and gave us courage the tokyo olympics starts in july and afterwards when much younger was asked if you would like to light the cauldron at the opening ceremony in the sixty's you did it would be quite an honor but i'm not sure about my schedule the timing works out and i'm in japan when it happens and they asked me what an honor that would be. whether he likes the frame or not matsuyama is almost certain to be picked for japan's olympic gold cim providing him with a chance to win a gold medal to go with the green jacket david stokes al-jazeera. with al-jazeera these are top stories iran's foreign minister has blamed israel for a power blackout as its main nuclear facility so there is a reef as promised revenge for sunday's incident at the tents which tehran describes as an act of terrorism bake has the latest reaction from the foreign ministry in tehran he's claiming that the older less efficient centrifuges have

been damaged the oil ones and he said that iran would replace those with the more advanced ones the i r 9 s. we've also had the head of iran's atomic organization speaking now what he has said is that emergency electricity is now supplying the facility that they will assess the damage to the centrifuges over the next couple of days and he said that in richmond hadn't been halted but iran would compensate for any damage by increasing the capacity by 50 percent. india has soared paul springs ill to become the 2nd most affected country in terms of total number of coded 900 cases on monday it recorded a staggering 169000 new infections health officials are hoping a 4 day super vaccine dr can turn around the surge in numbers all the 2700000 doses were administered across the country on the 1st day. well life is slowly returning to normal in england with not essential services reopening across the country pub

restaurants hairdressers gyms shops and a number of other venues have now reopened the easing of restrictions comes as the u.k. recorded just 7 deaths on sunday the lowest toll since the september police in the u.s. state of minnesota have cleared protesters who gathered outside a station after an officer shot a 20 year old black man officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds in the minneapolis suburb of brooklyn center dante wright's family told a crowd he had been shot by police before driving away and crashing he was later pronounced said rescuers in china trying to reach 21 coal miners stuck hundreds of metres below ground and became trapped after the mine flooded in the northern province of jang on saturday 8 of them have been pulled out alive you are now up to date with all the headlines more news here on al-jazeera that's after inside story stay with us.

plucking people's minds into a computer brain chips are no longer a science fiction and can theoretically be used to treat several medical conditions so can brain computer interface is really transform people's lives and what could be the downside this is inside story. it's. hello and welcome to the program i'm dead you know imagine being able to control your smartphone with your mind or being able to type using your thoughts instead of

your thumbs or tesla c.e.o. elon musk says that could soon become a reality particularly for people with. his brain chip start up neural link has just enabled a monkey to play a video game by thinking they did it by embedding 2 chips on each side of the animal's brain to record his mind activity and this part of the experiment the macaque was trained to move a joystick data sent to the computer was then used to allow the monkey to control the stick just by thinking about moving its hands up or down while near a link uses a technology called your brain computer interface it reads brain activity and can also communicate information back to the brain it's been around for a while but neural links big advance is making it wireless rather than a direct connection now it's 1st commercial products will allow people with piro says to use smartphones it could also. will be used to help cure a brain conditions like alzheimer's disease on the company's basilan must believes

that it could one day allow telepathic communication without the need for spoken words. so a lot to discuss with our guests let's bring them in joining us from utrecht is nick ramsey was a professor in cognitive neuroscience at the university of attract and then master of the root and they peña who's an assistant professor a digital legal studies at master university thanks for joining us welcome to the program nicole start with you how significant is this latest reveal from there a link it's very interesting from an engineering point if you will i think that made an amazing tiny difference that does a lot more than currently faces can but the rest of the story is basically showing that you can they can do what we've been able to do for 20 years. so it's you know the monkey being able to play again is not a big surprise we have 2030 people implanted with the feiss they could do. a lot better than that but you know i think what he shows is that at least if i swear

it's right in what he seems to be new as well is that it is wireless so does that change where technology is headed and is that a big deal in your opinion now you know we have wireless devices for the last 878 years the big difference is that the number of electrodes the number of sensors that it can serve is a lot higher at the read a lot harder to base we have fully implanted now it's about $64.00 electrodes sensors and i think he has over the sow's ear 2000 in the type x. that's for the inmates and it's engineering feat. ruta i wonder if you can weigh in on the technological advancements and how you would write it. yes so my background is more from the legal and technology writer which i'm going to get into a little bit later but then just give me your reaction to what you've seen come out

of this video yeah i mean it is fascinating to see how far we've become but i agree with nick that some of these advancements we already saw in research papers from engineering perspective it's wonderful to see that we can do it right now so is it more of a hype than in your opinion ruta oh no i mean we do have to take into account oh so the hype that comes with that discuss think technology advancements and even musk also in social media so there's a bit of a rounded but it is an advancement as well nic you are working with 2 patients yourself from what i understand currently using brain computer interface tell us about the aim there and what you're hoping to achieve so i know the field has been implanting people for almost 20 years we implanted the 1st patient 5 an act years ago she's a less she has a list she's worked in speech that she can barely communicate she can still go over

eyes a little bit but not that much should she. we decided to go for an implant that's fully implantable and it works at home and mind you many scientists before us have shown that you can decode gray signal she could interpret braces if you can figure out roughly what someone wants to do. but we decided to make a little simpler have a fully implanted device that no wire sticking out and that would work at home and has a really big difference from the lab most of the systems that are more advanced. they were in a lab but you have a team of scientists and big external computers to make it work which is not feasible for a home and we have a system that works 24 hours a day and the only disadvantage is it's only a click so patients can or do users and basically click make mouse clicks and then they can use software that's commercially available for people with

disabilities or. like people that are. have an uncontrollable movement and they use a switch or a chin switch and that so what we proved is that it really works at home that you can decode the signal reliably enough because what you can do in a lab showing that you could you know make an arm movement everything doesn't mean it works at all because people are distracted all the time and there's so many patients that if in the lab you know you can move an hour if you're at home or you're distracted that the r. is going to go all over the place because that your brain does more than just control the hour but in the lab you're completely focused on moving your arm and nothing else when you're at home there's a lot of the few different things going on so that's the additional challenge and what does a one hour as some of the challenges that i think that have come with this. it's

a couple want is the reliability it's it's very difficult to have the system respond to the brain only when a person wants to quite often if you know the computer response well the patient doesn't want to do anything that's that's very irritating another big challenge is to get more sophisticated information so where we really want to go is to decode attempted speech that sounds a lot quicker but when people are completely paralyzed they can't move their facial muscles they can't talk what we think we can do is if we have you know 100 or maybe a 1000 sensors we only have 4 an hour in our patients. we might be able to have a computer say what the user of the science trying to say so we basically pick up the signals from the brain that you generate to try to speak but those signals don't reach the muscle so there's no movement but those electrical signals

are there in the brain and we should be able to see them that's for the next i think 1020 years we're going to be really working hard on trying to figure out how to decode what a person's trying to say that that's out of each huge challenge. ok root cause one of the apologies make it worth one of the statements that dylan must has made is that he said the initial goal of the projects such as these the same able people with quadriplegia to control a computer or smartphone using just their thoughts but then he also did go on to say that the he seeks to enable humans to merge with artificial intelligence giving people super human intelligence so do you think this type of technology is intended for medical treatment or will we see it evolve into human in value and handsome and yeah that is a very interesting question and also an interesting path for development because at

the moment even with the experiments with the excitement of what the applications says is that it's focused with helping people with central. you know. the central diseases at the same time it is worrying to think about what if this technology becomes commercially available so what if we could all and hand certain reasoning skills and who it will be made available so is it available for everyone is it available organized better and it believes questions really create more innate equality considerations and also ethical concerns yeah we'll get into the ethical concerns as well but nick do you agree with that assessment and also the assessments from the royal society which is a group in the u.k. the u.k.'s national science academy in fact one says that b.c. i could be on the verge of explosive growth i think at 1st it will be for medical purposes not was for people that are locked in and you know years to come it will

be for people who have to pray stroke like a bleeding in the brain and they and they can't talk or whatever i think this will be really interesting to make their lives you know more dignified. the people who don't. need one i think it's a free high. hurdle to get because you are getting someone to tinker with your brain you do need a surgeon to put it in there no matter how small it is and you know in my experience people are very hesitant even people that are paralyzed they are free has to have anyone take it with their brain because that's the most important thing in your body you can say you can suffer a lot of other ailments but your brain if something goes wrong or memory or confusion everybody fears that the most so i think will be quite a challenge and it will have to show that or really bring something extra and

that's that's going to take decades i mean it is a sign engineering feat but there's no way that that you know near a link is going to suddenly reveal how to brain works well millions of scientists have been trying to figure it out for for many decades they will hit the scent limit that we just don't know enough about the brain to be able to make it work the way that ylem thinks it should work i admire his idea but i see no hurdles way beyond a lot of hurdles beyond the technical challenges and again it is an amazing feat to put like sawzall avatar is in a tiny little discuses star medically speaking medically snuka is probably right so medically speaking what are the risks because obviously as you're saying safety is a top priority always the device and he's to be or proof because the brain fluid

will be in contact with that if ice it's capsulated in titanium whatever but if the liquid leaks in it can also transport chemicals out and we don't know what micro quantities of electronic. nichols due to the brain that might kill you in 20 years' time there are those are really high standards that we are here to or that there's a lot of developments as knurling much much less sophisticated but they never reach people because they don't meet the standards the 2nd thing is the sensors it's again amazing technology they're here they were put in there with the big you know sewing machine that they built but we don't know how long they stay intact what if they deteriorate how long to do how long you know is it worth an implant if they're of only last 5 years because then the brain liquid said eat an adult because that's what the brain liquids do they eat up stuff that's alien to them up to the brain.

what comes out of those electronics electrodes what is going to leak into the brain are they going to break those are all things that we need to worry about not for the short term but you really don't want to risk someone having severe problems 10 years after you reply to it because these things are not easy to take out. on the issue of human and handsome and i mean there is an estimate that says be expected market value off this industry is at $1720000000.00 and that's by 2020 to self for a lot of companies that may be interested in this there is huge potential is that something that worries you and what sort of privacy and security issues would this rain. yes and then vestments fairly they've followed the technological developments some not really surprised to hear that there is so much interest and this

technology but a lot of worries come with that so i think the 2 areas of law that would be most affected is criminal law if we think about responsibility and human capabilities of controlling their mind and actions so what if you now don't have this interview dearie of a machine that could alter some of the states and then the other thing that you mentioned about the privacy and data protection so these devices gather data directly from your brain and at the moment. there's a lot of discussion about data protection online and internet and certain apps and your phone that you have quite a lot of control over whereas when it comes to our brains and mind we really don't know enough and we can't control enough what information is given away and how is it used afterwards as to what purposes are used for that what sort of regulation is there around this issue if any at all so

i would say at the moment there is a vegan to relate that when it comes to implanted devices and brain development there is protection when it comes to product liability and medical devices such but at the moment we don't really have enough specific regulation that would focus on that is implanted in humans so there is a gap there and when it comes to data protection again g.d.p. art that is really privacy concerns and data protection in europe it doesn't specifically address these kind of questions why do you think that is why is there a lack of regulation. yeah that well it's i think it's in the tourist lee. said that regulation always lags behind development and technology and at the moment there is progress in developing laws about ai. protection and liability at the same time ai include so many different aspects that it really goes

into almost all areas of law and it's such a huge task that it is going to take us much longer make someone who works in b.c. i do think that it needs regulation. i think i think of what was said is correct we don't really know why it's not there it's because there's nobody implants here just not common yet. i think an additional part is the responsibility issue so we do get into the area of robotics and automated feel equal split a brain implant it interprets a wish and what if the wish is you know whose is it is it let's say ever wheelchair even if you control a wheelchair with your d.c.i. and you hit someone in need and you hurt someone who is responsible is that the wheelchair or the technology because clearly they didn't quite interpret you

correctly or is it the is the user because he didn't get the right instruction these are these are pretty complicated fields where human behavior gets in tangled in intelligent the machinery and the who is responsible is one issue that we have to deal with threats in our day our users our patients we do not allow them to control mechanical devices because that it's just too risky even if we trust the system quite hot quite well but it's still too risky and i think that's going to be more and more complicated and it's quite a challenge to get that. handled legally but i think a lot of the things that go for a high of peru politics they apply to b.c. i am not i'm not sure you need a separate kind of legal. domain for this what about the risk. you touched upon this just a moment ago but the risk off people's brains being hacked is that

realistic. yeah well i'm not entirely sure how read realistic that is a link specifically for the implants but there have been a lot of data breaches in the last few years where a lot of personal information has been leaked so if personal a sensitive information such as your address or name is leaked it is really difficult to replace that and at the moment we don't really have enough scenarios what if some of your brain states what if some of your thoughts are leaked because that is very sensitive data and from a legal point we really want to protect that yeah that's the thing i mean will break data can it actually be bought and sold like people's information is now online yeah i don't really have an answer to that question but it is worrying and it's something we should consider before this you know it is made available ok and they put how do we prepare for this future of this future of b.c.

eyes. i don't think we should prepare i think there's a lot of work that that's ahead of us with the better technology i really hope we get the current device available provided it's safe i don't know. but once we're there once we've know how much we can extract from the brain. that's a that's a set where you know we can sink about what consequences are inferences people think that those devices can read to mind or sauce or notions there is there is no indication whatsoever that we're going to be near good enough anywhere in the next decades because the simple thing is the brain has 100000000000 little cells that will do their own same getting together to be able to make sense out of what's happening in the brain it's very distributed would happen in the you know hundreds

of millions of sensors and i don't know how we're going to put those into granite there are reports however there are reports that facebook itself is developing a b c i implant that does read brain activity i wonder if you know anything about the . i would i don't know that they do brain implants they're really geared towards noninvasive like helmets or things like that i don't see how they can do anything more surprising that what iran is doing i think he's ahead off. the field in terms of the number of your electrodes the number of sensors but he says sensors there's 3000 been there in like a few square millimeters of the brain and the brain is a lot larger than that so i don't see any technology implant or not implant it's going to get anywhere close to what we need to start thinking about you know reading minds and everything which i think for me and my colleagues it's not

a target we don't there's there's no reason for this and the only thing that we carried out from the brain is the part of the brain that's used to you know control your muscles. pretty much anything else in the brain is extremely difficult to to interpret. moments ago you were mentioning that this can lead to unequal and sort of divided societies if this type of technology is only accessible to some i wonder if you can just flesh out that argument for us. yes so here i was thinking more about really long term development of this technology because some of the claims that iran is making that he would want to access some of these thoughts maybe record some of the memories that we have or possibly enhance the reasoning of some human beings so i believe that if such technology is only available to people who can pay for it that could further. just develop

a net inequalities are ready in society so that could be a huge problem and i know the both of you are speaking to us from the netherlands but so over in the u.s. any sort of human trials needs to get f.d.a. approval so. would this industry face significant hurdles do you think when it comes to getting gifts or regulatory approval from the f.d.a. . so that really depends because i feel the f.d.a. is taking this not to be approached so they have given their missions for it experiments on the egg and the monkeys but it will take years because we also have to think about long term an act of this technology so there will be particles but i don't see that it would be possible that they would get approval for this so do you agree with him on mask when he said the neural language start human trials by the end of 2020 which owns the sear is that a significant target ruta i do think that is too optimistic but

then again we don't know the full story of what's 'd happening behind the scenes but 202020 is very early do you see the human trial starting by the end of this year or this year i think it's possible it only need to prove to the f.d.a. is that it's you know there is there is no harm done to animals for at least 6 months or something like that the f.d.a. is much more inclined to help these studies to call them safety and fixes if safety in a fix to seek tests. they are and were bought in europe it's extremely difficult to do that because there is no f.d.a. it's all they're located to the governments of europe with european rules. i think the we're not going to have that many developments in europe they're all going to be in the us because they have a special program that expedites the development of human brain implants and technology there will be some casualties of people that get harmed but that's what

the what the f.d.a. gives permission for to say will test your device in a human after you've shown it safe in animals and from there you go further and those studies typically last maybe 6 months maybe years own and it's supposed to be exploited. i think it's possible if it's good hope to get approval with the f.d.a. says if you have a lot of files and you could test in animals real quick and you don't have to change the device based on that because then you have to go back to the handles test again if the paperwork is right if enough people to make it to break the paperwork then the end of this year should be feasible ok thank you so much will leave it there on the ground there thanks for joining us live pay nothing q so much and thank you for watching you can always see the program and again any time by visiting our website al-jazeera dot com for further discussion you can go to our facebook page that's facebook dot com for its last a day inside story and you can also join the conversation on twitter our handle is

at a day inside story from myself and the whole team thanks for watching for by for now . i'm counting the cost m.r.i. although it's changing the world of vaccines just took over time see big business and play off thousands of pixels millions of dollars and fungible and we demystify the world of. helping because it's on al-jazeera. it's a very bleak picture for

a lot of americans out there white supremacy impacts all of our issues you're putting more money into the hands of someone 1st keiki money out of the hands of other workers that will goes to their king after he becomes a us versus them this is the deal about constraining your nuclear program the bottom line the big questions on out is there. is only change because some people believe in a post that is because then they're. trying to make a political the mice in you know you promised they were in the senate they put themselves to make the changes something that. we should have taken this new name as condemnation learned we have this culture to slosh or to create new areas we have to change this culture i am one of the fortunate ones who can leave an establishment outside but all the people and the majority of

these illegal of us are talking about just good hard working people that want to live the american dream like our ancestors these are going to refugees are terrified that they may be forced to return to me and mark. hello there i'm just on the attainder ha with the top stories for you here on al-jazeera iran has been aimed at israel for a power blackout at its main nuclear facility foreign minister zarif has vowed revenge for sunday's incident in a tense which tehran is describing as an act of terrorism israel has not directly claimed responsibility but local media say its intelligence services were behind it or about man reports. nuclear terrorism is how a new radio official described a power blackout and it's not.