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.
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.
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.
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.
Not totally surprising, I feel bad for the person who was in a desperate enough situation to become a con man narcissist’s guinea pig.
It looks like we’re learning the lesson we already learned back when Bill Gates tried to mess around with the education system and faceplanted; just because billionaires made a bunch of money selling a fancy toaster they invented or whatever, doesn’t make them experts on anything else.
I’d sooner put a bullet in my head than something Elon Musk had a hand in.
The Gates Foundation has been working in education for over two decades, and still is
And has produced mostly expensive failures which they simply abandoned.
This is because Bill Gates is just a guy who helped cobble together a computer in his garage with his dad’s money, he doesn’t know jack about education and has repeatedly ignored the advice of experts because it wasn’t what he wanted to try.
We place too much virtue on wealth in this country, just because someone has accumulated a lot of wealth doesn’t mean they should be allowed to tinker with our society and try out ideas they had in a dream or w/e.
Instead they should just pay their taxes.
who helped cobble together a computer in his garage with his dad’s money
And the sold it with his mom’s connections.
To be fair, that article’s only about one of their education initiatives, and they’ve had many
They mention two, but it’s enough to make the point. There’s no justification for Gates to be at the helm, if he wants to help he can donate money to the groups and institutions that actually know what they’re doing or, as I said, just pay his taxes.
There’s no reason for him to be meddling, his ignorance is actually making the money less effective.
Well, I’ve got good news, you can do both at the same time with the patented cyber-bullet! When it implants, it implants 100 percent of the time.
I’m excited to get more cyborg parts especially after laser ablating my eyeballs
The older I get, the more becoming a robot tiger seems like as good a retirement plan as I’m gonna get.
No use of your body is a pretty desperate situation. Before the procedure he had to yell for his parents that he wanted to use the computer, they’d come sit him upright and put a joystick in his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. And he was often very uncomfortable in that position, so he couldn’t do it long. Now, he can use the computer fully laying down, without anyone’s help. The next logical step would be to have some robotic helper arms.
Anyway he can’t shoot himself. He can’t hold a gun or anything else. There’s little reason for this to be about Musk at all other than money. This is the culmination of decades of research from many medical professionals. It’s about a lot more than one person.
It’s 100% about Musk, yes, given his pursuit of tech even if it comes at a human cost. It’s a pattern of his specific companies.
What this situation demonstrates is that Musk is pushing the tech ahead before it’s ready and that the person recieving the implant is simply lucky that that negligence and haste hasn’t left them with brain damage or worse.
No one is saying medical devices shouldn’t be developed to help people, I’m saying Musks tech-cult attitude of “move fast and break stuff” should not apply when human lives and well being are involved.
Nobody is making you get a brain chip. Noland did the research, talked about it with his family, and wanted to proceed in spite of the fully disclosed risks. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right - if you want to do something or have something done to your body it’s not the governments place to stop you. Safeguards are necessary, and they do exist. You don’t need laws to make sure everybody has the same risk tolerance as you. I can’t fully imagine what it would be like to have no use of my body and no hope of recovery. But I wouldn’t want people like you or me who aren’t in my shoes deciding what I can and can’t do. Honestly if he wanted to have a lethal injection, I believe he should be allowed to make that decision, but he can’t. I’m happy he was able to make some kind of decision, and regain some autonomy, if only temporarily, and not just be a vegetable head in a bed for the rest of his life.
Again, the person’s desperation is a key here, this technology is targeted at people who are potentially willing to try anything even if it comes with risk.
That isn’t the same sort of consent I have as someone who isn’t paralyzed and just think it’d be cool to control my garage door with my brain or something. I’m not under the same pressure.
If I mix a bunch of laundry chemicals and bill it as a miracle cure for cancer, and then target vulnerable people willing to try anything because they are stage 4, that doesn’t excuse me of my reckless disregard for safety or to use those people as experiments.
Musk’s company wants to get this tech into human beings as quickly as possible even if it’s underdeveloped and potentially unsafe because Musk’s priority is not really about helping people.
Are you suggesting that the FDA gave Neuralink special treatment in the approval process? Or are you suggesting that the government should specifically shut down anything Musk tries to do, like SpaceX?
That or Musk’s org lied, misrepresented their progress or found loop holes in the regulation process, yes.
It’s pretty obvious from its immediate failure that it was not ready.
My concern is not the extinction of the human race, cringe sociopath.
deleted by creator
He just lost his free will, nothing to important.
“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….”
From what I seen, I think I can win a fight against the guy by tipping him over.
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.
That is still a pretty serious issue. It’s not something you should downplay
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.
We jam stuff into our body for all sorts of medical things.
Some require rejection meds for life. Others don’t.
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.
Sounds like the brain scanner has dead pixels.
Reaaaaaaaaaally??? Never saw this coming /s
You truly are a genius to realize that developing new technologies often encounter problems and it doesn’t always go smoothly.
oh huh
just had a moment where I realized that this is a real prelude to SOMA and maybe .hack//SIGN
- although we’re currently seeing the pros and cons for proprietary hardware+software
ooh this is a real bizarre feeling I’m currently having
The .hack// timeline had net Epos rivaling the likes of the Odyssey and Beowulf.
…Is that the problem? We need more epic poetry to guide neural interface and AI development?
Just let the AI create its own poetry about that. Ain’t they selling us the idea that it can do anything an humans are useless and deprecated now?
Hey what can I say we were overdue
It’ll be over soon, just wait
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.
Didn’t it die and they had to pull it out of RFK’s skull?
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.
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
Was he throttled due to not upgrading to the latest model?
“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”
