The BCI X PRIZE: This Time It’s Inner Space

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites recently rolled out SpaceShipTwo, a commercial passenger spaceship designed after the winning ship that captured the $10M Ansari X PRIZE for spaceflight in 2004. For those few of you who don't yet know, an X PRIZE is a $10 million+ award given to the first team to achieve a specific goal, set by the X PRIZE Foundation, which has the potential to benefit humanity.) Here’s an animation of SpaceShipTwo:

While SpaceShipOne carried only one pilot and two passengers, SpaceShipTwo can accommodate two pilots with seats for six paying passengers.

The latest X PRIZE, however, has nothing to do with the commercialization of outer space. The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) X PRIZE will reward nothing less than a team that provides vision to the blind, new bodies to disabled people, and perhaps even a geographical “sixth sense” akin to a GPS iPhone app in the brain. Communicate by thought alone? Recent h+ articles have explored early research into this intriguing possibility (see Resources).

Peter Diamandis modeled his Ansari X PRIZE after the Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 by flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Inspired by President Kennedy's 1961 goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, Diamandis has, in turn, inspired pioneers and risk takers to take up the X PRIZE Challenge of flying humans into space — except this time it’s inner space.

A recent workshop on the BCI X PRIZE – sponsored by Singularity University and held on the campus of MIT – brought together Peter Diamandis (Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation), Ray Kurzweil, John Donoghue (Founder of Cyberkinetics), Dr. Gerwin Schalk (holds a brain computer interface patent), and Ed Boyden (MIT Synthetic Neurobiology Group). Diamandis’ X PRIZE foundation is just starting to conduct interviews with experts, governments, and potential competitors. The foundation must court donors to make the $10 million+ prize a reality. Once funding is secured, companies and teams from around the world will compete – as Burt Rutan once did with financing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to engineer SpaceShipOne. The intent is that one or more teams will engineer a BCI solution with “ideas that could be won with a decade.”

During the MIT workshop, Peter Diamandis discussed the history of the X PRIZE. Ray Kurzweil followed with a 36-minute presentation called “Merging the Human Brain with Its Creations.” Here’s a video of the presentation:

After presentations by Donoghue, Schalk, and Boyden, the 50 or so workshop attendees broke into discussion groups on Input/Output, Control, Sensory, and Learning. Software Engineer and Singularity University alumnus Rod Furlan, who attended the workshop, writes about some of the problems discussed at the break-out sessions — for example, communicating with a brain v. implanting memories or skills, non-invasive v. invasive input/output solutions, and the difficulties of using EEG to capture brain wave states. Furlan concludes, “While we still have significant technical and scientific hurdles ahead of us, given the current pace of progress it is reasonable to expect that robust, albeit limited, implanted BCI solutions will be widely available commercially within a 10 to 20 year time frame.”

James Cameron’s trippy vision of a part-alien, part-human body controlled by the thoughts of a marine in the film Avatar or William Gibson's cyber-cowboy Case plugging into the Matrix, as in Neuromancer — if truly feasible — are likely more than 10 years out. But given the incentive of a $10 million+ BCI X PRIZE, who knows what might be possible by 2020?