"Day 33: Problematic symptoms developing in Patient X. Current fluctuations from the implant are causing unwanted signals in the somatosensory cortex. The patient is expressing aggressive behavior as a result, presumably due to the interference of the implant on normal sensory function. It is unknown what is causing the fluctuations.
Day 45: Patient X sedated following a violent outburst that injured a staff member. fMRI scans indicate an uptick in activity in the premotor cortex compared to the previous scan four days ago. Patient X not responding well to the Brain-Computer Interface. Violent aggression may not be consciously controllable.
Day 46: Patient X escaped Secure Room Alpha. Lockdown initiated. Quarantine measures are now in effect. There is a loud banging on the lab door. This might be my last journal entry. Before I leave this Earth, please let the shareholders know I created value for them."
i remember rightwingers, the same who praise elon musk lately, screamed for months about implanting chips during covid vaccinations. oh the irony.
The right wingers were not angry about microchips in the blood. They were angry about secret, non-consensual, microchips in the blood.
Please don’t make me say these stupid disclaimers: I don’t think covid vaccines contain microchips.
Anyway, it was about consent, not a moral outrage at implanted chips. A moral outrage at secret microchips implanted by government directive under cover of emergency powers.
And that wasn’t even real. They howled about a fake scenario, and then praise the actual event happening.
Security Log day 42: Our request for a proper security door was denied. “Just buy a master lock, it’s cheaper” was the reply.
Oh well, I’ll make something work. Right after my quick meeting with HR.
[Last log entry]
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
Just recently I was reading about blind people who got experimental eye implants several years ago. They’re having serious problems now because the company stopped supporting the implants.
…how. I make plastic medical devices and I need to support them for 10 years by law, since that is considered “lifetime” for it. How is a company not supporting them before the lifetime of the product (i.e. before they need to take them out) and gets away with it?
Bankruptcy maybe?
Edit: article says company was on verge of bankruptcy.
seems like i have read similar about folks who got implants to manage migraine or epilepsy.
edit - i was reading about it in the New Yorker, context was more philosophical. but here’s an article that looks to cover the topic (biotech abandonware) directly.
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html
Do people think this is new? We have been able to do this for decades. I’m a lowly PhD student and even I get to work with humans whose brains we are actively recording from (although I don’t put the electrodes in there myself).
Just another instance of Muskrat talking about things he doesn’t know. I used to think he was a genius when he was talking about rockets, then he started talking about things I know (neuro & AI)…
Elon never invents anything new. He finds a complex concept, scuffs off at it’s complexity and announces it’s actually really simple. Creates company that over-simplifies things.
Sometimes his project fails enough times that it starts working (space x).
He has so much money that he can keep doing it. And hire the best in the field - there’s no money in academia so of course they’ll go. And then he’ll take credit for their hard work eventually of course.
Didn’t the team he put together at least come up with better miniaturization of a BCI, with denser/more numerous electricodes, and a more advanced implantation process to minimize scarring?
You probably won’t be worried about scarring after you die of a brain bleed so that might not be the best selling point.
It’s a current limitation with all BCIs from what I understand, so one hurdle for them is to try to eliminate it from ever forming at all. Not sure where his thing is at, but I guess no one here knows anything about it.
Elon musk is a fucking moron, but he is paying a team of actual neuroscientists and surgeons to develop this.
Yes you are right, they are trying to improve on what exists. My response was more for the “OMG musk is doing a sci-fi” - recording spikes is not really new or hard.
So what are actually useful applications that might be feasible soon for this kind of stuff? I could google it but I’d mostly get a bunch of sensationalist BS that is meant to generate clicks.
Basically three things -
-
BCI - Brain Computer Interface. This can allow people with disabilities to control prosthetics using their brains. For example, this one from 20+ yrs ago. They are in clinical trial stages now - lot of data over 20yrs showing it’s pretty safe. There are some differences like BrainGate uses “Utah” electrodes which sit on the brain rather than go inside the brain.
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Medical diagnosis - Some patients (with things like epilepsy) get their brains recorded like this to find the region of the brain that is malfunctioning. Then sometimes this region is removed and believe it or not it actually helps! Edit: DBS is another option sometimes like the other commenter said but that needs “stimulation” also, not just passive recording.
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Understanding the brain - these recording data can help make sense of the brain. We still don’t understand much of how the brain works so this data can help and maybe help with treatments in the future.
For all of these currently we only have patients (because “healthy” people wouldn’t want metal electrodes in their brain). But neuralink’s promise is to make these electrodes so thin and dense (so that you can record more) while keeping SNR high that it might be possible to put it in healthy people without brain damage. I wouldn’t hold my breath for that, though.
I’m hoping so hard for a brain/computer interface. I have a chronic condition that makes me a walking repetitive stress injury generator. Being able to control a computer with my noggin would be a game changer. I currently use an eye tracker combined with a camera head tracker, plus speech recognition, but it’s not the best. It certainly killed my (non-existent) computer programming career.
Thanks! So how far away are we from something like this:
- Create a kind of “virtual sense organ” that allows you to learn to “read” text or information through BCI
- A virtual or augmented reality, able to close your eyes and see things that the BCI is feeding you
Both of them can be done shitty-ly now. But to do it with quality that even healthy people will voluntarily get it? That would need several breakthroughs.
We can stimulate some neurons now; to be able to stimulate enough neurons to do either of those in good quality will be hard. Cutting edge stuff can stimulate ~1000 neurons (only monkeys not even humans) but the human optical nerve is more than a million fibers. So we probably will need 3 orders of magnitude improvement and somehow do it in humans safely.
-
I always find it weird when videogame do that, in writing even.
“the monster is at my door, i don’t think i can get through this. Ohh shit the door is broken! The monster is charging at me! I love you, my dear wife, goodb”
Dude could’ve find a way out but instead he start to scribble down his thought in his journal.
In fairness, it has happened several times IRL when scientists realized they’re about to die. I think we know cyanide tastes almond-y because someone wrote it down after a lab accident. I forget her name, but there was a woman who got a lethal dose of a very dangerous form of mercury (due to a ripped glove), and she documented her symptoms for the several days with her husband by her side
Early chemistry used to involve looking, smelling, touching, and tasting new chemicals… Back when science was more of a solo hobby, they’d document everything as they went. I’m sure instant death was pretty rare, but I’m sure there’s at least a few records where it goes “I will now taste the substance. It tastes faintly of lemons and soap. I am struck with dizziness after a few moments. My vision has become blurry, I fear I have made a terrible mistake. Martha, if these are my last thoughts, know they were of you”
I buy that this is a thing a true scientist would do (assuming they thought their only hope was to hide and hope for rescue)… It’s just way overused and often not thought out well
Aren’t they usually transcriptions? I don’t remember any games off the top of my head where some scientist is actually typing their last thoughts out…
I hear footsteps… oh no it‘s at the door. My constant audio recordings probably caught it‘s attention at last. Anyway, here‘s wonderw-
Musk can’t even make a proper ev why would anyone want a product of his in their brain.
When the patient dies Musk’s team will write a report saying it was the patient’s fault.
They were thinking wrong.
Has anyone a TL;DR why they could do that? Last time I heard anything about Neuralink they were mass killing animals with botched implants.
Do we have any concrete evidence that he’s even telling the truth? Something other than a tweet on a platform he owns? He seems to lie often.
Smells a lot like “Funding secured” or any of the other insane promises he’s made.
There’s the hyper loop, the cyber truck missing deadlines and quality concerns and range lies, all of the Tesla delays, etc
That said they did FDA approval for human trials last May https://www.reuters.com/science/elon-musks-neuralink-gets-us-fda-approval-human-clinical-study-brain-implants-2023-05-25/
Don’t forget that time when he held up a piece of glass, pointed to a house behind him with a glass roof, showed a presentation of power output metrics and dualrability tests, and said they made solar roofs and just needed to figure out how to manufacture at scale
They had not, in fact, made a working prototype - they were still trying to figure it out. He stood up there with a piece of pretty glass (that was not in fact any type of solar panel) and entirely fabricated test results, and he lied over and over.
He must’ve gotten some artist’s design model, produced several roofs worth, and made all of it up.
FDA had denied, company presumably made some sort of changes that were not publicized (or paid off the right people), FDA approved.
If you’ve ever dealt with getting a medical device approved by the FDA, you’d know they don’t fuck around. They’re so hardcore it’s scary.
They were approved last year in May by the FDA for human trials
Enough animals died. Now humans have their turn
Fucking finally.
Imagine voluntarily granting an advertising company direct access to your brain.
I can imagine for people who are disabled this is super exciting stuff.
I work with a lot of disabled people and while obviously my sample size isn’t large enough to write a paper, the ones capable of understanding consent all think this is a terrible, terrible idea.
Linux neuralink edition gon be funnnnn
Oh shit, those logs were always like that too! Short and revealing, I always wondered who would write like that. Well here we are.
A lot of these types read sci-fi dystopia books and think, “yeah that would be really cool actually.”
“I’ve created the Torment Nexus, from the sci-fi classic ‘Don’t Create the Torment Nexus’”
Does anyone remember the OCZ NIA (“Neural Impulse Actuator”)?
It was a gaming input device, a simple headband that measured brain activity externally. For beginners, if you thought really hard of “pitch black” or “bright white,” it could measure that and you had your first two thought-controlled buttons. Advanced users could train themselves all the way to several buttons and analog inputs, i.e. control joystick input through their mind.
(just Google/DDG “OCZ NIA” to watch some old review and test videos)
just Google/DDG
We really need a generic verb for “searching the Internet” that’s not a search engine brand-name.
“search”?
How about “search”? Google was originally Google Search.
Maybe, though it could also sound too unspecific, like searching for some physical object.
“To look up” is in use more or less in that sense, actually.
“Surf the information super highway”
satanic and should be illegal
