The Moment When We Turned Humans Into Robots

Alex, hello. Yeah, hello.

How are you?

I'm good.

Nice to meet you.

Good to meet you as well.

You were the first person to get to use this technology.

Yeah.

Can we do it?

Yeah, we can totally do that.

Thank you. This might not have been my finest hour. Without being a total jerk, can I see what you can do?

Yeah.

But I am a simple man, and if you put a dude with a mind-controlled robotic hand in front of me, I'm gonna wanna see things.

I've got open and close. I've got a 3-finger pinch, then I've got a 2-finger pinch, And then I can rotate the wrists. Everyone always asks, can I flick people off? And the answer is yes.

360. Exactly. Alex Smith lost his right arm when he was 11 and has spent most of his life with a standard prosthetic.

This is what I wear.

It's simple and functional. But this is a story of where prosthetics are heading and how Alex got the ability to do things like this.

Ah!

Is that all right?

I'm sorry.

I had no choice.

Hi sharks, I'm Dr. Adil Akhtar from San Diego, California. I'm here seeking $1 million for 2% equity in my company Psionic.

Alex's robotic hand was made by a company called Psionic. It's packed full of sensors and made out of carbon fiber so that it's strong and lightweight. At 490 grams, it weighs less than the average human hand. While the device is amazing, I really came here to learn how Alex operates it.

Index flex and start.

This is the Austin headquarters of Phantom Neuro. It's building what's known as a muscle-computer interface. In the most basic terms, Phantom has made sensors that translate Alex's intention to move into actual movements. On his robotic hand. To explain in more detail, may I introduce Phantom's lustrous-haired founder and CEO, Connor Glass.

I'm Connor Glass. I'm the founder and CEO of Phantom Neuro. I went through medical school and was extremely passionate about function-limiting injuries, so people with functional disabilities who can't do whatever it is that they want to do. And I recognized that there was really a gap in the market in terms of commercially relevant approaches to human-machine interfacing. Almost all of the commercial focus was on brain-computer interface, which is fantastic, but it actually turns out that the vast majority of people with physical disabilities don't have to have a brain implant in order to regain their lost function through human-machine interfacing. So ultimately we came up with this implantable sensor system for the limbs that could do the same thing as a brain-computer interface, but in the setting of outpatient surgery, very straightforward, you don't need a specialized surgeon.

Phantom fits into the shoving electrodes into your body field. Companies like Neuralink and Onward have been building implants for the brain and spine. This technology can help people suffering from paralysis or ALS speak, use computers, and even walk again. But instead of putting a chip in someone's brain, Phantom has built a device that gets implanted right next to the person's amputation site.

So this is what would go under somebody's arm, right under the skin. But you can either have a wearable armband or you can have an implantable armband. And so the goal is to have a ring of sensors around your limb. And so what we do is we put two of these devices in somebody. One goes on top of the arm or residual limb and one goes on the bottom. And then these are wireless electronics, right, that's sending the signals out to this edge compute kind of module we have called the FusionPort. And that's what's actually computing, and then telling the robotic wrist and hand what to do. So we make the implant of this wearable as well as the edge compute module.

So these two black boxes that you're seeing here have this exact chip on the inside of it. So these are just the simulators because it's not implanted.

The earliest people using Phantom's technology, like Alex, have had external sensors placed around their amputation site. Phantom, though, is in the midst of running clinical trials where its device device will be implanted right under the skin.

We have a wearable system, and that's what's allowed us to optimize our implantable system, which we implanted at the beginning of next year. And so what we do is, is you make a pocket under the skin that basically is the size of the implant, and then you put the implant under the skin in that pocket. So it's very straightforward. So it's much more like a cosmetic procedure where you don't need general anesthesia. And so it should be less than an hour-long procedure, you know, maybe 15 to 30 minutes for someone to walk in get these things put under the skin, wrap them up, and then they're out the door.

What I see in patients when they've gotten BCIs and it takes a couple days configuring it, was it similar for you the first time you put that on? Did it take a minute to—

Oddly enough, no. I think I probably had gestures working in like 10 minutes.

Okay.

It's designed to be really simple. It's designed to be as natural as it can be. It's not like a BCI where you're trying to sort of think about how to make that work. It works exactly how you would move your muscles. And I've tried all kinds of different hands and I've beta tested different things and I've tried production systems and I've never had something that's sort of this natural and this just sort of easy to use. It's really, really powerful.

Back when he was 11, Alex was on Lake Austin boating with his family. A drunken boater crashed into his family's boat and Alex flew off and into a propeller and lost his arm. He's had his regular prosthetic for many years, That said, like many others, he's looking forward to the advances coming in this field. It sounds like you wouldn't think twice about the surgery.

No, no, no, not at all. And I'm super squeamish. I don't like surgeries. I don't like needles. I'm terrified of it. And when Connor first told me, yeah, we're going to put this thing in your arm, and I was like, no, you're not. And then when I started to learn more about it, I was like, okay, well, that's kind of interesting. And now it's like a no-brainer. I mean, I think any amputee would be stupid not to do this if they, if they can. I can do it.

If you get the implant, are there things you're hoping to do beyond some of the stuff you showed us today?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, not having to put all that stuff on and take it all off every day is going to be really exciting and really rewarding. But also just life, you know, if I took your hand away and said, you know, you can't do it, what would you be looking forward to? You'd be looking forward to being able to use your hand again, you know. I don't know, my least favorite part of any day that I'm here testing this thing out is taking it off. I don't want to take it off.

Actually, Alex, we might have to disconnect you from that, uh, through the app.

Oh, through the app.

Alex, please.

After watching Alex in action, I too wanted to use the Force.

So I'll place one here to sort of capture the extensor muscles on the back of the forearm, and I'll place a secondary right there.

Gonna fly a —drone with my muscles and my mind? That is the plan.

Okay, so if you flex your hand, you'll see all those signals coming up. And now let's do index finger, press it into your palm. So you're seeing the activation of these channels up here. Now go middle finger, some more down here. Ring finger, much stronger activation. And then little finger. Okay, and that's the data collection is done. So what you'll do, try making a fist. Okay, so far so good. So middle will make it spin in a circle. Okay, there you go. Wow. And then try that pinky finger, so it'll go towards you guys.

Good dodge. Sorry. All right, you ready to land?

Let's do it.

Dude, that is like the forest, but it's cool. You've been here before?

I've been here many times. Okay.

Over the past few years, Connor and Alex have gotten close, which is nice and should be the setup for the next part of this episode.

Surprise!

Hello, how are you? In reality though, I heard that Alex had an unusually large Scotch collection. Shiver the crickets, you've got a drinking problem. Yeah, so I used their friendship as an excuse to drink some of Alex's Scotch. When did you get into Scotch?

Uh, my dad got me into it.

My dad's a big collector, so for my 21st birthday he got me 2 bottles of Scotch, and then I started I like it. And then I told my dad, and my dad's like, oh, we're gonna try all these things, and we have to hold a whole tasting. And so that it kind of naturally grew. So my dad has a very large collection as well. So this one's, uh, 14 years old, finished in a rum cask.

So what is your— what is your favorite?

I really like really heavy peaty, smoky kind of things are my jam.

Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. You were saying before, this is the largest collection in Texas? How do you— how do we know? We don't, actually.

Nobody publishes this. You know, we're very big in the community. My wife and I started the Austin Scotch Club a number of years ago. We have— we've had a lot of distillery reps here. We would pay attention to social media. We pay attention to kind of who's out there and, you know, the big collectors. And to our knowledge, we've got— I think we're very close to 800 bottles now.

800 bottles. Okay, so what you're doing seems so practical to me, but we've been in the middle of this brain-computer interface gold rush. If I look at the money that's raised and the values of some of these companies, to make that math make sense— The math don't match.

I mean, it doesn't. So brain-computer interface almost entirely is starting with spinal cord injury or people with like locked-in syndrome. There are north of 100,000 individuals with spinal cord injury in the US, something, something in that range. If you are not Elon Musk, and you're talking to investors, they're gonna tell you that is way too small of a market. But there's somehow this like open sky, endless limit perception with brain-computer interface that doesn't exist with anything else. And I think it's very much TBD whether it will actually materialize into what the hype has made it out to be.

In the near term, Connor is a realist when it comes to brain-machine interface technology. Phantom's implant is in many ways less flashy than the devices from Neuralink and others. It's relatively simple in its design and is serving a very practical purpose. As for where this technology is going though, I guess it's time to prepare for octopus soldiers?

We're working on some interesting things that I can't talk too much about. That are non-medical. And so—

And so you're giving me like a super hand?

Um, those are the kinds of things that are going to happen, right? So there absolutely will be like additional appendages, like wearable wings that they can control, or, you know, the Doc Ock kind of thing, you know, with multiple arms. We will quickly get to a point where humans more or less can be what they want to be, and where your body is kind of like a blank canvas of sorts. Now, there are situations in the defense world too where you would want to do that, such as bomb diffusion. The dream is that you have human arms, or maybe even superhuman arms, attached to a remote operated vehicle that then you can have somebody kind of transport themselves into that and then be able to operate these arms from a distance with one-to-one human dexterity to defuse a bomb or something like that, right? Or maybe it's something that's under the water, not even necessarily just defense, but also like surgical robots, space exploration. How you interact with machines hasn't changed since, you know, Atari or whatever, right? Like, you click something and you've got a little joystick that you move around. And we need to change that because machines are becoming so radically more capable. And now we're trying to interact with all these different machines at the same time. And so we need to find better ways for humans to be able to interface with those. And I think we're on the cusp of We're doing it.