19 ms·

For those who don’t know much about this field, this seems incredible. The reality is that this a tech demo that Neuralink is using to practice the basics. For

by elil17 6y ago

For those who don’t know much about this field, this seems incredible. The reality is that this a tech demo that Neuralink is using to practice the basics. For other research groups in this field, this is tech from 20 years ago. The current state of the art is humans, mostly quadriplegic people, with chips which let them control robot arms with enough accuracy to pick up small delicate objects, play games, and type by thinking words. Current state of the art implants let people get tactile feedback too - they can intuitively know the position of the arm they’re controlling and feel the amount of pressure on each finger tip. I had the pleasure of meeting a man with an implant in 2016 and the technology he was using was incredible. He could pick up a grape with his arm without crushing it and then eat it. If the arm was in another room, he could feel around with it to find objects. He described how the arm just felt like a part of his body when it’s turned on. To use SpaceX as an analogy: this isn’t a first flight. This is more like a static test fire. If Neuralink follows the SpaceX trajectory of driving down cost/increasing innovation, it results will be really out of this world. Stuff that would just sound bonkers right now.

Zecc 6y ago
Now imagine if someone could control an implant installed on a Mars probe. Stupid speed of light, making it lag so much.
alcover 6y ago
If the arm was in another room, he could feel around with it This uncanny sentence is giving me dystopian vertigo. I picture a mob of derelicts home-invading a 130 years-old tech boomer, fighting his remote-controlled spare limbs from room to room..
- GrumpyNl 6y ago
  Thats a nice idea for a movie.
- brians 6y ago
  Heinlein’s Waldo might be a good thing to read, then. It’s the origin of the word “Waldo” in English.
  - ZeikJT 6y ago
    It is a cool story, but I had no idea that remote control arms were called waldoes when I read it haha.
- m463 6y ago
  I think you want to read Gil "the arm" Hamilton stories by Larry Niven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters#Gil_Hamilton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collection) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collec...
ggambetta 6y ago
Would it be possible to control an extra arm somehow? Or brain plasticity doesn't go that far?
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The real innovation is when you can find a method to control the physical hand and the virtual hand independently. I suspect it would be possible if you can do some kind of real-time feedback/tuning of the ML model. Reinforcement learning stuff. By slowly adjusting the model to reward hitting the ball back in pong, but also to penalize moving the real physical hand, you might achieve it.
  - harperlee 6y ago
    Can't the brain alone use visual feedback to close the loop, separating both hands? If thinking in a particular way activates the only the robot hand (trembling), I'd guess that with sufficient plasticity you should be able to start enhancing control of it. Obviously tactile and proprioceptive feedback through the chip would enable better / quicker control, given the sufficient plasticity hypothesis.
- riccardomc 6y ago
  this is why we can't have nice things... :)
- childintime 6y ago
  Many monkeys use their tail as an extra arm, so, should not be a problem.
- _Microft 6y ago
  I bet it is possible but that does not mean that it is going to be easy. Try training yourself to wiggle an ear or to lift a single eyebrow if you cannot do that yet. It's possible but it takes quite some time.
- RobertoG 6y ago
  The brain is very plastic, it probably would adapt at any consistent input. A most interesting question is, what would you sacrifice? Because the part that you would use to control your extra tentacle or whatever is probably currently used for something. If you are missing an arm is obvious what part of your brain you would use, otherwise, some sacrifice probably have to happen. Even reading, it seems, take the space that is used in people that can't read for some detailed visual processing (1). Maybe you could add some extra processing in the extra arm, so it's more "cheap" to use. (1) - I learnt that in "Reading in the brain" by Stanislas Dehaene.
jonplackett 6y ago
I had no idea these things were possible. Are they currently insanely expensive / only experimental? How available are they?
- PetitPrince 6y ago
  IIRC this is only experimental. The most reliable/interesting stuff are relying on ECoG (== put electrodes on the surface of the brain), and this means you have to perform a surgery. For human applications, most of the time the researchers are using patients that requires several brains surgery (e.g severe epilepsy) so that they can do some sort of fly-by experiments (several surgery are needed so that they can also remove the electrodes). I studied this at uni; my knowledge is probably not up to date.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Thanks - so it seems like it's actually the ease-of-implant part that Neuralink is really doing most interesting development on then, rather than the actual abilities it gives (so far at least)
    - ianai 6y ago
      Out of my range here, but I bet they have a deeper and wider base to draw on for the AI interface with the brain than most other organizations through their CEO.
- elil17 6y ago
  Very much insanely expensive and only experimental. The man I met had a team of like five people needed just to set the thing up and calibrate it for his "brain waves" that day (they had to constantly fine tune the neural net he used to control it because the human brain is so plastic it would change every day and become unusable after a couple days) - plus more researchers running the experiments he was doing. The team had a portable supercomputer running the neural net (this thing was maybe a two or three server cabinets on wheels) that they brought around with them. They had a safety managers to make sure the arm didn't hurt anyone and make sure he was medically okay. This was not a device he used around the house, he was an employee of the research lab and using it for experiments was his full time job. The risks of these devices are also significant: you have to get risky brain surgery to install them and then you might still reject the implants and have to get them removed. A very limited number of people have these - the lab this guy worked at had I think about a dozen people, all with BMIs installed using different surgery techniques (some had the implants on the areas where the brain met the nerves going to the muscles so the output to the neural net was a more "direct" representation of movement whereas others had implants on motion planning areas on the brain giving a more "high level" output to the neural net). There are several such labs in the world. My best guess is there are less than one hundred BMIs installed on people today, as well as quite a few more on animals.
jdsalaro 6y ago
I'm really interested in learning more about the process of putting existing research into practice as a process from an economics and innovation point of view. Does anyone have book, talks and other material you'd suggest looking at?
- elil17 6y ago
  Some great places to look: The Annual BCI Research Award highlights interesting advances each year "Search for Paradise: A Patient's Account of the Artificial Vision Experiment" is an older book (2012) about a research subject's personal experience with an attempted vision-restoring implant The research put out by the University of Pittsburgh Human Neural Prosthetics Program and Braingate at Brown University
- overdrivetg 6y ago
  Sounds like you are asking about tech transfer capabilities? As a starting point, here is a good intro article from WIRED that you might find useful: https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2017/02/tech-transfer-lab-main-street/ https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2017/02/tech-transfer-lab-mai...
icoder 6y ago
The chips you describe, are they responding to brain activity, or are they connected to something outside it, and if so, is that remnant muscle tissue or remnant (peripheral) neural tissue? And if so, do you agree that if that's missing, this is an unprecedented (possible) solution?
- elil17 6y ago
  Both techniques have been used! Some are connected to the top of the spinal cord where as others are on different areas of the brain. Both techniques work and it's not clear which is superior right now.
graderjs 6y ago
I think that's a little unfair. I guess what they are doing is achieving the basics, but with a different interface. This is an important proof of concept. Remember, Musk is all about scalable manufacturing and products. If this was other's tech from 20 years ago, where's the massive commercialization? They failed. Musk is focused on this aspect, and he will (given his past achievements) succeed.
- trombonechamp 6y ago
  This is really basic. Here is a harder task from 2015 in monkeys with only 96 implanted electrodes (Utah array): https://youtu.be/lVFWIv5lupo?t=1673 https://youtu.be/lVFWIv5lupo?t=1673 Here is a video from 2014 of someone controlling a quadcopter with their mind with zero implanted electrodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsraC04Mm8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsraC04Mm8w
  - antattack 6y ago
    That's akin to saying that phones are basic since we already had desktops in the 1990s. Having 10x more electrodes that stay active for a long time, attached to self powered unit under skin with low latency wireless comm link is a major step forward.
    - graderjs 6y ago
      That's what I'm saying. Exactly. I don't think it's "easier" to use 2000 electrodes in a microneural mesh. Besides that, why the pushback? Is it coming from field experts who are like, "bah, old hat as shiny new. humbug!"; disappointed futurists who expected more ("we were promised flying cars and intelligent robotic spouses, and all we got was 2000 electrodes in our brains, and 140 characters"); misMuskists; people who sense unfairness in praises lauded upon this, in their mind, mediocre achievement, echoing to them a theme that the already-anointed and, in their view, undeserving, accrue all praise, while the genuinely meritful, themselves, for example, are overlooked, yet again?
    - elil17 6y ago
codeulike 6y ago
One of the neuralink innovations is having the electrodes installed very precisely via a robot surgeon, which supposedly allows them to make things easier/better/more precise - https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/02/neuralink-elon-musk-brain-implant-technology/ https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/02/neuralink-elon-musk-brain-... Previous discussion of surgical robot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152
- elil17 6y ago
  That's really cool! I think one of the things that will hold them back is that there are still a lot of issues on even knowing where to place the electrodes - but as those issues are solved this will have such amazing potential!
  - lolthishuman 6y ago
    It sounds like they know exactly where to put it based on their white paper. The problem is more materials engineering for longevity and economics.
    - elil17 6y ago
      They know where to put them for the tasks they are targeting right now - tasks which have already been performed in the lab. Beyond that is a open question
      - lolthishuman 6y ago
        It seems that the ideal way would be trhz gap if it can be done. That way no implant needed but maybe a dome.
swiley 6y ago
If they handle the software anything like they do for the tesla this will b a massive net negative.
m463 6y ago
I would agree, with the further caveat that musk is the guy who builds the machine that makes the machine.
elil17 6y ago
Also! Forgot to put this in my comment but here is an interview (a couple years old) with the man I met talking about what he thinks of NeuraLink: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/19/238809/nathan-copeland-man-with-brain-implant-on-elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/19/238809/nathan-co...
ianai 6y ago
You really shot this down with your comment until the end. I’m curious what you could see happening with this tech in 5/10/20/30 years? Particularly the “bonkers” stuff. I’m asking in part because Elon’s suggested this could eventually lead to whole brain uploads and downloads. Partly asking because it’s pretty easy to be very destructive with a comment like yours and offering a glimpse of where this stands out from the crowd balances the attack.
mlindner 6y ago
You're confusing apples and oranges here. Those implants you're referring to are at the injury site (arm stump for example), not in the brain. Completely different technology.

by elil17 6y ago

Zecc 6y ago

Now imagine if someone could control an implant installed on a Mars probe. Stupid speed of light, making it lag so much.

alcover 6y ago

If the arm was in another room, he could feel around with it This uncanny sentence is giving me dystopian vertigo. I picture a mob of derelicts home-invading a 130 years-old tech boomer, fighting his remote-controlled spare limbs from room to room..

GrumpyNl 6y ago
Thats a nice idea for a movie.
brians 6y ago
Heinlein’s Waldo might be a good thing to read, then. It’s the origin of the word “Waldo” in English.
- ZeikJT 6y ago
  It is a cool story, but I had no idea that remote control arms were called waldoes when I read it haha.
m463 6y ago
I think you want to read Gil "the arm" Hamilton stories by Larry Niven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters#Gil_Hamilton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collection) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collec...

ggambetta 6y ago

Would it be possible to control an extra arm somehow? Or brain plasticity doesn't go that far?

londons_explore 6y ago
The real innovation is when you can find a method to control the physical hand and the virtual hand independently. I suspect it would be possible if you can do some kind of real-time feedback/tuning of the ML model. Reinforcement learning stuff. By slowly adjusting the model to reward hitting the ball back in pong, but also to penalize moving the real physical hand, you might achieve it.
- harperlee 6y ago
  Can't the brain alone use visual feedback to close the loop, separating both hands? If thinking in a particular way activates the only the robot hand (trembling), I'd guess that with sufficient plasticity you should be able to start enhancing control of it. Obviously tactile and proprioceptive feedback through the chip would enable better / quicker control, given the sufficient plasticity hypothesis.
riccardomc 6y ago
this is why we can't have nice things... :)
childintime 6y ago
Many monkeys use their tail as an extra arm, so, should not be a problem.
_Microft 6y ago
I bet it is possible but that does not mean that it is going to be easy. Try training yourself to wiggle an ear or to lift a single eyebrow if you cannot do that yet. It's possible but it takes quite some time.
RobertoG 6y ago
The brain is very plastic, it probably would adapt at any consistent input. A most interesting question is, what would you sacrifice? Because the part that you would use to control your extra tentacle or whatever is probably currently used for something. If you are missing an arm is obvious what part of your brain you would use, otherwise, some sacrifice probably have to happen. Even reading, it seems, take the space that is used in people that can't read for some detailed visual processing (1). Maybe you could add some extra processing in the extra arm, so it's more "cheap" to use. (1) - I learnt that in "Reading in the brain" by Stanislas Dehaene.

jonplackett 6y ago

I had no idea these things were possible. Are they currently insanely expensive / only experimental? How available are they?

PetitPrince 6y ago
IIRC this is only experimental. The most reliable/interesting stuff are relying on ECoG (== put electrodes on the surface of the brain), and this means you have to perform a surgery. For human applications, most of the time the researchers are using patients that requires several brains surgery (e.g severe epilepsy) so that they can do some sort of fly-by experiments (several surgery are needed so that they can also remove the electrodes). I studied this at uni; my knowledge is probably not up to date.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Thanks - so it seems like it's actually the ease-of-implant part that Neuralink is really doing most interesting development on then, rather than the actual abilities it gives (so far at least)
  - ianai 6y ago
    Out of my range here, but I bet they have a deeper and wider base to draw on for the AI interface with the brain than most other organizations through their CEO.
elil17 6y ago
Very much insanely expensive and only experimental. The man I met had a team of like five people needed just to set the thing up and calibrate it for his "brain waves" that day (they had to constantly fine tune the neural net he used to control it because the human brain is so plastic it would change every day and become unusable after a couple days) - plus more researchers running the experiments he was doing. The team had a portable supercomputer running the neural net (this thing was maybe a two or three server cabinets on wheels) that they brought around with them. They had a safety managers to make sure the arm didn't hurt anyone and make sure he was medically okay. This was not a device he used around the house, he was an employee of the research lab and using it for experiments was his full time job. The risks of these devices are also significant: you have to get risky brain surgery to install them and then you might still reject the implants and have to get them removed. A very limited number of people have these - the lab this guy worked at had I think about a dozen people, all with BMIs installed using different surgery techniques (some had the implants on the areas where the brain met the nerves going to the muscles so the output to the neural net was a more "direct" representation of movement whereas others had implants on motion planning areas on the brain giving a more "high level" output to the neural net). There are several such labs in the world. My best guess is there are less than one hundred BMIs installed on people today, as well as quite a few more on animals.

jdsalaro 6y ago

I'm really interested in learning more about the process of putting existing research into practice as a process from an economics and innovation point of view. Does anyone have book, talks and other material you'd suggest looking at?

elil17 6y ago
Some great places to look: The Annual BCI Research Award highlights interesting advances each year "Search for Paradise: A Patient's Account of the Artificial Vision Experiment" is an older book (2012) about a research subject's personal experience with an attempted vision-restoring implant The research put out by the University of Pittsburgh Human Neural Prosthetics Program and Braingate at Brown University
overdrivetg 6y ago
Sounds like you are asking about tech transfer capabilities? As a starting point, here is a good intro article from WIRED that you might find useful: https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2017/02/tech-transfer-lab-main-street/ https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2017/02/tech-transfer-lab-mai...

icoder 6y ago

The chips you describe, are they responding to brain activity, or are they connected to something outside it, and if so, is that remnant muscle tissue or remnant (peripheral) neural tissue? And if so, do you agree that if that's missing, this is an unprecedented (possible) solution?

elil17 6y ago
Both techniques have been used! Some are connected to the top of the spinal cord where as others are on different areas of the brain. Both techniques work and it's not clear which is superior right now.

graderjs 6y ago

I think that's a little unfair. I guess what they are doing is achieving the basics, but with a different interface. This is an important proof of concept. Remember, Musk is all about scalable manufacturing and products. If this was other's tech from 20 years ago, where's the massive commercialization? They failed. Musk is focused on this aspect, and he will (given his past achievements) succeed.

trombonechamp 6y ago
This is really basic. Here is a harder task from 2015 in monkeys with only 96 implanted electrodes (Utah array): https://youtu.be/lVFWIv5lupo?t=1673 https://youtu.be/lVFWIv5lupo?t=1673 Here is a video from 2014 of someone controlling a quadcopter with their mind with zero implanted electrodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsraC04Mm8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsraC04Mm8w
- antattack 6y ago
  That's akin to saying that phones are basic since we already had desktops in the 1990s. Having 10x more electrodes that stay active for a long time, attached to self powered unit under skin with low latency wireless comm link is a major step forward.
  - graderjs 6y ago
    That's what I'm saying. Exactly. I don't think it's "easier" to use 2000 electrodes in a microneural mesh. Besides that, why the pushback? Is it coming from field experts who are like, "bah, old hat as shiny new. humbug!"; disappointed futurists who expected more ("we were promised flying cars and intelligent robotic spouses, and all we got was 2000 electrodes in our brains, and 140 characters"); misMuskists; people who sense unfairness in praises lauded upon this, in their mind, mediocre achievement, echoing to them a theme that the already-anointed and, in their view, undeserving, accrue all praise, while the genuinely meritful, themselves, for example, are overlooked, yet again?
  - elil17 6y ago

codeulike 6y ago

One of the neuralink innovations is having the electrodes installed very precisely via a robot surgeon, which supposedly allows them to make things easier/better/more precise - https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/02/neuralink-elon-musk-brain-implant-technology/ https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/02/neuralink-elon-musk-brain-... Previous discussion of surgical robot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152

elil17 6y ago
That's really cool! I think one of the things that will hold them back is that there are still a lot of issues on even knowing where to place the electrodes - but as those issues are solved this will have such amazing potential!
- lolthishuman 6y ago
  It sounds like they know exactly where to put it based on their white paper. The problem is more materials engineering for longevity and economics.
  - elil17 6y ago
    They know where to put them for the tasks they are targeting right now - tasks which have already been performed in the lab. Beyond that is a open question
    - lolthishuman 6y ago
      It seems that the ideal way would be trhz gap if it can be done. That way no implant needed but maybe a dome.

swiley 6y ago

If they handle the software anything like they do for the tesla this will b a massive net negative.

m463 6y ago

I would agree, with the further caveat that musk is the guy who builds the machine that makes the machine.

elil17 6y ago

Also! Forgot to put this in my comment but here is an interview (a couple years old) with the man I met talking about what he thinks of NeuraLink: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/19/238809/nathan-copeland-man-with-brain-implant-on-elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/19/238809/nathan-co...

ianai 6y ago

You really shot this down with your comment until the end. I’m curious what you could see happening with this tech in 5/10/20/30 years? Particularly the “bonkers” stuff. I’m asking in part because Elon’s suggested this could eventually lead to whole brain uploads and downloads. Partly asking because it’s pretty easy to be very destructive with a comment like yours and offering a glimpse of where this stands out from the crowd balances the attack.

mlindner 6y ago

You're confusing apples and oranges here. Those implants you're referring to are at the injury site (arm stump for example), not in the brain. Completely different technology.