-ROM holds about 700 Megabytes. They claim a novel approach using hundreds of layers, with the data density of each layer over 100 times that of traditional optical discs. While the production process is compatible with standard DVDs, the authors note that improvements to read/write speed are needed for commercial viability.

Such an exponential improvement in the storage capacity of optical discs in a known form factor may make them a strong contender for longer-term data storage; especially considering the power demands and relatively short life-spans of hard-drive arrays.

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