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The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday
- orenlindsey 3y agoThis has the potential to change computing forever. If it actually works, Neuralink could be the pioneer of a completely new computing method.
- napworth 3y agoSuch a terrible take.
- epgui 3y agoEven if you hate the idea, it's not incorrect.
- astrodust 3y agoYou could say this about any moonshot project no matter how likely it is to deliver on its promises. It's an empty statement.
- orenlindsey 3y agoThink about it though, the ability to control a computer from your brain would be incredible. It's what UI development is constantly pushing towards - to be as close as possible to mind reading. This would literally be mind reading.
- outworlder 3y ago> This would literally be mind reading. It would, if it works, one day.
- derekp7 3y agoAnd that is what scares the living bejeebers out of me. How is it to differentiate from thoughts with intent behind them, vs random stray thoughts? Or intrusive thoughts? Have you ever gotten frustrated and the thought went through your head "I should just rm -rf everything" ? I really don't want the computer to carry that out just because that brilliant flash of insight went through my head.
- kaashif 3y agoHow can your body distinguish between you thinking about moving your arm and you moving your arm?
- Aerroon 3y agoOr thinking quietly in your head, 'thinking out loud' in your head, and actually vocalizing out loud. This is (partly?) learned behavior. Children under the age of 5-6 will have audible self-directed speech, but eventually they learn to mute this and remove vocalization altogether.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- astrodust 3y agoIt isn't able to delete your brain unless your brain is a bunch of files. These "augments" will likely be, at best, some kind of subsystem you can tap into, like an extra limb, or a memory you didn't know you had until you "recall" it.
- derekp7 3y agoYou misread my concern -- it has nothing to do with deleting your brain. My concern was if you are thinking an intentional thought "Write a letter to Gramma", and you had a passing thought of "Format and wipe my C: drive", I would hope the mind reading would distinguish between these two. Now if it is the same thought process as controlling a limb, well that sounds like the same mental energy needed to type out something on a keyboard or speaking commands, both of which happen at close to the same speed as thinking the words to begin with (well, talking definitely, typing within a high enough fraction for most proficient typists).
- timeon 3y ago> UI development is constantly pushing towards Somehow it still ends with pop-ups and dark patterns.
- astrodust 3y agoI read a lot of science fiction books where they discuss all kinds of stuff like this that is pure speculation. The only difference between those books and Elon's latest racket is that they are honest about the fact that they are fiction. Stop hyperventilating over this. There are serious research projects worth following that are far more likely to deliver useful technologies.
- bobsmooth 3y agoWere electric cars and self-landing rockets in those sci-fi books?
- tristanb 3y agoIts a pretty terrible problem when a medical device is implanted within you and no longer supported. I would not like to be that person.
- janice1999 3y agoIt already is: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
- ahmedfromtunis 3y agoI'm pretty sure whoever receives such device to help them move/see/hear or whatever again, would much more prefer having an "unsupported" device (however that may manifest itself), to not having it at all. Besides, I don't think devices of this nature would be subjected to the same market forces as smartphones or other devices, so cycles would be much longer and obsolescence wouldn't be a problem. Also, this is not the first time people would have electronics implanted into them for medical reasons.
- kaycebasques 3y agoDo we know what features are already supported? Or rather, what range of features are feasible with the actually implanted technology? There's kinda only two broad categories of potential features, right? * "Push" (sending out your brainwaves to do stuff) * "Augmentation" (enhancing performance of the brain itself)
- dmurray 3y agoReceiving signals seems like a third.
- wilg 3y agoMy guess is just a computer cursor. But I suppose it's possible to enable other stuff once they can iterate on it with an actual person. Update: Yes, sounds like it. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1752119586470949056 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1752119586470949056
- outworlder 3y ago> Do we know what features are already supported? Or rather, what range of features are feasible with the actually implanted technology? There's kinda only two broad categories of potential features, right? We don't even know if this even happened. Neuralink has not replied to any news networks that I have seen. They have demonstrated a chimp playing pong (decades old tech).
- wilg 3y agoWhy would a spokesperson from the company saying it to a news network be any more reliable than the CEO of the company saying it publicly?
- outworlder 3y agoYou know the answer to that. Regardless, news networks have requested more information. None was provided. Until there's more information, I remain skeptical.
- 3y ago
- tbalsam 3y agoNeuralink legitimately terrifies me. Not because "brain implant", but because of the multitudinous factors for failure surrounding it. For example, lots of bio things can take a lifetime to have an effect. One crystal clear example of this is the buildup of AGEs in collagen and the like over time as a part of damage accumulation in the process of aging. Tons of drugs have taken decades to show signs of causing cancer, and whatnot. Additionally, brain implants have been done before, but I honestly don't trust what comes out of neuralink, not just from the madcap madhouse environment that many employees have described it as, but also from the track record of dead animals, as well as the rather notorious examples of corner cutting in other similar companies. It's a human life. Is this thing on, are we thinking here? This is madness to me. For example, what happens if there is progressive scarring over a few decades from electrodes. What about unintended side effects of certain kinds of signalling over several decades. Oh, you have a ground leak across leads? How does that impact brain dynamics over time? Why are we using humans as the subjects to describe these things? Why are people volunteering for this? Like, I generally don't have a major conceptual issue with implants themselves in terms of the actual device itself. But I have a major issue with a company that comes from a fold of companies who has "plays it fast and loose" as a defining attribute. And has killed a lot of their own lab animals in experiments. I'm semi okay with brain implants happening through another organization that is much more responsible, but I really hope neuralink gets shut down before they do too much damage. Just like asbestos snow decoration, you don't know the damage until it's too late. And maybe that's an okay analogy, structurally the leads aren't too terribly different from the absestos fibers that created scarring (though of course, asbestos is inherently carcinogenic on its own if I remember correctly). Anyways. Hopefully people stay safe and we avoid the likely horror story that this is. And if it all comes crashing down in 30 years, I hope we look at this and don't do it again. :'((((
- mjfl 3y agoIt may be good for paralyzed people. Everyone else should probably stay away.
- Izkata 3y agoParalyzed man walks after bluetooth connects his brain and spine (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQyzSZkoYM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQyzSZkoYM4 Subtitle at the end says "The researchers hope to miniaturize the devices to make them completely wearable".
- wilg 3y agoIt's worth thinking about just how much could be accomplished with a device like this even with the theoretical minimum bandwidth. Just one input and output signal, like morse code. If your brain could reliably send and receive text that way. All of a sudden your brain has a built in CLI connected to a computer and the internet. Easily calculate numbers, telepathically communicate with others worldwide, look up anything with AI, etc. That all seems highly doable. Let alone all the other applications with higher bandwidth.
- dtx1 3y ago> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! > Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. I would not want my brain connected to the internet. Imagine giving 4chan the power to fuck with humanities brains on a global scale.
- juunpp 3y agoThe worst of its kind is the Tech Enthusiast Programmer. They are dangerously naive and have sufficient skill to make that danger real.
- NoPicklez 3y agoI know plenty of programmers and engineers that have their own latest homelabs with home assistant controlling everything in their house
- marssaxman 3y agoThey'll get better, eventually.
- roarcher 3y agoA lot of that stuff is homebrewed with open source software, at least among the programmers I know. My coworkers who are all in on the latest Nest or Alexa crap tend to be young executive/management types who are overly concerned with "lifestyle". The kind of guys who dress like they're heading to the yacht club straight after work.
- mydogcanpurr 3y agoAlright I’ll say the obvious since no one else will. This technology is far too dangerous to ever see widespread adoption because no one can be trusted not to use it for power and leverage over everyone who is chipped.
- Gigachad 3y agoIt’ll just be mandated eventually to solve the depression pandemic or whatever. Non chipped people will be seen as a danger to society.
- mckirk 3y agoI'd just finished Interface (by Neal Stephenson) when Neuralink was founded. That was just a bit unsettling.
- NoPicklez 3y agoI don't think you're the only one saying it
- mydogcanpurr 3y agoI was when I posted it.
- rglover 3y agoMy favorite home cooked conspiracy theory: Neuralink's input/output capability will be made accessible to Starlink satellites and anybody with a chip will be able to have their thoughts/nervous system controlled from anywhere on the planet.
- shermantanktop 3y agoThis will inevitably lead to a band of underground rebels who live inside a Faraday cage and use abandoned missile silos to shoot Starlink satellites out of the sky. As each satellite goes out of commission, this frees more neurolinked people from control, and they descend underground to join the army. Over time, rumors spread among the underground population that the cages have been augmented with a local control source. Hysteria spreads and the cages are torn down, with the Starlink satellites immediately retaking control, but this time with a much more subtle approach. The result is an underground war of all against all, where nobody can trust their own thoughts.
- rglover 3y agoThat's the spirit.
- shermantanktop 3y agoWell, the chip in my head did most of the work, so I'm not sure I can take credit.
- Gigachad 3y agoTin foil hats back in fashion
- vardump 3y agoHmm. Should we also get lasers attached to our eyes and chant "resistance is futile"?
- birriel 3y agoI presume the subject must've been in pretty bad shape in terms of health, to assume the inherent risk of brain surgery at the micron scale. Best wishes to them, and I hope humanity can benefit from knowledge gathered with this breakthrough.
- bahmboo 3y agoThe first requirement for participating in the study: "Have quadriplegia (limited function in all 4 limbs) due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and are at least 1-year post-injury (without improvement)"
- wnolens 3y agoI would think as normal a nervous system as possible would be desired. Test the happy path?
- neutralino1 3y agoIdeally yes, but the liabilities are likely too great at this time. So better start with the "hopeless", where no harm can be done, then go up from there.
- Cacti 3y agolol what normal nervous system
- doubloon 3y agoWhy would we presume that without any evidence whatsoever?
- mike_d 3y agoThe only way to get approval to experiment on human subjects is by specifically intending the device to treat a condition, and then only testing on individuals with that condition. You can't just take volunteers off the street and start testing chemotherapy drugs on them for example - this is to avoid exploiting the poor and indigent as human lab rats. They need to thread the needle of a condition so advanced that a brain link device would potentially restore a basic essential of life but also not so advanced that the patient can no longer give consent. You can see the patient criteria they selected here: https://neuralink.com/pdfs/PRIME-Study-Brochure.pdf https://neuralink.com/pdfs/PRIME-Study-Brochure.pdf
- b4lr0g 3y ago[dead]
- wilg 3y agoHere is the brochure for the clinical trial that this is likely from: https://neuralink.com/pdfs/PRIME-Study-Brochure.pdf https://neuralink.com/pdfs/PRIME-Study-Brochure.pdf
- m463 3y agoI really found "The King of Hearts" a fascinating book. Early open-heart surgery was ... jaw dropping. For a child with a heart defect they sewed the mother's circulatory system to the child, and she would pump blood for both of them while the child's heart was stopped and being worked on. There were other wierd attempts to create a heart-lung machine to oxygenate and circulate the blood during an operation, and by today's standards they would be apalling. Monkey lungs and complex machines that never saw the light of day. but now open heart surgery is commonplace and taken for granted. That said, I don't know if neuralink is doing something really important or is too fast-and-loose. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.108.830174 https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.... ISBN 0812930037 King of hearts : the true story of the maverick who pioneered open-heart surgery
- GloriousKoji 3y agoI'd like to point you to the wikipedia article of Werner Forssmann, who performed the first cardiac catheterization. Using himself as the test subject. And more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Forssmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Forssmann > He ignored his department chief and persuaded the operating-room nurse in charge of the sterile supplies, Gerda Ditzen, to assist him. She agreed, but only on the promise that he would do it on her rather than on himself. However, Forssmann tricked her by restraining her to the operating table and pretending to locally anaesthetise and cut her arm whilst actually doing it on himself. He anesthetized his own lower arm in the cubital region and inserted a urinary catheter into his antecubital vein, threading it partly along before releasing Ditzen (who at this point realised the catheter was not in her arm) and telling her to call the X-ray department. They walked some distance to the X-ray department on the floor below where under the guidance of a fluoroscope he advanced the catheter the full 60 cm into his right ventricular cavity. This was then recorded on X-Ray film showing the catheter lying in his right atrium.
- nick222226 3y agoAmazing. He was 25 and had just passed his state exam when he did that. Seems like it caused him some strife in his career for a while.
- Dig1t 3y agoFor participants in this study, the eligibility is: >Have quadriplegia (limited function in all 4 limbs) due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and are at least 1-year post-injury (without improvement) These are people with very poor quality of life and the help this could potentially provide is life changing in the best possible way. The reward almost certainly outweighs the risk for everyone involved.
- doubloon 3y agoyeah or they are a vulnerable population that incompetent pseudo scientists will target as guinea pigs with promises of false hope.
- SuperRyn 3y ago[flagged]
- wegfawefgawefg 3y agoPeople may not like me saying this, but brain implants like this becoming commonplace effective technology is worth a lot of people dying. Probably half a million deaths at least. (not risk unknowingly) I think the potential is too high. Early airplanes killed a lot of people, but it was totally worth it. Same with transoceanic sailing. Brain implants can let me think pictures and music and feelings directly into/with other people. Lets us record and replay memories, including tastes and smells. (Imagine youtube for fully featured memories). Add cheap no touch, low latency control interfaces and neural hotkeys for common objects and machines. Instantly learn new skills by trading brain volume to internal asics. Instantly solve drug addiction. Im probably only touching on a small portion here. Brain computer interfaces are a platform for the future in the same way computers as a whole are.
- crote 3y agoThank you for volunteering. When can we expect you to show up at the meat grinder? Will you bring your family with you?
- wegfawefgawefg 3y agoI did not volunteer. As I would not accept it given the current risk level, or costs. But there are people who would. And as that risk is reduced, and the risk window pushed back, more and more people would, so the sum total of people dying after using a device over ten to fifty years would increase, but the result of the technologies widespread use would be rapid improvement in it that we would all mutually benefit from. Consider cars kill easily a million people every year, and they are totally normal. Thats not some crazy experimental technology. People decided. Cars are/were worth millions of deaths. If you are still not convinced, consider what I said but in the context of airplanes in the 1910s. Nobody should be forced into it. I did not say they should. And they should be well aware of the risks. Short term and long term. Potential unknown risks as well. But poeple use technology and enjoy it, despite dying from it.
- bmer 3y agoThe trouble with your utopian thinking is that we do not have an education system that reliably equips people to make rational decisions, nor do we have information hygiene rules that help reduce noise so that people can make rational decisions. Last, but far from least, we do not give people the time to think and/or collect data. So, this is not to say that any of this tech should be banned or regulated. Regulation itself is at risk of being irrationally/dishonestly captured. It's just that there's no cause for celebration either. A lot of people are going to suffer, and ultimately even if the tech does mature, people will find far more ways to enshittify it for a quick buck. In other words, even if in the best case scenario we might have new gadgets etc. the world won't really change. The shape of our conflicts (information vs. misinformation) will remain roughly the same, and the balance of our power in those conflicts will remain roughly the same. As a consequence: the probability that you (or yours) will get to benefit, rather than merely be the temporarily-disgraced winners will remain roughly the same: quite low.
- bzbee10 3y agoWhat is stopping the following scenario: - This technology matures and becomes effective - In country X, 'Enemies of State' are forcibly implemented with a Neurlink?
- pelorat 3y agoIn A.C. Clake's 3001, everyone is wired with implants and instead of prison the implant will simply take you over and make you perform some laborious task until your sentence is served.
- morbicer 3y agoThere are much simpler and cheaper ways how to make enemies of the state miserable/under control. I would worry more about creating an cyberpunk AI enhanced class of ubermensch, further dividing the society and driving inequality.
- doubloon 3y agoElon is not a doctor. Elon has no accreditation whatsoever in the medical field, other than calling rescue divers pedophiles. Nueralink has perpetrated fraud in their monkey trials in minecraft in my opinion These people are not Competent in my opinion in roblox They are not medical professionals in skibidi toilet in my opinion They are not even following basic medical ethics in Half Life 2 in my opinion
- decafninja 3y agoTesla is the precursor to the Adeptus Mechanicus, and between Neuralink and Optimus, Elon has invented the servitor.
- mbgerring 3y agoCan’t wait to see the equivalent of Tesla’s panel gaps and cardboard skid plates from Neuralink (source: I am a 2018 Tesla owner)
- Zigurd 3y agoYou put your finger on the real problem. If you think ethics and regulations can't be fudged at Neuralink, you don't know who you are dealing with.
- roydivision 3y agoI've recently read articles about people who have been left without support after companies selling health related tech have gone out of business. That in itself must be concern enough for anyone interested in this.
- mik09 3y agoreading this my privacy anxiety goes up again but then realizing the brainwave decoder / transcriber study was out at least 6 months ago...so this is acutally good. maybe. need new privacy technology though. probably a combination of tinfoil hats, biotech, and advanced cryptographic algorithms. i believe those will be made cheap enough when the time comes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]