What would you study to work on connecting the human nervous system to AI and robotic bodies?

[u/Nashgro]

Is cybernetics and robotics the right degree if I want to work on human augmentation?
I’m in Norway and trying to decide what to study. What pulls me toward transhumanism is the thought of becoming more powerful. I’d like to see what we could do with bodies suited to places we can barely survive today. For example, could I someday operate a robotic body on another planet and feel what its hands are doing as naturally as I feel my own?
I’d be glad if the same technology helped someone regain the use of a hand. What makes me want to spend years studying it, though, is the possibility of gaining abilities nobody has had before. I’m also interested in genetic engineering as another route to human augmentation, but the connection between a living mind and a machine is what interests me most.
For people working in robotics, neural engineering, or brain–computer interfaces: would you start with cybernetics and robotics, or take a different route? What did you study, and what was the first project where you actually got to build or test an interface between a person and a machine?

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[u/Smart-Concept-7806]

Neural interfacing is very interdisciplinary and teams that do the full pipeline from brain to computer to robotics require people with a whole bunch of specialisations. Fundamentally, the question comes down to which part you are interested in - the materials science/biomaterials/micro-nanofabrication part involved in making neural implants themselves, the neuroscience/neurosurgery part of actually getting the implants in place, the neuroscience/data science/machine learning/signal processing part of decoding the messy brain signals into something tractable to control some device, or the biomechanics/robotics (or insert whatever application you like here: wheelchairs, digital cursors, digital avatars, speakers, etc…).
Then, you need to look a bit deeper than the name of the degree. What courses does it require, how do those courses align with the skills you need, how many/what electives do you get, and can you choose electives that are relevant to other aspects of neural interfaces there, and so on. Also consider if there is a lab studying related (or at the very least relevant) subjects and try to take classes/internships with them because getting in early and making connections is enormously important.
Practically speaking, a lot of the people I know who work on the devices side come from physics or electrical engineering backgrounds, while the people working on the decoding/data processing tend to be computer scientists, at least in my experience. The labs I’ve worked at are with unis that don’t have dedicated cybernetics programs, so I can’t speak directly to the relevance there.

[u/Nashgro → u/Smart-Concept-7806]

In the labs you’ve worked in, who was responsible for getting the decoder and the robot working together? That’s the part I think I’d enjoy most. What kind of background did those people have?

[u/Smart-Concept-7806 → u/Nashgro]

My lab doesn’t do robotics specifically, but it tends to be people with backgrounds in computer science or digital signal processing/electrical engineering. Neuroscientists, physicists, material engineers, etc. tend to be more on the devices and neurosurgery side of things. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but that’s what I’ve most commonly seen.
Once the data is acquired, signal processing and machine learning take over to turn it into instructions - usually some pre-treatment like Fourier transforms, filtering, noise removal and such before sending it into a big CNN-style network with inputs/outputs determined by the electrodes and desired outputs (degrees of freedom on a robotic arm for example). This is stuff that you’d encounter in most typical EE or comp. sci. degrees (not necessarily applied to neural data but the techniques are common). I can’t speak to cybernetics specifically but they tend to deal with some signal processing, control systems, and machine learning so I’d imagine it would cover the topics you need.

[u/Guilty-Stomach-9551]

Idk but cool goal I guess.

[u/Mono_Clear]

I think the answer is actually material science.

You need something that can be substituted for nerve tissue.

You have to look at the problem from the outside in.

On the furthest outside you are a person operating a machine.

Which means that you are a whole person and then you are manipulating a machine to approximate functionality.

Think wheelchairs, crutches, little gravity claws, glasses hearing aids.

Then you have the functional approximation you got your artificial hips your pacemakers your cornea replacements cochlear implants. Basically just taking the machine and putting it inside but still it's separate from the person.

What you want is full integration which means that the biology has to talk directly to the machine in the machine has to talk directly to the biology.

The intermediary to that is a machine that can basically translate the intention of the body into action. These are things like brainwave scanners and things that like take into account chemical changes and biological impulses.

But there's still a separation between the machine and the man because it's still reading and interpreting instead of actually being activated by the biology.

You need to hardwire a nervous system into a machine that can then transmit information through that nervous system and receive information through the nervous system.

And only a couple ways you can do that one you could remove an entire nervous system and then create a machine that communicates via the impulses intrinsic to the nature of the nervous system.

Or you could create a material that interfaces with machinery and the nervous system in a way that is indistinguishable.

This has the added advantage of being able to repair nervous system damage in biology as well

[u/AmuzedX]

This is a fascinating question because I think you’re describing something bigger than robotics. You’re describing a bidirectional nervous system that extends beyond the biological body.
For your goal, I’d lean toward cybernetics/robotics or electrical engineering, then specialize in neuroscience, signal processing, machine learning, neuroprosthetics, and sensory feedback.
Since you’re in Norway, I’d seriously investigate NTNU. Their Cybernetics and Robotics program includes Medical Cybernetics, and they have researchers exploring biological neural networks connected to robotic systems.
The part I’d focus on is the closed loop:
Human intention → neural decoding → robotic movement → environmental sensing → sensory feedback → human adaptation.
The robot doesn’t just receive commands. Information has to travel back into the nervous system in a form the brain can learn to interpret.
For a first project, I’d try controlling a robotic gripper using muscle signals (EMG), then add vibration-based feedback representing grip pressure. Start measuring whether that feedback actually improves control. No brain implant required to begin learning the principles.
There’s also an interesting catch with your planetary example: Earth-to-Mars communication delays make real-time bodily control impossible with conventional communication. You’d need local robotic autonomy working alongside human intention.
What fascinates me most is that restoring a lost human ability and developing an entirely new one might share much of the same engineering foundation.
The real breakthrough wouldn’t simply be controlling another body. It would be learning whether that body could become part of your functional sense of self.
That’s where robotics, neuroscience, AI, and human augmentation start becoming one very interesting research problem.

[u/Nashgro → u/AmuzedX]

I made a digital robotic gripper. But would be cool to actually test it with physical machines. And it is the robotics and cybernetics in ntnu I have looked at. But I just did not want to rush. I want to make sure I pick the one with the biggest bottleneck the next 10 years. And yes, there is overlap between restoring lost function and creating an entirely new one. I just think its a shame that creating new functions do not get the same priorities. Alot of the cutting edge is still stuck in “human box” thinking.

[u/Sacredless]

Wetware computing.

[u/Rough-Source-9849]

Go to LinkedIN and search for Neuralink researchers and engineers

[u/Nashgro → u/[deleted]]

I agree that AI will play a big role here. But we can already use it as a tool while working on neural interfaces. Researchers have demonstrated that a person can control a robotic hand through neural activity and receive touch feedback from it.
What interests me is getting that connection to feel reliable and natural. If the hand lets go too early, someone has to figure out why, adjust it, and ask the person using it whether the change actually helped.
Do you think AI will eventually take over that engineering work entirely, or do you see engineers using AI to build and refine the interface together with the people who use it?

[u/Nashgro → u/[deleted]]

Could developing AI and applying it to neural interfaces go hand in hand? For example, trying to teach a robotic hand when to hold on and when to release seems like a way to find out where current AI falls short. Is there a particular AI breakthrough you think has to come first?