Do we need Brain Machine Interfaces? | Bullaki Science Podcast Clips with Timothy Grayson

Опубликовано: 20 Май 2026
на канале: BULLAKI

Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs). DARPA has been interested in Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) since the 70s and now we have Elon Musk trying to achieve this with Neuralink. So is the way humans acquire and output information a bottleneck in warfare?

This is the 10th part of our conversation with Timothy Grayson. We’ll be releasing this podcast in episodes every one or two days. If you wish to access the full podcast immediately please join us on Patreon (  / bullaki  , otherwise subscribe and turn on the notification and you’ll know when the other episodes will be available.

As the director of the Strategic Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA), Timothy leads the office in development of breakthrough technologies to enable war fighters to field, operate, and adapt distributed, joint, multi-domain combat capabilities at continuous speed. He is also founder and president of Fortitude Mission Research LLC and spent several years as a senior intelligence officer with the CIA. Here he illustrates the concept of Mosaic Warfare, in which individual warfighting platforms, just like ceramic tiles in a mosaic, are placed together to make a larger picture. This philosophy can be applied to tackle a variety of human challenges including natural disasters, disruption of supply chains, climate change, pandemics, etc. He also discusses why super AI won’t represent an existential threat in the foreseeable future, but rather an opportunity for an effective division of labour between humans and machines (or human-machine symbiosis).

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SL. Interfacing humans and machines. DARPA has been interested in Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) since the 70s and now we have Elon Musk trying to achieve this with Neuralink. So is the way humans acquire and output information a bottleneck in warfare? Or maybe this is not a problem? What do you think?

TG. Well, so, first of all, I can’t comment too authoritatively about that, because most of that kind of work goes on in another office at DARPA, called the Biosystems Technology Office (BTO) . I don’t have a lot of insight into those specific programs. I’ll come back to that human-machine symbiosis problem. Personally, I’d love to have something like [a Neuralink]; I could read faster and get through more quickly.

There have been a couple really exciting things that have gone on out of those BTO programs, where it has created more fine level control of prosthetics or for people who are quadriplegic, totally paralyzed and bedridden, and yet with one of those brain-machine interfaces, being able to control all kinds of things in the physical world or experience things that they wouldn’t normally. All of that is, I think, a very exciting and a big opportunity.

But to me, it doesn’t really change the fundamentals in this human-machine symbiosis. To me the bigger, or at least the more interesting, thing from my office’s and my personal perspective is not how do we bring the two together more closely through one of those interfaces, but rather, how do we understand where it makes sense to split them apart. Where are the natural boundaries for division of labor? And that really gets more to what are the type of the information, what are the ways to control information, dimensionality or complexity. And that, to me, is where the big breakthroughs with AI will occur. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong at all with the other research, but to me, I find it more exciting to think about this information centric problem.