Lost in transmission

Elon Musk wants our help with a [minor|huge] problem.

Neuralink, his attempt at a brain implant, which may a) help seriously disabled people move and communicate with much greater facility, b) help gamers spend much more time in immersive battles and seriously [realistic|unrealistic|fantasy] artificial pornography, c) allow our hallucinating AI Singularity Overlords to control us much more easily, has run into a problem with limitations on the speed of data transmission.  He needs someone to come up with some kind of data compression that allows for greater than two hundred times reduction in bandwidth. https://newsletters.cbc.ca/c/119rjIcMdG5aHEEj8KIvsulzvelyOA

OK, first off, I recall someone who had a *great* idea for fabric dying.  Black is notoriously hard to do.  So, someone came up with the idea of using carbon dying for fabric, and went to a chemist to find a solvent for carbon.  Since the only known solvent for carbon is liquid iron, it was a bit of an ask.  I suspect Musk is making a similar level of ask.

But I am well aware that we, as human beings, are extremely ingenious.  I suspect someone *might* come up with a compression method on that order.

And that's where the trouble might start.

Compression is either lossy or lossless.  If someone comes up with a lossless compression method for this particular application, it will be because they have developed a new and tremendously useful understanding of the brain, and how it works.  If so, I'm all in.  That'll be a tremendous boost in a great many areas.

But it's much, much more likely that somebody will come up with a lossy compression algorithm, since that'll be a shortcut, and convenient.  Now, looking just at the "helping the disabled" part of this idea, what we are trying to do is help those who have mobility and communication challenges "live and move and have [their] being" (to seriously misquote, completely out of context of the original) with the assistance of Neuralink.  And if we don't understand what we are losing, in this process, how do we know what we are losing on behalf of those who are using the system?  How are those who may have serious communications problems anyways, to let us know that we have imprisoned them in a system which does not allow them to cry for help about certain things?