Hello and welcome to Tech Life on the BBC World Service, the programme about how tech has an impact on all of us around the globe. I'm Imran Rahman-Jones, and on the programme today, the man with Elon Musk's chip in his brain. I still forget sometimes how incredible the technology is until I'm around someone that has never seen it, and they are watching me do it with sort of a jaw on the floor, and I'm like, oh yeah, this is a really big deal, isn't it?
We'll hear about the crypto-powered solution to bringing electricity to a rural part of Zambia. And the boss of a freelancing platform trying to help creatives stay in control of their work when it comes to AI. It learns from everything everyone ever created. And then it generates based on those learnings without giving any reward or compensation for the people that actually contributed to the learning of AI. Imagine being able to control a computer with only your thoughts.
Once the stuff of science fiction is very much a reality right now with several companies around the world hoping to transform people's lives in this way. Brain-Computer Interfaces are a way of communicating directly from the brain to the computer using thoughts instead of physical touch. Nolan Arbour from Arizona in the United States was paralysed from the shoulders down in a swimming accident when he was just 22.
But eight years later, in January last year, he became the first person to have a BCI chip from Elon Musk's company Neuralink embedded beneath his skull. Our tech reporter Lara Lewington has been speaking to Noland on a video call and she asked him how he first found out about the technology. You know, just sort of randomly, about a year and a half ago, one of my buddies called me up on the phone and said, you want to get a chip in your brain? And I said, sure, I've got nothing better going on.
And then he kind of gave me the rundown of what Neuralink was. I had never heard of it, didn't know anything about it, didn't know what a BCI was. And from there, I applied over the phone with him. I kind of didn't expect anything to come of it. And, you know, a month later I was getting full body scans, psych tests. and four months later I was getting brain surgery. What an incredible call to receive before we go into the details of what it was like and how it's been.
Can you just describe to me what life was like for you because you obviously had to make an unbelievable adjustment. You know, there were a lot of things I had to learn, a lot of things I had to give up control over. You know, one of the things about being paralyzed, being a quadriplegic is... You just have sort of no control, no privacy, and it's hard. And you just have to learn that you have to rely on other people for everything. So let's talk about the process with Neuralink.
You found out you were going to have this device put in your brain. You were the first person to have it. How did you feel? Were you apprehensive? No, not really. I think I just wanted to help more than anything else. I knew going into it that good or bad.
Whatever may be, I knew that I would be helping. I knew that if everything worked out, then I could help being a participant of Neuralink. If something terrible had happened, I knew that they would learn from it, and it wouldn't happen to anyone in the future. So when you went to have the surgery You went in. How was it when you woke up? What did you feel? What were you expecting?
I honestly didn't know what to expect. I remember first waking up, first I played a little joke on my mom, pretended not to know who she was right out of surgery, you know, brain surgery. kind of a big deal and she was not a fan of that but just wanted to show her that everything was okay and i'm the same person And then after that, being in my room surrounded by Neuralink employees, Elon Musk and all these people and them showing me for the first time that.
They could measure my neuron activity real time and I could affect change with that. It was really exciting. What did they have connected at this point to be able to do that when you just woken up? So they woke up my implant for the first time and connected it to a tablet. On that tablet, they were displayed in eight different squares, different boxes, essentially.
my neuron spikes from the channels on the threads in my brain and I was seeing them spike real time as you know things were happening in my motor cortex and then I wiggled my fingers and I got some of them to move and showed Neuralink and everyone was really excited. So that is what happens. You imagine the sensation of moving your fingers, your brain then responds accordingly, and those signals are being read. Yeah, it's something very, very similar.
It's in my motor cortex, so all the signals are still working. They just don't get to my body because of my spinal cord injury. There's a disconnect there. So all the signals are firing when I move my body. So I wiggled my fingers and those neurons fired and they were showing up on screen. How was it the first time when you actually played chess or tried to do something that was beyond the experiment that was happening the moment you woke up?
I didn't fully appreciate what Neuralink was for maybe a couple of weeks into surgery when I, instead of attempting to move my fingers, which is what I'd been doing up to that point, I just imagined. sort of like you were saying the sensation or what it might look like to wiggle my fingers something along those lines and i could still get the cursor to move and then it all sort of sunk in that this was a very very sci-fi technology but it was real now i could
actually control my computer with just my thoughts and I was giddy for the whole day. I still forget sometimes how incredible the technology is until I'm around someone that has never seen it and they are watching me do it with sort of a drug. jaw on the floor and i'm like oh yeah this is a really big deal isn't it it really is incredible
And I know that some of the connections have been lost over time. I know that it hasn't sat exactly how they wanted it to, but you're still having quite a few of the benefits, aren't you? You're still able to play games. Just what have you lost in that process? Nothing, actually, in the long term. I had some threads retract from my brain, and so a lot of the electrodes where they were originally pushed, put in place.
They had moved around, and so I, at that time, had lost a lot of cursor control. I wasn't able to really use my computer at all, and that was really upsetting. But a couple weeks later, they just... switched how they were registering my neuron spikes in the software. They changed from trying to target individual electrodes on my threads, individual neuron spikes essentially, the strongest neuron spike that's near one of those electrodes, and they instead started measuring groups of neurons.
better firing, and I got all control back. It was better than it was before, actually. Incredible how they could just update the algorithm. Yeah, it is. It really, really is. An incredible process the fact that I can get updates to it just over my computer on a daily basis What are you using it for? What are the different things throughout the day in practical terms where you're doing something you otherwise just couldn't?
I am using a computer, which is just a start through that. I do everything from You know, doing these interviews, I schedule everything on my own. I am interacting with people online at a much higher degree. I'm interacting with my friends and family. so much more proficiently. And now I feel like I've become a better friend, a better son, a better brother in all sorts of different ways because of how much I'm able to communicate.
I'm able to play games, which is something I wasn't able to do before. I'm keeping journals and trying to write speeches and trying to get out there and give talks. All of these things I'm able to do. helping me find work. It's helping me hopefully go back to school. There are a lot of things that I'm able to do now and really at the end of the day it's just giving me a lot more independence.
given me the chance to live a life, a fulfilling life that I just wasn't living before. That's Nolan Arbour speaking to Lara Lowington. You're listening to Tech Life on the BBC World Service with me, Imran Rahman-Jones. Now, last week, we asked what everyday tech you couldn't do without. Tony emailed in from the UK and he said he really couldn't do without something called an RTL-SDR device.
That's a small USB dongle which plugs into the computer and receives digital radio signals without needing to connect to the internet. Tony says without it, it's unlikely he'd be able to listen in to tech life. Well, thanks, Tony, for emailing. We also have this from a POS, that's point of sale, operator in Lagos.
It can be difficult to get hold of cash in Nigeria as ATMs often run dry. So in recent years, POS operators have sprung up as an alternative, buying and selling cash to people on the street. My name is Tolu Oremechi. So I'm a POS operator and I was looking for work. Then I got the POS machine and then I started using it to help people get money. and without the spears I will not have any business And we'd love to hear more from you, the audience, on the tech vital to you and your work.
Send us a voice note on WhatsApp. Our number is plus 44 330 1230 320 or send us an email to techlife at bbc.co.uk. to come, how can artists and creators retain control of their work in the age of AI? One platform thinks it has the answer. Now have a listen to this. This is the sound of a Bitcoin mine in Zambia and there's going to be more in the future.
because a cryptocurrency company is planning to roll out mini power plants to rural villages in Africa to bring electricity to remote areas and mine for Bitcoin. The company has already installed these types of mines at six different renewable energy plants across three countries, and the project shows the potential benefits of the controversial energy-hungry system that powers Bitcoin.
The BBC's cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy, has been to a remote mine on the Zambezi River in Zambia to see one project in action. And he's been telling me all about it, beginning with an explanation of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. So Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, it's a virtual digital currency that's similar to pounds, dollars or rupees, but of course there's no financial institutions in charge, there's no bank.
So it's all peer to peer. So I can send you some Bitcoin essentially in the same way that I would send you an email. And Bitcoin mining is the system that underpins this this cryptocurrency because Without those financial institutions, how do we know that when I'm sending you a Bitcoin, I actually have that in my wallet? And how do you know that it's all legitimate?
This is the calculations that these volunteer computers around the world, that anyone can join, of course, anyone can become a Bitcoin miner. You just have to have... Well, these days you have to have some pretty high-tech gear, but you sign up and you start the computers going and they churn through really complex calculations to verify the transactions on the blockchain. And that keeps everything going. Without the Bitcoin miners, there is no Bitcoin. And why does it take up so much energy?
It's been like a race really to find a random number. And there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin mining computers that are part of the network and they're all racing. to get that number and the first ones that do of course they're the ones that get the Bitcoin and there is a regular payout of Bitcoin completely automatically by the algorithm that was set up when Bitcoin was invented
So people are able to get money. And the way that that works is that the computers that are needed, they of course have to have electricity, which means you need to get some money for that. So that's why the incentive is there to pay people in Bitcoin. Otherwise, you wouldn't do it. So tell us about this plan in Africa for small-scale power plants to be installed in some rural villages.
Yeah, well, there's this company called Gridless and for the last couple of years, whenever we talk about in the media, or at conferences or whatever, we talk about the real concerns about the Bitcoin mining network and how much energy it uses because it uses about the same amount of energy as a small country like Poland.
People have said to me over the last year and a half or so, yeah, but look what's happening with Gridless in Africa. And I've been looking into it and I thought, okay, well, let's go out there and see for ourselves what it's like. And to be honest, you know, you go out there and it is a benefit. What you're seeing really is a kind of win-win where the Bitcoin mining company...
uses what's called stranded energy from these renewable energy projects. So the Zengamina Hydro Plant was supplying power and is supplying power to about 15,000 people in the local area. And it's off-grid, so it's its own, they call it a mini-grid, which means it's not connected to the national grid. So the local people just aren't using about 50% of the energy that that hydro plant is generating.
So the Bitcoin miners came in from Gridless and said, well, let's plug in. We'll use that excess energy, the stranded energy. We'll mine Bitcoin and we'll give you a revenue share. And the energy company has said that it's actually boosted their revenues about 30%, which has helped them keep the energy that's supplied to the local people stable and cheap. And this is what I was hearing from the CEO of the hydro plant.
Daniel Ray. We really struggled to make ends meet and every day we were wasting over 50% of the energy that we could Generate. which also meant we're not earning from that. What we lacked was institutional a major user of power in the area and the extra revenue important to say has also helped us keep the prices down for what we charge the local people which is which is also very important And you were talking to some of the people in the village by the power plant. How was this helping them?
Yeah, it's fair to say that the people of Zengamina, which is about two, three miles away from the hydro plant, all they care about is whether or not they can get electricity. And what's interesting is, although the hydro plant has been going for about 17 years now,
Because of how long it takes to get some of these buildings wired up, some people are only enjoying electricity since the last couple of years, year and a half. I spoke to one resident who's a barber called Damien, and he said that things have really improved for him since his barbershop got wired up. When I got power, my life changed. I started earning money and bought all this. Now I'm earning enough to pay to go to school. So Joe, what's next for this project?
Well, what's interesting in this particular example in Zengamina is that the project has kind of reached its conclusion now because the Zengamina hydro plant, they've managed to get some investment from... a big energy firm and they're expanding to other villages and they're eventually going to rig themselves up to the national grid. So that excess energy, that stranded energy that the Bitcoin miners were utilizing, that's going to be sold back to the grid.
those guys have got to find a new place to go but if you speak to the the the people that run the bitcoin mine gridless they're happy about this they're fairly calm about it because of course they are seeing themselves not just as a profit-making bitcoin mining company but also as they're doing some good. They're trying to spread electricity around Africa. His founder and CEO, Philip Walton.
The truth is that Bitcoin mining doesn't pay very high prices for electricity. If we think of ourselves less as a Bitcoin miner and more as an energy producer, then Bitcoin becomes one buyer that has a price they're willing to pay the community.
The community is another buyer that will pay a higher price. Our economic interest is to sell to the higher paying customer, and that's always going to be the community. But it has been difficult for them to find the right places and partners to team up with. Yeah, that's right, because although they've got these sites that have kind of proven that Bitcoin can be good and Bitcoin mining can help,
There is this stigma and this reputation about Bitcoin that you can't get away from. It uses so much energy and electricity around the world. Lots of water is needed to cool down the machines. And then, of course, some of that energy is being used and being created by fossil fuels, which of course is adding to the carbon footprint. So there is this reputation that some governments around Africa and some companies, investors, don't want to be a part of. That's our cyber correspondent Joe Tidy.
There's a social media meme which has gone round in the past couple of years and a version of it goes something like this. I wanted the robots to do my manual chores for me so I could create art and poetry. Now the robots are creating the art and poetry and I'm still doing manual chores.
It highlights one of the arguments made by critics of generative AI that tech companies have focused their efforts on getting AI to create new things rather than to replace the mundane, everyday tasks we'd rather not do. Whether or not you agree with this, it's something the company Fiverr has been considering, as it's now rolled out a suite of AI tools, which it says will give power to creative.
If you haven't heard of Fiverr, it connects self-employed freelance workers with businesses across industries such as graphic design, coding, voiceover, music and business services and it's now launched something called Fiverr Go. One of its new tools allows creators to train an AI model on their own work, retain the copyright, and then sell that model to customers who use it to generate new products.
I've been speaking to Fiverr's chief executive and founder, Mika Kaufman, about why he wanted to introduce these new services. I call myself a techno-optimist. I love technology. I haven't seen even a single case in history where people that denied advancements or didn't embrace technology, won. It's all around embracing it. And we love the power that comes with AI. But at the same time, we were very concerned to see the impact of AI on creators.
the way AI is being designed right now is that it learns from everything everyone ever created. And then it generates based on those learnings without giving any reward or compensation for the people that actually contributed to the learning of AI. Essentially, this is a very exploitive way of creator. And so AI itself is not the problem. It's not a being. It's just software. But maybe there's a different approach to how you design AI in the first place. One that thinks...
But the fact that the people that actually feed the technology and make it better should actually enjoy from it, thus continue to be motivated to create. And what's to stop, say I was a freelancer on your platform, a writer, and instead of training on my own writing, I copied and pasted a load of other stuff I found online and trained on that. Are there any guardrails in place to stop that?
Of course, and obviously I'm not going to discuss all these guardrails because I don't want to give people ideas. But that said, what they do right now, this is open to our top tier creators. And we have enough information on Fiverr of their actual work, which is why we're letting them train their models on work that we have anyway on our cloud. Fiverr has 6.5 billion interactions between customers and freelancers.
No one in the world, including OpenAI, Entropic, or any other player, holds that amount of transactional information. So essentially, when we're offering those models, It's really to give freelancers the option of training a model in a super simplistic way, whereas behind the scenes, it's extremely, extremely complex. I guess on the other side, from a business point of view, say you're a voiceover artist.
Someone can basically get you to say anything they want. Are there things in place to stop misinformation, harmful material being said in someone else's voice? So there's two classes of guardrails around this. One is the community guidelines of Fiverr and our terms of service. they define the things that are not going to be allowed. Discrimination, things that have to do with illegal, anything that has to do with illegal activity and so forth. this the models will follow.
Then there's the second class, which are things that the actual freelancer defined as the things that they would or would not do. the models that they train for their own purposes will follow those guidelines as well. And this is how we're actually ensuring that they're not going to generate something that the freelancer feels uncomfortable with. Now, is it 100% perfect? No, will people try to circumvent it? I don't know, whatever.
We're pushing new versions of Fiverr Go every day, and we're very well aware of the sensitivity of that in the way we design our technology. I think this kind of technology does lend itself to kind of more creators than other parts of Fiverr. Does it feel like AI is kind of coming for the creators before it comes for everyone else? we're not putting this genie back into the bottle and by the way who wants it i mean there are so many aspects that improves our lives who would say no to that and so
It's not about displacing, I think. I think that if anything, AI would displace the micro solutions, the microservices that seriously do not require a human being. We've seen how technology makes some jobs obsolete. and think about the future, it's going to dramatically change the jobs. The point is, we can't even imagine the types of new professions that are going to be created. And creativity or creation spans across the vast majority of the categories on Fiverr.
All of them are creators. You might be creating code. You might be creating business plans for customers. And I think that some of these aspects are just going to change. But these are natural. I mean, the way we do accounting today has nothing to do with the way accounting was done 20 years ago with the pen and paper.
but you don't see less accountants. And I think that one thing that is very unique to the freelancers, definitely those who are on Fiverr, is their agility, their ability to adopt. and embrace new technologies, and make the most out of them ahead of everybody else, is why they're so valuable by their customers. And I think that this is one of their superpowers and they're going to continue adopting and using technology to make their lives and the lives of their customers better over time.
That's it for this week's edition of Tech Life. Remember, you can email us about something you've heard on today's show or something you'd like us to cover in the future. and please let us know what everyday tech you can't do without We'd love to mention it on air. Our email address is techlife at bbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us on plus 44 330 1230 320.
And remember, please tell us your name and where you live. Today's Tech Live was produced by Tom Quinn, edited by Monica Soriano, and presented by me, Imran Rahman-Jones.