This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I find the wording weird: The neuralink's threads have retracted from the brain.
The threads can't move or disconnect on their own. Neither can brain cells. All that can be measured is a loss of connection.
The far more reasonable explanation is that the brain cells at the connection point have died.
I seem to recall that scarring around the electrodes, which eventually causes them to stop functioning, is a known failure mode of older experiments along similar lines. It's one of the reasons I didn't hold out much hope for this iteration.
I just hope the patient doesn't take any long-term damage from the implant.
In principle they could have pulled out slightly, if there's jostling and tiny movements in skull then you'd expect them to work loose over time if they're not securely anchored
The patient was a paraplegic. I'm not sure how much they'd be capable of moving enough to dislodge the in-skull writing.
Paraplegics still need to move or be moved.
If they don’t rotate into different laying or sitting positions, they’ll develop bed sores they can’t even feel, which can be extremely dangerous. They also still need to move their limbs to avoid blood clots.
All this shows is that Neurolink isn’t ready for one reason or another. Either the wires are so fragile they become dislodged or broken by gentle movements during physiotherapy, or the surgery damaged the brain. Either way this is a major issue with the technology. No way are they going to be putting robot limbs on people if the chip that can control them is this unreliable.
No way are they going to be putting robot limbs on people if the chip that can control them is this unreliable.
Let me just go ahead and remind you that the cyber truck exists.
In one of the interview with Nolan he says he has full body spasms when he sits in the chair and those spasms take him out of position from being able to use the mouth stick controller. With neuralink he doesn't need intervention by someone else post spasms to continue.
Definitely enough to be jostling the head, but he didn't get into explicit detail of how serious they are movement wise.
Edit: side note, makes me wonder if they're a build up of spinal signals and the cord briefly connects and suddenly a pile of commands go through and he spasms.
About a month after surgery the implant started to perform poorly. They tweaked some software settings and now it's running better than it did before the drop-off for a longer period, based on the actual blog post the story is talking about https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience.
This is obviously prototype technology with insane risk. The guy only signed up because he's paraplegic. It's not in any way remotely ready for normal humans and probably won't ever be in our lifetimes. IMO this is like self driving technology, it's easy to promise the world but hard to actually accomplish what they say.
I really feel conflicted about this. I hate Musk as much as anyone and think this experiment is a little irresponsible, but if I were going through what that guy is dealing with, I'd probably want to give it a try.
That is what makes this even more egregious. Musk doesn't care about this guy in the slightest, except for the publicity that might help Musk raise more investor money. So Musk takes advantage of this desperation without any concern for long-term consequences. We know people left the company because of their ethical concerns. Those that remain probably just don't care or aren't on a position to do anything about the lack of ethics.
That's definitely one legitimate perspective. Another would be from the guy who can potentially gain some of his automony and dignity back regardless of the asshole who is itching to profit from it.
I have nothing but admiration for the guy willing to be the human experiment. He's like an astronaut paving the way for a potential future for mankind.
Even if someone else finds the right way of doing it, this is driving us towards having practical man-machine interfaces. It's really cool.
Also completely terrifying to think about being the experiment myself.
It's definitely morally complicated. Like paying life changing money for medical testing or organ harvesting.
On one hand, yeah he's making a sacrifice for human advancement. On the other hand...
Ya think so??
I'm already a paraplegic, may as well just fuck my brain too
Not sure the logic checks out
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
Before anyone gets too excited: some of their electrodes are no longer able to record a signal from the patient's brain. They're reprogramming their software to work with fewer electrodes. No one is being turned into a borg drone.
A software patch for a hardware failure.
Sounds like what they do at Tesla, too.
Well it's also what NASA is doing. Only logical if you don't want to dig it out again.
Do you mean with the Voyager FDS? There's a big difference between patching a system 30+ years past it's planned mission date because at everyone's amazement it just keeps going and being valuable versus the Neuralink developing issues a few months after being installed when many expected it to fail because of the news of high failure rate among the primate test subjects beforehand.
I was thinking more a vegetable than a borg drone.
No one is being turned into a borg drone.
Yet.
You, too, will be assimilated.
I don't know. Even if the outcome is just that the implant just stop working, with no other issue, it's looking pretty bad to me.
Since it required literal brain surgery just to be installed, which I assume is already a serious risk, it's not something you want to potentially be useless.
The implant is already malfunctioning after a few months. Makes you wonder how many more of these threads will retract over the next following months.
All of them. The body doesn't want foreign materials inside it at any point. You can't just jam wires into your body and expect your immune system to not attack it. The organ interface problem as far as I know has never been solved.
Especially in less than 4 to 5 months. Damn thing was put in back in January and is already failing.
No one is being turned into a borg drone.
Damn. I finally thought this would be the year :(
No one is being turned into a borg drone.
Yeah nobody is worried about this.
"We can't control him and he's currently on a rampage. We urge all citizens to stay indoors with the doors and windows locked and your curtains or blinds drawn."
“…you now have five seconds to comply….”
Didn't it die and they had to pull it out of RFK's skull?
this dude can't make a car pedal right what did you expect
He doesn’t technically make anything, tbf. He just takes credit for all of it.
the stupidest things are always made on his demand
Sounds like the brain scanner has dead pixels.
Literally WHO did not see this coming??
Did the fucking chimps begging for death not tip these people off???
oh huh
just had a moment where I realized that this is a real prelude to SOMA and maybe .hack//SIGN
ooh this is a real bizarre feeling I'm currently having
This is coming from a company by the same guy who approved the cybertruck.
They just want to get a product out the door no matter the cost.
Was he throttled due to not upgrading to the latest model?
Did a worm eat it?
There are lots of parasitic bugs in this story, including Elon Musk
Sooo, is there like a certain knuckle-cracking sequence to turn it off and on again or what? Lol
"Sorry guys, Elon is experiencing technical difficulties, please remain patient while we bugfix his Neuralink and then update it to Evil Overlord OS v0.2 alpha to his Neuralink"
