5 ms·

The efforts made by Neuralink’s team are impressive and, IMO, the idea is very serious, with lots of practical short term consequences as well. Someone said tha

The efforts made by Neuralink’s team are impressive and, IMO, the idea is very serious, with lots of practical short term consequences as well. Someone said that getting electrodes into the brain is the easiest part, but I beg to differ on this, for the simple reason that data is more accessible, abundant and clean than ever. Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. Now, on the demo and its tech: some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? The stacks I used in my embedded projects were simply horrible and I’m heavily biased against BT even on principle :D What about the electrodes being, in the end, simple conductors and, so, antennas? I’d hate to be in a NMR machine with a NL in my head (thunderstorms too? An attacker with a jammer?!). I was expecting a write demo too, but maybe it’s not something you want to be streamed online for the general public. Last thought: the pig limbs prediction task. I think that the prediction was greatly aided by the chosen setting of the experiment (tapis roulant), but still impressive. I’m sure that today we saw a very important piece of human history unfold before out very own eyes

modeless 6y ago
They talked about security and explicitly mentioned that the Bluetooth radio is hardware isolated in some way. They mentioned using encryption without detail but I expect that the radios are treated as untrusted. Also they are using third party penetration testing.
visarga 6y ago
> some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? Being Bluetooth, you probably have to retry a few times to get it to connect and will fail frequently from WiFi interference. Also, the BT software stack is a mess. For example I have problems connecting AirPods to MacBooks (recent ones), same company on both sides, still not working reliably. BT is a shit technology if there ever was one.
tsimionescu 6y ago
> Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. That is only true if the data is likely to be the right data. For motor control, electrical signals seem to be pretty much it. But we have no clear proof that the same is true for higher thought processes - it could well be that chemical signals and processing inside each neuron itself are major components of that, so the data would be massively limited. It would also be interesting to see how well such an approach would do when tried on a microprocessor - could we tell that a microprocessor is displaying "hello world" by sampling electrical signals from its transistors and trying to apply some kind of machine learning on that data?
- bshanks 6y ago
  You might like this article titled "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?": https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

modeless 6y ago

They talked about security and explicitly mentioned that the Bluetooth radio is hardware isolated in some way. They mentioned using encryption without detail but I expect that the radios are treated as untrusted. Also they are using third party penetration testing.

visarga 6y ago

> some other commenters are concerned about the safety of the lithium battery, but what about the Bluetooth? Being Bluetooth, you probably have to retry a few times to get it to connect and will fail frequently from WiFi interference. Also, the BT software stack is a mess. For example I have problems connecting AirPods to MacBooks (recent ones), same company on both sides, still not working reliably. BT is a shit technology if there ever was one.

tsimionescu 6y ago

> Accessibility of data has obvious implications on the pace of progress in using said data. That is only true if the data is likely to be the right data. For motor control, electrical signals seem to be pretty much it. But we have no clear proof that the same is true for higher thought processes - it could well be that chemical signals and processing inside each neuron itself are major components of that, so the data would be massively limited. It would also be interesting to see how well such an approach would do when tried on a microprocessor - could we tell that a microprocessor is displaying "hello world" by sampling electrical signals from its transistors and trying to apply some kind of machine learning on that data?

bshanks 6y ago
You might like this article titled "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?": https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...