[HN Gopher] Monkey MindPong
___________________________________________________________________
Monkey MindPong
Author : ag8
Score : 634 points
Date : 2021-04-08 23:55 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neuralink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neuralink.com)
| sdwr wrote:
| This is honest-to-god magic. Some cyberpunk, neuromancer,
| hardcore reality-bending shit. The brain is the final frontier,
| if technology gets a foothold in there things are going to get
| WILD.
|
| Also, as this stuff gets further along, there's going to be large
| incentives for unethical testing. Rockets can be tested with
| unmanned flights, but you can't really dry run brain implants.
| anonytrary wrote:
| This isn't even the start of it. Everything in this video could
| be done with a non-invasive EEG, and has been possible for
| decades. This is a teaser video. The real magic of Neuralink
| has not been witnessed yet.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Well, that's what animals are for honestly. They didn't
| volunteer but we've deemed it "humane" nonetheless for our own
| moral comfort.
| cloudking wrote:
| Are you thinking bootleg neuralinks from the local ripper doc?
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Here is the ultimate question....
|
| What smoothing algorithms did they use to guess the 'certainty'
| of the 'intended' movement in a Y-Plane game vs. the X,Y grid
| they learned from?
|
| Having researched in this space, you don't get better results
| from 'training' on a X,Y space and reducing that training to a
| Y-grid predictor.
|
| There is a ton of smoothing going on in the video... or the metal
| conductor plays a huge role in the electrical signals they get
| from the implanted electrodes. I once blew up a demo because of
| something like this metal stick as a constant I didn't think to
| consider.
| anonytrary wrote:
| > or the metal conductor plays a huge role in the electrical
| signals they get from the implanted electrodes
|
| I highly doubt that, you must be talking about non-invasive
| electrodes such as EEG. When the electrodes are _inside_ the
| brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected
| from outside EM activity since they 're in an effective Faraday
| cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity.
| yurielt wrote:
| >When the electrodes are inside the brain and thus in the
| cranium, they are effectively protected from outside EM
| activity since they're in an effective Faraday cage, so your
| signal has much higher fidelity.
|
| Pretty much this on a different and somehow related note I
| would still try to check if the algorithm does not just trick
| us into thinking that it is doing what the monkey wants it
| would be nice if they post some more in depth material of how
| the code or whatever they use looks at the end just to be
| sure we are not in front of a half machine clever hans
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans)
|
| TO clarify: we dont have the ability to know if the monkey
| made an error he wont say hey I didnt want to get that one
| right or win that pong movement, have your milkshake back
| please. And we kind of need to know that in fact when doing
| mathematical modeling and AI having a way to quantify that is
| a requirement and one of the first things they teach you
| about.
| anonytrary wrote:
| True, the post-processing algorithm could just be doing a
| randomish walk towards the answer, but I highly doubt that
| is what's happening. 2D cursor movement is well understood
| to be within the realm of possibility for EEG, so I imagine
| it is actually much easier with an in-vivo device. From
| what I understand, this is entirely supervised learning.
| The monkey is "telling" the device what neural pattern
| corresponds to moving the cursor. If I had to guess, then
| this chip is planted extremely close to the hippocampus,
| which is known to have cells that encode spatial
| information. The algorithm is probably doing a basic
| supervised learning on the cells that fire for a particular
| location of the cursor.
|
| I'm just guessing on this, but the "training" session
| probably involved having the monkey stare at the screen for
| a while, while the cursor moved, which allowed the device
| to capture a spatial heatmap of which cells fired at which
| locations. There's probably some online optimization
| happening as the monkey then continues the "training"
| process by completing the task. Overall, this task is
| completely doable with the current technology, so I would
| not assume any foul play here. If the monkey was writing
| Shakespeare, I would definitely doubt it.
| natosaichek wrote:
| the chip is implanted in the motor cortex, I believe, so
| the training consisted of rewarding the monkey for moving
| the cursor to a target.
|
| After the monkey has played the game a bunch, you can
| correlate the neuron firings generating motor signals to
| the arm with the motion of the cursor on the screen.
| Later, the monkey's arm need not actually move the
| joystick.
|
| The hippocampus is pretty deep in the brain, and the
| Neuralink surgery can't go deeper than a centimeter or
| two.
| pharke wrote:
| How would it know which direction to move in if the
| position of the goal was not part of the input to whatever
| control algorithm they're using? The part of the code that
| detects the overlap of the cursor and the goal should be
| completely separate from the part that is translating the
| implant inputs into x,y movement so I don't see how it
| could be driven by anything other than input from the
| monkey.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > I highly doubt that, you must be talking about non-invasive
| electrodes such as EEG. When the electrodes are inside the
| brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected
| from outside EM activity since they're in an effective
| Faraday cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity.
|
| Yeah, I am speaking through non-invasive experience, however,
| unless your grounding is LIGO level sensitive, sticking a 3
| ft metal pole into your mouth takes some significant
| processing to get a good ground, especially if it comes into
| contact with the earth and then you change your connectivity
| with opening and closing your mouth.
|
| Again, low probability, but that just looks like it's asking
| for problems.
| rkachowski wrote:
| The skull works as a Faraday cage in such situations?
| anonytrary wrote:
| Nowhere near a perfect conductor. It, and the muscles
| around it, create noise and weaken the internal signal
| measured externally, acting as an effective cage. Measuring
| the signal from outside the skull is a bad idea. From
| inside (e.g. hippocampus), the electrodes are so much
| closer to the neurons, that the majority of the measured
| signal is not due to cranial noise.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| So we directly connect to the blood and tissue CPU and enable
| things not possible before like bringing mind control to
| paraplegics and avenues for brain ransomware. Imagine the future.
| sub7 wrote:
| This is cool but I played a much more complex game with a mind
| reading headset at Gates (Stanford) in 2007
| 0xy wrote:
| I can't wait to see this technology be immediately used for
| nefarious purposes by dictatorships and power drunk governments.
|
| No need to waterboard prisoners for information anymore when you
| can just suck data from their brains.
|
| In most judicial systems, you cannot be compelled to testify
| against yourself. With this technology, I really worry that that
| right will slip away.
|
| This feels like the precipice before dystopian hell, to me.
| stefanmichael wrote:
| This will change the world completely. I didn't anticipate seeing
| anything like this in my lifetime
| echelon wrote:
| Our brain interface tech is so primitive, but it holds incredible
| promise if we're able to solve it.
|
| Imagine being able to virtualize consciousness, back up memories,
| live forever...
|
| The problem is how invasive it is, and how little reward there is
| initially. We have to solve the chicken and egg problem, but
| unfortunately cracking open the skull and sticking electrodes
| into the brain is not something one typically wants to do if
| they're conscious about their health.
|
| I hope we can gain traction with medical applications and then
| begin to make steady advances. It'd be neat to have fully
| virtual, synthetic senses before we die.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Digitizing consciousness is a much harder problem, because we
| don't really understand how much of the brain works, the areas
| involved with conscious thought in particular, and the exact
| learning mechanisms the brain employs. The way we do deep
| learning these days is a very rough approximation of how the
| brain might work, and backpropagation is not really
| biologically plausible. So IMO, digitized consciousness is
| probably two to three orders of magnitude harder than this demo
| we're seeing here. Could unfortunately be a century away or
| more.
|
| However, the medical applications should come much sooner. What
| they've shown is amazing. The monkey's control of the paddle
| seems to be precise and fast. If people who are paralyzed and
| wheelchair bound just had a way to operate the wheelchair, a
| robot arm, and communicate with the outside world reliably,
| that would already be amazing. If we could somehow reconnect
| their nerves or give them some kind of mechanized suit, it
| could be even better... And if Neuralink's tech works, that
| could be only 10-15 years away.
| jcims wrote:
| The thing i always think about with digital consciousness is
| that it would just be a clone that can't distinguish itself
| from the OG consciousness that's still resident in the brain.
|
| The way this idea came to me was in a weird day dream
| thinking about the first experiment to attempt it... Patient
| lying on the table all wired up, a Dr. Frankenstein moment of
| 'the upload' followed by a screen witnessing the boot of the
| relocated consciousness. The doctor interacts with the
| persona, asking what it's like and getting direct responses
| saying how amazing it is.
|
| Meanwhile, amidst the commotion and celebration, you see the
| 'donor' patient wake up in a reflection on the monitor and
| hear them faintly ask 'did it work?'
| ycosynot wrote:
| I would argue that there is one consciousness, which is split
| into differing perspectives. I call that the multi-
| perspective being. This solves the teleport paradox (if you
| clone someone then where is the consciousness). The
| consciousness is everywhere, but split into differing
| perspectives.
| turrini wrote:
| Solves paralysis, until it turns into a subscription service /s
| topkeks wrote:
| "Soon our monkey will be on twitch & discord haha"
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1380372826071330817
| jm4 wrote:
| That was difficult to watch. While the technology is impressive,
| it is sickening to watch. The part where they can pair the phone
| via bluetooth made me want to vomit. It is obviously unnatural,
| but I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about seeing
| that animal, oblivious to what's happening, and that implant with
| the ability to directly record thoughts and/or remote control.
| The whole thing doesn't sit well with me.
| numlock86 wrote:
| Yes, it's weird in its special way. Especially the part you
| mentioned in which they are pairing a phone. Rest assured, this
| is the most humane invasive lab work on an animal I have ever
| seen. If you want nightmares check out how they test cochlear
| implants for example ... No, really, don't do that.
|
| For me the strangest part of watching this is not the lab work
| or the animal, but the implications of this technology and
| where it might lead to in the future once applied to humans. I
| really like the idea and premise presented, but let's be
| honest: There are also way too many evil use cases ...
| mlindner wrote:
| I'm confused why you'd even feel that way? Neuralink goes into
| a LOT of effort for animals to feel good. Animal studies happen
| all the time for medical testing, and from what I hear
| Neuralink is much better than the average. As they said in the
| video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free
| will. They don't harm the animal if it refuses to participate.
|
| Are you familiar with the term "luddite"?
| neolog wrote:
| > As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity
| of it of it's own free will.
|
| Why don't they do it on humans then?
| natosaichek wrote:
| It's legally prohibited until a certain amount of animal
| testing has been performed. They're aiming to do the first
| human implants within a year.
| neolog wrote:
| > It's legally prohibited until a certain amount of
| animal testing has been performed.
|
| Link?
| natosaichek wrote:
| You have to conduct testing to show that the device is
| safe and effective before you can begin marketing it.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-approval-
| pma/p...
|
| If you've never gone through the process of bringing a
| medical device to market, well, I'm not sure there's an
| easy FAQ that will answer your scepticism. But the basic
| idea is that you have to do a bunch of testing in the
| lab, then probably a bunch in animals, then finally a
| bunch in human clinical trials, then you can actually
| market the device to the public.
|
| Neuralink is in the 'animal testing' phase, and it sounds
| like they're likely to start human testing soon.
|
| Note that once they've gotten a device approved for
| humans, that doesn't mean they will stop testing on
| animals. There will likely be improvements to the device,
| new protocols, etc. that will necessitate continued
| testing as new features are brought to market.
| OrbitRock wrote:
| 2030 is going to be a dystopia
| dang wrote:
| Please omit snark and name-calling from your comments to HN.
| Your comment would be fine without the swipe at the end.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| gopiandcode wrote:
| I initially thought GP was being overly hyperbolic, but after
| watching the video I can't say I fully disagree. It's not so
| much the animal studies aspect, but rather the fact that they
| used bluetooth via a mobile phone to connect to the monkey.
|
| That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most
| conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities
| such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's being
| used to interact with a _live_ monkey. This framing somewhat
| gives the impression that this living being has been reduced
| to the status of a replaceable commodity, a mere peripheral
| that one might connect to via bluetooth.
|
| I agree that given how much modern society relies on animal
| testing that it's not really a rational response - maybe this
| reaction could have been mitigated somewhat if they had
| connected to the monkey via a computer or more involved
| process rather than simply just the conventional bluetooth
| pairing flow on a phone.
| kbenson wrote:
| > That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is
| most conventionally used to interact with replaceable
| commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here
| it's being used to interact with a _live_ monkey.
|
| I understand that, but I think to some degree, you're
| letting somewhat unrelated things influence your opinion of
| this.
|
| You know what else it interacted with and controlled
| wirelessly? Pacemakers. Nobody thinks of those people are
| replaceable commodities.
|
| Also, what about those that don't live a life of luxury and
| have access to lots of commoditized devices that wirelessly
| pair through a cellphone? People in less affluent countries
| might be less jaded about controlling something wirelessly
| and still view that as an amazing new technology associated
| with things they can rarely afford.
|
| So, to what degree are those associations useful and
| accurate, and to what degree are they you bringing
| unrelated prior biases to bear?
| jm4 wrote:
| I think you articulated it well. It trivializes life.
| Countless animals die horrifically for science, but much of
| it is ultimately in the pursuit of valuing human life. This
| is something different. This animal has been reduced to a
| device accessory.
| jka wrote:
| After watching macro trends in U.S. politics and tech for
| a while, I've held (but not articulated much) a sense
| that power is shifting from federal government to private
| interests. Previously that would have meant corporate
| boards, but I think increasingly it's a small number of
| individuals (due to realpolitik).
|
| The good thing about messy, human models of transactions
| and interaction is that it can take a long time and many
| different voices can be heard, allowing disuptes to occur
| and be resolved.
|
| Many of these successful tech corporates work to
| eliminate the human discussion element, and replace it
| with digitized (and frequently proprietary, or at least
| gatekept) rules.
|
| I think I've dealt with a few difficult dominant
| personality types in the past, and it would not surprise
| me at all to see them consider humans-as-pets as a
| desirable future. Match that with digitized 'asset
| ownership' and other non-repudiable mechanisms and there
| could be a very dystopian and authoritarian future in the
| mind of some of these people.
|
| Now I'll make sure to sound like a complete nutter (as if
| I hadn't already) and mention that some of these
| individuals and companies are now so essential to the
| U.S., both domestically and internationally, that they
| are becoming untouchable.
|
| Meanwhile our own tech industry is busy debating and
| trying to determine what the future of libre software
| will look like. It's a pivotal moment and I'm optimistic
| we'll figure it out to everyone's benefit, but there is a
| lot at stake.
| [deleted]
| aeternum wrote:
| Bluetooth is just a short-range wireless technology. People
| use bluetooth to control their pacemakers, is there an
| issue with that too?
| manmal wrote:
| I'm working for a company which makes apps connecting to
| insulin pens and pumps via Bluetooth. Once you get into the
| mindset of connecting medical devices to your phone, this
| feeling of cheap commodity entirely disappears. Bluetooth
| and phones can be awesome tools, and if implemented with
| enough verification and validation, are sufficiently safe.
| impish19 wrote:
| For me, I find it unsettling because it's a reminder of how
| ultimately we're all just compositions of atoms with electric
| signals in our body. While I find this immensely exciting, it
| unnervingly reminds me of my mortality. It's akin to what I
| imagine Neo would've felt when he learnt about the Matrix.
| I'd like to think I'd have without a doubt taken the red pill
| too (like I want this kind of research to be more successful)
| but anything that makes the Matrix more real is unsettling.
| dayre wrote:
| Nothing says feel'n good and free will like banana smoothies
| and forced brain implants.
| [deleted]
| jm4 wrote:
| I'm not buying the idea that the animals somehow benefit from
| this. I'm not necessarily against animal testing either. But
| it's one thing to test on animals to develop lifesaving cures
| and another thing entirely sure to experiment with brain
| implants with the potential to take away a living creature's
| free will. Or the ability to intrude on thought. The whole
| thing is pretty gross.
|
| It's great that this tech could help paralyzed people and
| amputees, but is it worth the cost?
| syspec wrote:
| Absolutely worth it. It's not ideal, but how else could we
| advance such technology that could help the paralyzed?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| To the paralyzed and the amputees, absolutely. The faster
| the advancement happens, the sooner animals models can be
| deprecated. Nobody wants to use animal models, they are a
| necessary evil.
|
| Edit: This is a moot point if it turns out we can repair
| the damage from paralysis and amputation using
| bioengineering.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| This is how progress is made. Similarly, people in DaVinci's
| times were sickened by his autopsies but that doesn't mean
| there was something wrong about them.
| bufferout wrote:
| To counter with an extreme example: plenty of medical
| progress was made via Nazi and Japanese experiments on live
| subjects during the second world war. So no, categorically
| the ends does not always justify the means.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >plenty of medical progress was made via Nazi and Japanese
| experiments on live subjects during the second world war
|
| [citation needed]
| bufferout wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-
| up_of_Japanes...
|
| http://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/learn-from-nazi-medical-
| rese...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Plenty of unethical experiments. What was learnt? What
| progress was made?
| syspec wrote:
| The ends justify the means. You're benefiting from ages of
| actually cruel animal experiments, they got us to where we are
| today.
|
| Nobody loves them, but they're important in this case to help
| parralyzed humans maybe with ALS or some other disease
| communicate with loved ones
| bufferout wrote:
| The assumption being that human lives are far more valuable
| than non-human lives.
|
| Where it gets funky though is trying to quantify that to an
| extent: how many monkey disfigurements is worth fixing one
| human disfigurement? Ten? A thousand?
|
| How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans
| being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
| markdown wrote:
| > The assumption being that human lives are far more
| valuable than non-human lives
|
| Is it even controversial that yes, of course they are?
|
| I mean, Boeing and the FAA kept 737 MAX's in the air after
| brown people died in the first crash when we all know
| they'd have grounded them if it was a crash in Kansas. We
| value human lives differently let alone animals.
|
| > How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent
| humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
|
| None. But I'd blind as many as are needed to trial human
| eye transplants, for example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
| visarga wrote:
| > The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me
| want to vomit.
|
| I had the same reaction. I just recently had a lot of trouble
| pairing Airpods to Macbook (both no more than 2 years old). If
| Apple can't make it work between their own devices, it's
| doomed. A piece of shit technology, a black stain on the whole
| stack.
|
| The demo is impressive otherwise, and I don't think it's weird
| to control a device with your mind. Or, if weird, it's the
| interesting kind of weird.
|
| I'd like to see a multi-modal GPT successor that learns not
| just text, image and video but also neural brain signals. It's
| one modality we haven't touched on yet. Maybe it will be able
| to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of
| magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.
| garmaine wrote:
| Btw this appears to be a common failure mode for AirPods. You
| need new ones :(
|
| Yay for planned obsolescence.
| swordsmith wrote:
| > Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the
| brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a
| joystick.
|
| Check out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1
|
| And yes it is definitely orders of magnitude harder than
| controlling a joystick
| aparsons wrote:
| Imagine the wonders it would do for interrogation /s
| caffeine wrote:
| Maybe you're onto something. Assuming your intent is to
| obtain information from a captured enemy at all costs, an
| implant like this is probably far more humane than
| waterboarding or actual torture.
| sellyme wrote:
| Also, unlike torture, it would work.
| crystalmeph wrote:
| I assume your /s was meta-sarcastic.
|
| With a few decades (years?) of refinement, this
| technology absolutely has the potential to capture
| private thoughts.
|
| Sure, it may require an implant, but just like we all
| carry tracking beacons that have become indispensable to
| daily life today, in 20 years it may be "the done thing"
| to have an implant to control your home automation, etc.
| Or maybe the tech will improve to where it just needs a
| hat. And at that point, certain authorities will have no
| qualms about using it in interrogations, with or without
| "due process."
| ctoth wrote:
| Sounds like the point in history where we should be
| practicing doublethink explicitly. Is this the
| evolutionary niche psychopaths are meant to fill?
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Yeah, it's not that hard to imagine the next bit where there's
| a captive warehouse of monkeys solving CAPTCHAS for food or
| something. It's a depressing video to be sure.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Right now, this is being done with people from India, so ...
| I'm not sure if your dystopia vision is a step up or down on
| the civilisation ladder.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| By "captive", I meant they didn't choose to do so, and
| didn't get to go home after their shift, and weren't
| compensated outside of food.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Where is the Bluetooth pairing? I don't see it. I'm watching
| the video at the top of the page... is it one of the other
| videos?
| jm4 wrote:
| 24 seconds in
| challengly wrote:
| On the flip side, what if this comes to pass?
|
| _First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis
| to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using
| thumbs
|
| Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in
| brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus
| enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again_
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1380315654524301315
| [deleted]
| lookACamel wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine them implanting Neuralink-type devices
| in humans to make Minority Report a reality. And that's just
| read-mode. With write-mode, I bet they could easily figure out
| a way to make wrong thoughts physically impossible to think.
|
| It's only a matter of time before certain governments start
| alpha-testing this type of technology in places like Xinjiang
| or Myanmar.
| scohesc wrote:
| If they haven't been already for 10-15 years.
| benevol wrote:
| The question is:
|
| Who wouldn't want to ultimately be assimilated by the Borg?
| nmca wrote:
| I'd encourage anyone worried about the ethics of animal
| experiments in research like this to come up with
| prioritisation metrics over a number of animal welfare cause
| areas as an exercise. _Surely_ a small number of well-cared for
| animals in high-upside experiments are lower on the list than
| say, pigs for pork sausages, which have worse welfare, smaller
| upsides and are more cost efficient to campaign against.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| Bluetooth (BT) is simply a wireless standard for exchanging
| data between devices over short distances. It is very
| widespread, reliable enough and easy to develop and integrate.
| It's an understandable and common choice in the medical devices
| field.
|
| In a more developed, market society, you typically have several
| commoditized, replaceable products and most tend to leverage
| BT. The idea of replaceableness belongs to the product itself,
| but what we see in common for all of them is BT connectivity,
| so we tend to perceive BT as an identifier of replaceableness
| as well.
|
| Neuralink very casually and tongue-in-cheek BT "paired" to the
| monkey, reinforcing the idea of replaceability and
| commoditization of the monkey.
|
| Many people have empathy for animals and monkeys are seen as
| precursors to humans. It's very easy to see how treating a pre-
| human species like a replaceable product, leaves humans
| themselves creeped out and feeling like in the future they may
| also be treated like a replaceable product.
|
| Neuralink needs an ethicist in a high exec position or board
| and a better PR manager. They should have done some of these to
| reduce that perception mess: - allude to the use of BT in
| serious medical applications before "pairing" with the monkey -
| reduce or change the common BT terms like pairing - use a
| computer rather than a smartphone - don't mention BT, just say
| wirelessly connected - don't use a Bond-villain smooth British
| voice
|
| By talking about it as a PR problem, I don't mean to say that
| is the root cause, it is just what we can see at the surface.
|
| Do they really care about ethics? Is it execs, engineers, video
| directors, everyone, no one? Do they care, but are just bad at
| PR? Do they not care, and this video is a reflection of that?
| This is what matters, for all those people to genuinely care
| about ethics.
|
| Can they still genuinely care though, after becoming a
| corporation? Can bringing shareholder value align with ethics?
|
| One botched video is simply one data point in the public trying
| to understand Neuralink's genuine stance on ethics.
|
| Only people with close contact to Neuralink will really know.
| We are all hyper connected, but sadly, only superficially.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I think it's 2 things:
|
| 1) The deliberately soothing British voice does not come off as
| soothing. It comes off as insidious, and threatening. This is
| in part influenced by our own cultural context with media like
| Black Mirror, but the effect is there nonetheless.
|
| 2) The comparison points to "pair with your iPhone" feel WILDLY
| misaligned with the rest of the message. The premise of
| Neuralink is that this is a world-changing cutting edge
| technology for the good of humanity. Then all of a sudden you
| have a situation where a living sentient being is paired to an
| iPhone like some sort of bluetooth speaker. It reeks of
| confused ethics.
| povik wrote:
| > Then all of a sudden you have a situation where a living
| sentient being is paired to an iPhone like some sort of
| bluetooth speaker.
|
| I think you put your finger on why that part was unsettling.
| anddddd1 wrote:
| you either test on animals, or you test on humans. simple as
| that.
| anonytrary wrote:
| This is nothing compared to what we were doing in lab several
| years ago. Neuralink is the least invasive of the invasive ways
| to conduct this research. I had to put animals down, because
| they would be defunct after trying to remove those bulkier
| devices. Neuralink is relatively humane, speaking as someone
| who has seen this technology in its infancy.
| gibolt wrote:
| You're right. This monkey gets to earn banana smoothies all
| day. I'm sure it is quite happy.
|
| Much less happy are the animals we eat, those confined in
| zoos, and many of the pets people lock in tiny spaces.
| mvzvm wrote:
| Zoos are bastions of conservation. They are usually only
| filled by rescue animals, and their funds are often used in
| conservation and animal welfare programs.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| is that really always the case? do you have some data
| about it I can look into?
|
| I stopped going to zoos because I didn't want to
| contribute to keeping animals like that, but would like
| to read information to the contrary if that's the case.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| I think it depends on the individual zoo. It's up to them
| to take part in conservation programs or to stick to
| keeping animals exclusively for display.
|
| The one where I live has historically been a bunch of
| very desolate animal display cases, but they've committed
| to doing what amounts to a slow U-turn, and they have
| done quite well in that regard.
|
| The old enclosures were clearly built to keep animals in
| plain view at all times. They've remodelled a lot of them
| since, and they're completely rebuilding some. There are
| times where you don't see a single great ape during a
| whole visit, because their new habitats have some caves
| and comfy areas hidden from view, with the result that
| especially the gorillas now appear to have quite a bit of
| fun interacting with visitors at the four separate points
| in their enclosure where that is possible and definitely
| seem much more relaxed than the previous generations (as
| far as I can tell, I'm no gorilla myself).
|
| Certainly still worse than a life in their natural
| habitat, but they are part of a multinational
| conservation project and all their current gorillas were
| essentially sent to them via this project, with the end-
| goal of (as I understand it) having a viable captive
| gorilla population in zoos around the world so there is a
| "backup" in case the natural populations collapse. The
| living conditions they provide have earned praise from
| experts (for what that's worth, seeing they're not
| gorillas themselves, either).
|
| They still keep their lions in a tiny, cruel pen, but
| they're building a new one currently that is supposed to
| be state of the art. Most monkeys have gotten new
| accomodations last year I think and they're pretty
| involved in keeping Kunekune pigs from going almost
| extinct a second time and they're breeding Visayan Warty
| Pigs (which are absolutely amazing things, and critically
| endangered); I guess for a relatively provincial central
| European zoo with a limited budget, that's quite decent.
|
| They've also recently completed a pretty big section with
| heirloom breeds of common farm animals and they do a lot
| of education programs and events for schools, which I
| feel is something my generation missed out on big time,
| not necessarily from a zoo, but some kind of getting in
| contact with animals other than the occasional cat or dog
| might have been quite helpful. I feel there are some
| really weird misconceptions about animals that are pretty
| widespread among people my age.
|
| For what it's worth, I've been quite opposed to that zoo
| in the past, but their efforts over the last decade or so
| have been enough to convince me to pay for a year pass.
| Some zoos are much slower adopting this approach, I
| surely wouldn't be as supportive of one of those.
| haxiomic wrote:
| I imagine it depends on the zoo
|
| I've never been to zoos outside the UK, but here often
| the primary function is conservation - both of the
| animals, which are often rescues, and of wider wildlife
| which is funded by ticket sales
|
| For example, London Zoo is managed by the charity
| Zoological Society of London [0] and places like Monkey
| World are essentially rescue centres you can visit [1]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoological_Society_of
| _London
|
| [1] https://monkeyworld.org/
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > places like Monkey World are essentially rescue centres
| you can visit
|
| Can confirm this (disclaimer- I'm a supporter). Many of
| their animals are rescues, including more than 70
| Capuchins that had been lab animals in Chile and four
| groups of Chimpanzees, many of whom had been rescued from
| use in circuses or as tourist props - the latter often
| with teeth knocked out so that they couldn't bite the
| punters. There is currently a sadly growing collection of
| marmosets, most rescued from the UK pet trade after
| tipoffs from animal protection agencies. Many of the
| marmosets have diseases such as rickets resulting from
| their owners' lack of animal husbandry skills (e.g.
| thinking that all they need to eat is bananas). Most of
| these animals lack the survival skills or health to be
| released back into the wild. On a more positive note,
| Monkey World is also a hub for breeding critically
| endangered species, e.g. Woolly Monkeys and Orangutans.
|
| Sadly, if an animal is being cared for at Monkey World,
| it generally means that the specific individual has been
| abused in the past and / or the species faces functional
| extinction in the wild.
| ipnon wrote:
| Won't someone think of the monkeys!
| [deleted]
| the_dripper wrote:
| The monkey probably won't be sad. I think it is entertained
| all day by the researchers. Playing its games, and drinking
| its delicious banana smoothie. As you say; Ignorance is
| bliss.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > The monkey probably won't be sad. I think it is
| entertained all day by the researchers. Playing its
| games, and drinking its delicious banana smoothie.
|
| Rhesus Macaques [0] have a lifespan of thirty years.
| Thirty years. Thirty years in a massively controlled
| environment, often sedentary, with limited opportunities
| to socialise with peers, and the simple pleasures of
| mutual grooming, lying in the sun etc. Lab animals that
| are rehomed in rehab centres / zoos etc are often
| overweight, in poor health, and have a range of nervous
| tics and social inexperience. Many adapt to the non-lab
| environment, but they tend to have underlying health
| problems and issues with acceptance by the alpha
| individuals because they lack the years of experience
| required to understand and fit into the complex group
| etiquette.
|
| Animals may still be the best model for testing drugs /
| devices that will go into humans, but lets not understate
| the massive cost to the individual animals concerned.
|
| [Source: personal involvement with a primate rehab
| centre]
|
| [0] https://animalia.bio/rhesus-macaque
| natosaichek wrote:
| Neuralink monkeys are housed with at least one other
| monkey for grooming / social activities, and are in the
| same room with visibility to other monkeys. Are they as
| happy as zoo monkeys? Probably not. But they're probably
| much happier than most other research monkeys.
| anonytrary wrote:
| Perhaps it is blissfully ignorant of us to think of
| ourselves as free on this rock. Does the monkey have a
| better life now than before? I don't know. The monkey
| will not mate and likely does not have peers. I wouldn't
| be surprised if those things are required for happiness.
| Social and sexual needs are programmed in us.
|
| I think it's a pretty tough topic in ethics but when I
| was younger, I didn't think much about it because we were
| doing science. I remember seeing my first rat die. I
| didn't feel bad at the time because we did it "humanely"
| with gas (and it's normalized and I was only 20) and they
| just sort of drifted off and defecated. It's an
| interesting and perhaps sad use of a life.
| sidcool wrote:
| Kudos to Neuralink engineers and doctors. We are still far away
| from human trials but this looks nothing short of SciFi
| swordsmith wrote:
| Not far away: https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-03-31/braingate-
| wireless
| cwkoss wrote:
| What is the metal stick the monkey puts into its mouth?
| 55555 wrote:
| it's a straw thru which he is drinking a banana smoothie.
| xcodevn wrote:
| The most amazing thing in this video is _NOT_ how we can read
| signals from the monkey brain, but how a monkey brain can learn
| to generate signals to control the cursor. I think it is
| remarkable that a brain can learn to have such fine control of
| its neural activities.
| superdisk wrote:
| Absolutely horrifying. A digital interface to the human brain is
| the most dangerous thing to possibly exist. Thank god I was born
| early enough that I'll die before this technology becomes
| widespread. I hope.
| lifeformed wrote:
| Don't worry, after you die they will insert probes into your
| dead brain and resurrect your mind, and you can live in hell
| forever!
| ycosynot wrote:
| Or you can revive your whole family and friends, and enjoy
| heaven.. Is the glass half empty or half full?
| itoocode wrote:
| This innovation opens up new ways of UX and human machine
| interaction. Just curious about the long term effects of
| externally controlling neuron signals.
| mlindner wrote:
| Really amazing demo. The moment that they just unplug the
| controller is impressive.
| aryamaan wrote:
| How are the electrodes in the brain powered? Are they running out
| of a battery?
| natosaichek wrote:
| There is a small battery in the device, which is charged
| wirelessly through the skull. In the images here:
| https://neuralink.com/approach/ It's the part wrapped up in
| gold-colored tape.
| MoodyMoon wrote:
| I honestly think this is a pretty important part. Why isn't it
| talked about in the article? Can someone shine a light on this?
| daenz wrote:
| Anyone else feel a strange kinship with the monkey?
| bostonsre wrote:
| Absolutely. He is one of the first few through the breach for
| us with this tech.
| andbberger wrote:
| Neuroscientists have been doing BCI with monkeys for years.
| Take a look at the work coming out of Byron Yu's and Steve
| Chase's labs at CMU for starters
| bostonsre wrote:
| I guess I just meant for this specific nerolink tech. He is
| definitely joined by a massive group of our distant cousins
| that have been involuntarily drafted into service for us.
| It's brutal, but so is life I guess. Hopefully this
| particular one doesn't mind it too much.
| gdubs wrote:
| Tangent: Dating myself here, but this demo just triggered a
| childhood memory of the movie Project X (1987, starring Mathew
| Broderick).
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T0de66wOE4Y
| bufferout wrote:
| Human/animal ethics is a minefield of hypocrisy. Why are we
| mostly comfortable with performing these types of experiments on
| other lower-IQ species but would baulk at doing them on
| intellectually-handicapped children for instance?
|
| I believe our morality base for these types of decisions is
| mostly based on the religious traditions of humans somehow being
| 'special' in the scheme of things. Domestic pets also partially
| fall into this category.
| spurgu wrote:
| Out of all animal experiments _this_ is the one where you take
| a stance? Or are you tooting your moral superiority everywhere?
|
| Feel free to stop using everything stemming from animal
| experiments. They're more or less a necessity, at least until
| we can model the animal kingdom with AI. Maybe you should start
| trying to cope with the fact instead of fighting it.
| bufferout wrote:
| I simply observed the situation as it stands. It's curious
| that you feel affronted by this.
| purplecats wrote:
| I'm convinced that this type of technology + some advancements in
| kinetic technology will allow for artificial telekinesis in the
| future. I don't know if it will be in my lifetime, but I would
| love to control it.
|
| It could be billed based on the energy required to translate the
| objects.
| avs733 wrote:
| Well thank god it can be billed!
|
| More seriously, I actually yearn for the days of Star Trek and
| where we look at how innovations like this can make people's
| lives better first and then just stop there.
|
| I was really excited to see the first goal they mentioned:
|
| >Our first goal is to give people with paralysis their digital
| freedom back: to communicate more easily via text, to follow
| their curiosity on the web, to express their creativity through
| photography and art, and, yes, to play video games.
|
| Modes of interaction in society are so poorly designed for
| anyone whos sensory functions are different than the norm.
| Bridging directly from the brain to interactions that currently
| require voice (normed to English Speaking White Males) or touch
| or movement or vision is a game changer not just for those who
| are paralyzed but many different groups for whom technology is
| not designed and is instead adapted.
| imron wrote:
| > It could be billed based on the energy required to translate
| the objects.
|
| It could be, but it will be billed with ads inserted directly
| in to your brain that you can't skip or turn off - even with
| your eyes closed.
| bfung wrote:
| In Soviet Russia, it (neuralink) loves to control you!
|
| Oh wait...
| abledon wrote:
| When they 'decode' the info, are they using something akin to the
| Autoencoder tutorial found on the tensorflow site (ofc x1000 more
| complex)
| _Microft wrote:
| I cannot imagine any future in which this is not terribly abused
| or otherwise going wrong.
|
| People invading other people's minds, Borg-like clusters of minds
| outsmarting anyone who is not connected with others, forcing
| others to play along to stay competitive. Maybe entities that
| even never grew up as unaugmented, unconnected persons because
| they were already linked in young age - one mind with different
| bodies.
|
| It is absurd to try to protect humankind against a perceived
| existential threat by AGI by developing a technology that would
| also destroy humanity if it works as advertised. Add to all that
| the cases in which it doesn't work properly. Developing
| inflammation around the implants, transmitter breaking, batteries
| running out, losing wireless connection, ... if you think dead
| zones while hiking are infuriating then wait until your cognitive
| capabilities depend on a network connection.
|
| I am afraid that all the good that SpaceX or Tesla have achieved
| so far will be undone by the damage that NeuraLink's technology
| will do to humankind one day.
| vuciv1 wrote:
| Holy poop that was amazing
| elil17 wrote:
| 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.
| jdsalaro wrote:
| 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?
| overdrivetg wrote:
| 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-
| mai...
| elil17 wrote:
| 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
| ggambetta wrote:
| Would it be possible to control an _extra_ arm somehow? Or
| brain plasticity doesn 't go that far?
| riccardomc wrote:
| this is why we can't have nice things... :)
| childintime wrote:
| Many monkeys use their tail as an extra arm, so, should not
| be a problem.
| m463 wrote:
| I thought the ctrl-labs guys did that.
| _Microft wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elil17 wrote:
| Absolutely. The first test subjects of this technology were
| chimps who weren't paraplegic, just controlling extra arms.
| RobertoG wrote:
| 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.
| vsareto wrote:
| I don't think we necessarily have to sacrifice something.
| We learn new skills and knowledge all the time. Using the
| new limb could be a skill. Maybe it's not as dexterous as
| the motor cortex and real hands at first, but there might
| be some benefits over natural hands.
| RobertoG wrote:
| I think that you sacrifice something when you learn a new
| skill. The brain have a finite capacity and it just
| forget not used facts or skills, and the reason it's
| forgetting is because it's always learning.
|
| For instance, I'm learning German and I can feel how is
| messing with my English, specially with the spelling
| (English is not my first language).
| vsareto wrote:
| But if it has a finite capacity, when does it fill
| completely and with what? I guess it's entirely possible
| that only kids who are growing up can learn to use the
| extra limb and adults won't be able to.
| RobertoG wrote:
| I don't think it never fills completely, it just empties
| the older entries to make place for the new ones.
| codr7 wrote:
| Also part of why voice interfaces didn't take off for
| complex tasks, talking about performing the task interferes
| too much with the mental process.
| Zecc wrote:
| Now imagine if someone could control an implant installed on a
| Mars probe.
|
| Stupid speed of light, making it lag so much.
| graderjs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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
| antattack wrote:
| 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.
| elil17 wrote:
| It's not that it's nothing new - it's obviously not
| identical to previous BMIs. But the thing people are
| reacting too is mostly the MindPong part (genuinely
| basic) and not the 10x electrode part (novel). It's not
| like a paradigm shift, it's a practice run for them to
| see if they can replicate previous successes with some
| changes to the tech.
| graderjs wrote:
| 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?
| jonplackett wrote:
| I had no idea these things were possible. Are they currently
| insanely expensive / only experimental? How available are they?
| elil17 wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| Not trying to be funny here: lunch with those guys must've
| been absolutely fascinating. When I worked at Microsoft a
| couple of decades ago we all loved the job and we talked
| about work even on breaks. To see the staff of the place
| you're describing just hanging out must have been
| extraordinary.
| elil17 wrote:
| It was! The guy with the implant did his undergrad in
| nanotechnology and had pretty much became an expert in
| BMI stuff so they were a very cohesive team. They had a
| lot of funny stories too - like when they accidentally
| put the mind control monkeys in the cage with the cocaine
| addiction research monkeys and got to see how cocaine
| affected the brain interface (it didn't).
| PetitPrince wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| icoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elil17 wrote:
| 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-co...
| alcover wrote:
| _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..
| brians wrote:
| Heinlein's _Waldo_ might be a good thing to read, then. It's
| the origin of the word "Waldo" in English.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Thats a nice idea for a movie.
| m463 wrote:
| I think you want to read Gil "the arm" Hamilton stories by
| Larry Niven
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collec.
| ..
| swiley wrote:
| If they handle the software anything like they do for the tesla
| this will b a massive net negative.
| m463 wrote:
| I would agree, with the further caveat that musk is the guy who
| builds the machine that makes the machine.
| codeulike wrote:
| 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-...
|
| Previous discussion of surgical robot
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152
| elil17 wrote:
| 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!
| [deleted]
| rishabhd wrote:
| Its projects like these that makes me wonder that what the actual
| heck am I doing with my life.
| meddy wrote:
| Same feelings, I started to think about dropping current
| ordinary app dev job and humbly get back to science. In 20
| years world is going to be a completely different place.
| system2 wrote:
| Heh same, when I create a nice group policy I feel smart.
| Imagine hacking a monkey's brain.
| the_dripper wrote:
| I know I'm conforming to a stereotype by saying this, but I cant
| stop thinking about how this could be the premise of a Black
| Mirror Episode.
|
| I also think we should restrict such technology. Without
| restrictions we can play God, and I am in no way approving of
| doing anyhting similar to that.
|
| The part about pairing the monkeys NeuraLink Device "like you do
| with a speaker" made me laugh. Not becuase it's funny, but
| because it is so incredibly absurd. I dont know wether to feel
| good about how far technology has come, or to feel terrified
| about all the implications.
|
| (I can't help myself; Nietzsche once said (or wrote) "God is
| dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we
| comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was
| holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has
| bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?
| What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of
| atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the
| greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not
| become gods simply to appear worthy of it?")
| nexuist wrote:
| A lot of people are focusing on the Bluetooth aspect of this
| which seems to be the most inconsequential part of it. Of
| course you need to connect to the brain device remotely; what
| do you want, a USB port on top of your head? Or should we go
| back to PS/2 or parallel ports and everyone can hide a 2in
| thick wire in their ponytail?
|
| If we want the brain to be an input device then we must treat
| it like an input device. That means interfacing with it with
| the most modern/common standards we have, which, for better or
| worse (mostly worse), is currently Bluetooth.
|
| Do you also think it's weird that people can put on VR headsets
| to alter their sight, or put in AirPods to subvert their
| hearing? 'Cause it is, but I think we've all normalized it to
| the point that it feels like something we're allowed to do. I
| think the same will happen with Neuralink at quite a fast pace.
| the_dripper wrote:
| I wasn't saying that using Bluetooth is absurd. The Absurd
| part, in my opinion, is treating the brain as an "input
| device". Ones brain should not be tinkered with.
|
| You can not compare VR Headsets and airpods to a chip that
| is, literally, implanted IN your brain. - These devices
| generate Extrinsic Stimuli. The Neuralink however directly
| READS the Neuron Activity (as I understood it).
| ativzzz wrote:
| > Without restrictions we can play God
|
| We've been playing God for about as long as human civilization
| has existed. Agriculture is playing God - overwriting the
| byproducts of nature. Medicine is playing God - overwriting
| natural selection.
| bspammer wrote:
| I don't understand your core point: why is it inherently wrong
| to attempt to augment the brain? It seems like a purely
| instinctual response.
|
| Is it God's will for paralyzed people to remain unable to
| interact with the world, and live the rest of their lives in
| misery? If we have a way to do a lot of good for a lot of
| people, isn't it inherently immoral to _not_ develop the
| technology further?
| the_dripper wrote:
| youre right, but I fear a future where such techonolgy can be
| abused. I haven't carfully considered all the positives such
| technology will bring into our world. I was starteled by the
| potential of abuse and how far technology has come.
| mcosta wrote:
| Let's stop changing organs then
| tryonenow wrote:
| Imagine floating in an isolation tank and coding with your mind.
| It would be a euphoric state of meditative flow. Such a device
| can revolutionize productivity of cognitive work by removing the
| impedance mismatch between intent and code. Imagine if all people
| were natural power users. The future is blindingly bright.
| tryonenow wrote:
| This technology is simultaneously interesting for it's potential
| usefulness as a brain augmenting tool, and simultaneously
| terrifying because of the enormous potential for abuse. Still I'd
| probably work on it if I had a chance, though the choice of
| ultimately getting it would not be without consternation.
|
| Hard to argue with the potential for a cognition-extending co-
| processor. And given that both the neural nets they use and the
| brains own neurons are capable of learning and adapting to each
| other, there's probably a world of potential here. This could
| very well be the start of the next stage in human evolution,
| unlocked by recent machine learning advances in particular, who's
| critically to this technology cannot be understated. What remains
| to see is how it works in (human) practice.
| anonytrary wrote:
| This particular exercise could've been done with EEG. Where
| Neuralink excels is in having a much higher possible bitrate.
|
| Pong is the absolute POC. Neuralink will most likely be able to
| achieve higher differentiability and thus be able to complete
| tasks of higher complexity, so stay tuned for even more
| impressive tasks. EEG can't get past pong; it's limited by
| physics itself. The solution _is_ to put the electrodes in the
| brain, and there is likely no other solution.
|
| Looking forward to the future.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| But can it run Doom?
| bckr wrote:
| When you say "this particular exercise", are you referring to
| the "put the pointer in the box" exercise at the beginning? The
| Pong part toward the end was pretty cool. I wonder how complex
| of games the monkey can play :)
| anonytrary wrote:
| I believe pong has less entropy than the initial task of
| putting the cursor into the box. Pong is a 1D game with one
| degree of freedom, where you are effectively moving the
| cursor along the Y-axis. The previous task involved moving
| the cursor on the XY-plane, which involves two degrees of
| freedom.
|
| Therefore, pong is less impressive than the previous task.
| nexuist wrote:
| This is difficult to say because pong involves moving
| components while the box stays still. In order to play pong
| the monkey must first estimate where the ball will go and
| then give the command to move the cursor. This indicates
| that Neuralink may be able to handle complex multitasking,
| i.e. you may be able to walk or drive and the system will
| still be able to decode you correctly.
| kweks wrote:
| If you watch closely, you can see the monkey is still
| "playing" pong with his right hand/paw. (He's pushing and
| pulling on the 'smoothie straw' in sync with the brain
| signals / on screen actions)
| anonytrary wrote:
| That's a good point, it is nuanced for sure. My line of
| reasoning is that ultimately the monkey only has to
| control one dimension of movement of some object, so
| whatever complex reasoning is required to arrive at the
| decision to move up or down (one dimensional movement),
| it would still be easier for a supervised learning
| algorithm to learn spatial-encoding neurons over a single
| dimension.
|
| I think this gets deep into the difference between
| premeditation and action and what that means at a neural
| level. I would guess that Neuralink is not processing the
| "logical thinking" as much as it is on the neurons that
| dumbly encode an association with ping-pong racket
| location.
|
| As long as some set of neurons uniquely fire
| approximately when the pong moves along its degree of
| freedom, different electrodes will pick up different
| voltages, and that can be learned by an algorithm. So we
| don't need to know _how_ the monkey arrived at a
| decision, but rather just be able to index the possible
| outcomes of the decision. Which is why I thought that the
| entropy of the decision space mattered. It 's easier to
| learn a smaller space.
|
| I would tend to think this is a dumb pattern matching
| cluster (e.g. see visual encoding[0]) that's being picked
| up by Neuralink, and not the actual "logical decision
| making". Although, there may be more subtle neurons that
| fire in a sort of "premonition" which have learned the
| correlation of the racket position with the ball over
| time.
|
| I can link to more papers on that -- it's not just visual
| encoding, but rats can "plan" where they are going to go,
| a sort of premonition. Humans also do this. It's like an
| echo that happens before you yell. That's what the brain
| does when you plan to go to the grocery store.
|
| This is all really interesting stuff, but I'm not an
| expert!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw6nBWo21Zk
| [deleted]
| lwansbrough wrote:
| The next step for Neuralink is write mode. No, not writing
| memories, but reprogramming motor function. If you can capture
| the signals of limb movement synapses for say, a paraplegic, you
| can read those signals and convert them into write signals in
| another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor
| function. Over time, that neuron pathway gets reinforced and
| could potentially teach a person how to walk again.
|
| It's exciting stuff and I'm sure there are concerns to be
| addressed down the line wrt altering perception, but let's not
| put the cart before the horse. That would be like worrying about
| impending AI drones in the 70s.
| klintcho wrote:
| I was about to say that the Link (Neuralink) is already
| bidirectional, so they should already be able to spike each
| electron as well as read from it. But I had troubles finding
| any sources supporting this, so I'm not so sure anymore. I know
| that Elon talked about this in the early presentations though.
| natosaichek wrote:
| The implant definitely can write, but it's more power
| intensive than reading, and lower priority.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| I know there's a myriad of reasons why people lose the ability
| to walk, but are there any in which it's a matter of what
| sounds like memory degradation(i.e. you need to remind a
| particular set of neurons what they previously "knew")?
|
| Total non-expert here and legitimately curious.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Sometimes people with severe brain damage in the motor
| section can lose the ability to walk, yes, but that can also
| be solved with traditional physical therapy (brains are
| amazingly adaptive things, and can even repurpose other
| sections into motor function).
|
| Butlike I said, traditional PT is a much less invasive
| solution to that, so I have no idea what GP is talking about.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but after writing to neurons to re-learn
| walking, will that render that particular Neuralink chip
| unless? Since the neuron structures surrounding that chip will
| be constructed for walking, you won't want to further
| disrupt/write to them. Then you would need to move the chip for
| any further use?
|
| Edit: After reading another comment about the link being broken
| (hence the name Neuralink), this makes more sense now.
| Although, I still think that maybe you only get one usage out
| of one chip? I suppose the definition of "usage" is what is
| important. Presumably you won't need a chip per joint in a leg,
| and presumably one chip could control two legs? Or perhaps you
| get finer control with a chip per leg?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >you can read those signals and convert them into write signals
| in another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor
| function.
|
| The signals Neuralink is reading _are_ from the "part of the
| brain responsible for the actual motor function". I'm not sure
| what you're suggesting here.
|
| I think you may be confused on how the majority of paraplegic
| and NDG conditions work - it's not that the brain isn't
| producing the signals, it's that the signals aren't reaching
| the muscles they need to to create motor function - it's the
| _link_ that 's broken, for a variety of reasons.
|
| Of course, the obvious corollary here is reading the signals
| and using electrodes implanted in the muscles to directly
| stimulate a contraction
| sangnoir wrote:
| > The next step for Neuralink is write mode. No, not writing
| memories, but reprogramming motor function. If you can capture
| the signals of limb movement synapses for say, a paraplegic,
| you can read those signals and convert them into write signals
| in another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor
| function. Over time, that neuron pathway gets reinforced and
| could potentially teach a person how to walk again.
|
| Or - hear me out - for a small bonus, you could volunteer for a
| second shift in the Amazon warehouse _while you sleep._ An
| algorithm right bits to drive your body as you shuffle unevenly
| from station to station in the dark (no need for lights, the
| computer knows where things are). They can call it the
| Neuralink Autopilot.
|
| Edit: would it be possible to externally trigger firing of
| motor neurons in someone who is brain-dead? The future might be
| a little _Ancillary Justice-y_ , but with a strong "posthumous
| work contract" capitalist flavor to it.
| anonytrary wrote:
| MIT "wrote" memories (the solution to a maze) into mice/rats
| using photons[0].
|
| Neuralink in "write" mode could be engineered to do the same
| thing by introducing an EM current that changes over time. In
| the past, I've worked with "read-only", passive tetrodes, but
| the opposite is possible from a physics standpoint. Moving
| charges is just another way of saying "propagating photons". I
| think there's not only precedent, but there's proof that this
| can be done.
|
| The hard part is figuring out the biology (for a given memory,
| you still need to calculate the correct I(t) that actually
| implants it), which is a relatively unexplored domain.
| Neuralink is centuries away from using "write" mode to turn
| everyone into Neo, but much simpler use-cases can still make a
| huge impact within the next couple decades.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jul/25/false-
| memory...
| gitowiec wrote:
| Poor monkey. It should belong to the forest or other natural
| environment it was took from. I don't get it why there are still
| tests run on animals. The first what technology should bring is a
| replacement for every animal test subject.
| MperorM wrote:
| we torture and kill so many more animals to eat meat and dairy,
| than we do to conduct science.
|
| While I share your view, I think it's important to point out
| that this really isn't the best place to start if you want to
| reduce animal suffering.
| spurgu wrote:
| Precisely. This is on the contrary one of the least bad areas
| to conduct animal experiments. Humanity would be nowhere
| without all kinds of animal experiments and I challenge
| everyone who thinks it's cruel to think about how cruel it
| would be for humans to erase all the advances made thanks to
| them.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| I don't understand how you can gather such a targeted signal by
| sticking wires in just a few places.
|
| Like, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone and
| start getting text messages through it.
|
| But somehow you can put some wires just as few mm into the
| surface of a brain and extract fine motor signals??
| JanSolo wrote:
| My understanding is that neurons are like a higher-order
| connected mesh. A bit like many fully-connected layers in a
| Machine Learning model.
|
| You can't just read fine motor signals from any neuron, but
| given enough neurons, since they're deeply connected, you can
| infer a close approximation of the intended motor signals given
| a known output. That's why they need a lot of sampling wires in
| the brain; to makes sure they have enough data to make that
| inference. Luckily, machine-learning is very good at figuring
| out patterns in this sort of data.
|
| My guess is that they train an ML model using the inputs and
| outputs when the joystick is connected. Then they can use the
| trained model to just generate the output directly from the
| inputs when the joystick is disconnected.
|
| This will work fine for one particular monkeybrain/interface
| combo; however, you cannot use the same model on other monkeys.
| You have to train a new one each time.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Like, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone
| and start getting text messages through it.
|
| You could if we didn't encrypt connections.
|
| On that note, does anyone know how to upgrade libssl across
| my entire nervous system?
| croddin wrote:
| > On that note, does anyone know how to upgrade libssl
| across my entire nervous system?
|
| 'Inception' shows someone who tries to do something like
| that, but there seems to be a vulnerability.
| meowface wrote:
| Or have Bluetooth disabled by default for my brain.
|
| The game examples were super fascinating, but since I was
| already essentially familiar with the fundamental
| principles and technology, it didn't quite impact me as
| much as the researcher pairing his iPhone with a Bluetooth
| transceiver in the monkey's brain. That sent weird shivers
| down my spine.
| aparsons wrote:
| Funny you mention meshes. I've always thought that self-
| organizing maps are a good model for neurons, more so than
| deep neural networks.
| babesh wrote:
| This reminds me of dropout where the neural network won't be
| dependent on a specific connection. Instead, it will be
| statistical which will actually be a good fit for this
| approach.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_(neural_networks)
| NavinF wrote:
| >Like, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone and
| start getting text messages through it.
|
| You can get a 128 key out of most electronic devices in a
| reasonable amount of time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_attack#Known_a...
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| The most interesting thing here is not the mind reading, it is
| the miniaturization of computing and sparse data transfer.
| Neuralink off-loaded the computation to the sensor, sending
| back aggregate data snapshots. Usually you will need massive
| ASIC/FPGA computation banks with a lot of messy to handle the
| data transfer and readout but they took a shortcut bye sending
| only counts of spikes that exceeds a certain threshold.
|
| There is nothing stopping you from using a cloth hangar. You
| just need to make sure it is impedance matched and properly
| sanitized for subdermal use. The signal will be much worse as a
| cloth hangar had gauge/diameter that is several magnitudes
| bigger than that of a neuron. Nothing here is particularly
| "novel" that it cannot be trivially replicated if you have the
| budget of one of the FAANGs. If you have 100million in capital,
| you can easily find poor neuroscience and EE PhDs who will be
| willing to work for you for <80K a year just for the
| opportunity to build something like this. The reason it is
| difficult and out of reach for smaller companies is because
| small amplifiers and electronic packages that can be
| subdermally implanted requires significant manufacturing
| capital as they fall under semiconductors and biomedical
| devices. Once the industry settle on a design expect the price
| to drop dramatically as the core chips and parts become
| commoditized.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| *messy cables
|
| *a shortcut by
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Is there anyway to get this signal non invasively (magnetic
| field detection or photonically)? Or are implanted electrodes
| table stakes for a neural interface?
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Not really, that we know of. To appreciate the complexity
| you could read this post[0] from Wait But Why? Your brain
| has approximately 40,000 neurons in the space of a cubic
| millimeter. Each saying something completely different.
| It's incomprehensible noise unless you start dividing it up
| like Neuralink has. They get a few thousand probes in the
| size of a penny, which is a far greater level of resolution
| than you could probably ever expect from a wireless
| solution.
|
| [0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
| aparsons wrote:
| Do you think something like fMRI would have enough
| resolution? Can't pick up activity directly of course,
| but perhaps by picking up fluid flow differentials?
| PetitPrince wrote:
| As mentioned by a sibling comment, fMRI have a sufficient
| spatial resolution (i.e. you can watch the activity of a
| few number of neuron at a time instead of grouping them
| by batch of hhundreds of them), but the temporal
| resolution is low (order of magnitude is seconds; a
| single action potential is 5ms).
|
| Here's a graph that summarize the temporal/spatial
| tradeoff of the different BMI tech:
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-various-neural-
| recor...
| swordsmith wrote:
| Noninvasive signal modality directly from the cortex are
| certainly possible (e.g. Ultrasound, fNIR). But they lack
| the spatial and temporal resolution of implanted
| electrodes. Intracortical brain signals are the most well
| understood and mature in terms of instrumentation as well.
| So in the short term, implanted electrodes offer the
| highest capacity for a BCI.
| mhh__ wrote:
| MI5 were lifting crypto keys based on keypress acoustics in the
| 50s, I wouldn't be so certain. If you put the phone up an
| expensive enough tool you can at very least find side channels
| swordsmith wrote:
| The location of the electrodes aren't arbitrary. The region of
| implantation is likely the hand-motor cortex (which has
| thickness on the order of mm), the area associated with arm
| movements (check out somatotopy), so the signals acquired are
| actually targeted for the demo task. This relationship has been
| known in neuroscience for almost a century and has been
| validated in decades of brain-machine interface experiments.
|
| They are also recording from up to 1000 channels, which is
| probably overkill for mind pong, tbh. But you'll need that many
| implanted electrodes to study long term electrode
| biocompatibility.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I think the source of wonder here is that neural networks are
| very un-CPU like, in the level of correlation between the
| units. I'm not sure you could probe a CPU in a similar manner
| and be able to recover meaningful information. A binary
| 101X10 are entirely different numbers depending on what X is,
| for example, and you woulnd't necessarily expect X to
| correlate with the place values elsehwere (e.g. 1st and 5th
| bit). Similar arguments, apply, to probing different
| components, such as registers or instruction memory.
| swordsmith wrote:
| Funny you should compare understanding biological neural
| networks to a microprocessor. Check out this paper (https:/
| /journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...),
| which systematically addresses how applying traditional
| neuroscience methods to analyzing a microprocessor would
| get you.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I've read that paper years ago. I'm afraid I find it
| unimpressive. It is not so hard, really, to fail, when
| you fail to try. I have a computer science degree; I've
| built CPUs (from all the sequential and combinational
| circuits on up); I also work in neuroscience, and do some
| of the kinds of analysis this paper tries to criticize.
|
| For example, a very basic approach is design
| _experimental tasks_ that have contrasting conditions, or
| events to be predicted. They don 't do that. Even
| something as simple as pressing the controller left vs
| right vs not moving at all in donkeykong would have been
| more interesting.
|
| In any case, brains and traditional computer circuits
| work on different principles as I noted in my OP.
| Furthermore, there is quite a lot more redundancy in
| brains--and partial-redundancy is a bit of how it works;
| for example, if you have a population of neurons with
| different tuning curves, then the output in response to a
| stimulus can be integrated, and a likelihood distribution
| obtained for the actual value of a stimulus; that's just
| fundamentally different than how, say, a 5-stage
| pipelined RISC cpu works.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Even outside of primary motor/somatosensory areas, 2D cursor
| control is a pretty standard BMI paradigm.
|
| Not exactly "Hello, World" but maybe "ToDo List App".
| caddemon wrote:
| Yeah their implant hardware is really impressive but "mind
| pong" is a pretty common starter project for at home EEG
| hacking, let alone legit BCI research. The internet is
| littered with examples of mind pong for the Muse like this
| one: https://medium.com/@nayvelt.lina/playing-ping-pong-
| with-my-b...
|
| Granted it moves slower than actual Atari Pong, and takes a
| few minutes to get the hang of controlling the paddle. But
| IME it isn't much harder to control the up/down of the
| paddle with the EEG than it is to play a game like flappy
| bird, and that's using a couple random scalp electrodes
| from a consumer device.
|
| So yeah thanks for bringing this up, because I feel some of
| the comments here are acting like this is much closer to
| "mind reading" than it actually is. Not that it isn't cool,
| but the overhyping kinda kills it for me lol. Is this how
| robotics people feel when Boston Dynamics releases a new
| video?
| swordsmith wrote:
| I'd argue it is the "Hello, World" in any BMI lab. Assuming
| existing implants and electronics, and non-naive monkey,
| advanced undergrads should get it in a semester.
| mattkrause wrote:
| That's why I went with To Do list :-)
|
| It's not totally trivial, but a reasonably skilled person
| should be able to get a not-too-janky version working
| with a bit of effort. (Also, where are you that
| undergrads get to interact with monkeys?!)
| dlg wrote:
| This seems to be very similar to the early 2000s demos at Brown
| University/Cyberkinetics[1]. In 2008 they demonstrated it in
| humans[2] after lots of work getting FDA approval. The core
| difference here (from my non-expert reading) seem to be
| electrodes are along a thread rather than on a chip.
|
| See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPbpHoPWo for a video of
| the pong demo in humans.
|
| The motor cortex seems to have a clear, learnable signal though
| it is rather noisy sampling <1000 locations.
|
| Mary Lou Jepsen at Open Water has ideas about how to do this non-
| invasively [3].
|
| [1] https://www.braingate.org/publications/
|
| [2]
| https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2006-07/06-...
|
| [3]
| https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig...
| jonplackett wrote:
| I'm curious - does taking a signal straight from the brain
| reduce reaction times?
|
| Is there a big loss of time sending the signal down to the arm,
| or is the reaction time mostly cognitive anyway?
| mryall wrote:
| Yes. Nerve signals travel at about 50-60 m/s through the
| limbs, so it takes about 20-30ms for a signal to travel from
| brain to the hand muscles.
|
| Source:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
| jonplackett wrote:
| So Neuralink have a large secondary market of FPS players!
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And about to be incarcerated cyberpunk guys.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Primary being the army who wants soldiers to quick-fire
| real guns
| neuronic wrote:
| Still better than Sonos Multiroom Speaker sync (70-75ms).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| IIRC the major challenges was brain plasticity itself. Brain
| signals changed over time and the device needed new
| calibration.
| cyrux004 wrote:
| Can somebody who is knowledgeable in this field of work explain
| how/if neuralink is better to the previous approaches and if
| its easier to "scale" this tech compared to previous works ?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The article describes how it has advanced: it's wireless and
| reads relatively more electrodes. Producing the device is
| something that can probably scale up easilt . 1024 electrodes
| is still nowhere near enough to decode precise movements
| imho. These pong experiments have been done in humans since
| 20 years ago, but real fluidity seems very difficult to
| achieve , because signals are noisy, the brain adapts,
| distractors are always present etc. The article doesnt
| mention how long it takes until the device needs
| recalibration. OTOH brain surgery is not something easy to
| scale and i doubt people will accept surgery for implanting 2
| devices just to play pong. Such a device should be precise
| enough to allow using a robotic arm effectively.
|
| I think the applications of this are going to be in research
| for years, not as implants that paralyzed people can readily
| use.
| etrautmann wrote:
| This is primarily an advance in the systems integration
| required to make such a sensor fully implantable abs capable
| of wireless transmission. It also ~10x's the number of
| channels of the Utah array, which is the primary point of
| comparison as a product that can currently be used in human
| patients (in an investigational context as part of clinical
| trials). The Utah arrays do not have any active electronics
| however, and pass a bundle of wires through the skin, which
| has obvious disadvantages and scaling limitations.
|
| NL's approach is scalable due to their robotic insertion
| system which can implant a (multi-channel) thread every few
| seconds. It should be possible to hit a few thousand channels
| within the window of a few hour surgery. They do face the
| same challenges with size, weight, and power that everyone
| else does, which forces trade offs on the bandwidth, ability
| to isolate spikes from individual neurons, and number of
| active channels.
|
| The primary limitation of this approach is that the needles
| cannot easily insert deeper than the outer layer of cortex
| (to my knowledge). This limits the application space to
| anything with recording or stimulation targets on the
| surface. Motor prostheses and gaming are perfect for this due
| to the anatomy, but many other medical applications require
| deeper targets, which their sensor cannot readily hit at the
| moment.
| natosaichek wrote:
| This is a great summary. I will just add that my
| understanding is that Neuralink is heavily focused on
| surgical speed, and a few seconds per thread is the slowest
| it will ever be. It will likely be much faster than that.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In this video, it looks like they are probably only sampling
| ~200 locations (assuming that's a 1080p screen and they have
| gone for one pixel per signal)
| switchstance wrote:
| Has anyone mentioned this footage being shot over green screen
| and a jungle composited in the background?
|
| Gotta love this addition to make it seem like this monkey is
| living the life.
|
| "Bananas and video games in its natural habitat! This monkey is
| living the dream."
| zerobits wrote:
| I don't think it's a green screen, it appears to be a painted
| wall -- you can see the seams and perspective to it.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| Super cringy banana quip.
|
| Also, as this comment suggests, it seems to be more of an advance
| in wireless data transfer than neuroscience:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746553.
|
| I hope I'm wrong, but Muskuito's misleading marketing is never
| far on the horizon.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| >>> Our first goal is to give people with paralysis their digital
| freedom back
|
| PKD's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" notwithstanding,
| "Consumer Neurotech" feels like one of those categories that even
| the most visionary of sci-fi writers failed to build into all
| aspects of human existence in the future ;)
| moh_maya wrote:
| Ian Banks / Culture Series and the neural lace.. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/1843/2017/03/31/the-novelist-
| who-i...
| jeff_vader wrote:
| I thought one of the biggest problems with brain-computer
| interfaces is our bodies creating scarring tissue around
| electrodes[1]. Have they solved that?
|
| [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/huge-problem-with-brain-
| impl...
| throwaway743 wrote:
| As this evolves and inevitably becomes an internet connected
| communication device, how will it impact the labor market?
| nexuist wrote:
| Data entry will probably be obliterated as you will just be
| able to insert rows into databases or spreadsheets in a few
| milliseconds rather than needing to type out entries from
| papers or receipts. There are already ML solutions to this but
| none are as perfect as a human brain that can correctly decode
| arbitrary formatting.
|
| Keyboards and mice will be phased out very quickly since you
| can just thought type, so the computer accessories industry
| will dry up as well.
|
| If the device allows you to write to limbs, you will probably
| also be able to write to motors. Expect a lot of specialized
| vehicle related jobs (excavators, forklifts, cranes) to become
| remote-first with skilled operators working inside call centers
| or at home. This is already happening but the presence of
| Neuralink means contracting companies don't have to pay for
| expensive joysticks, knobs, switchboards, etc.
|
| Of course this doesn't consider the impact on the entire world
| changing overnight, which will probably upend modern capitalism
| for the first time in a century.
| natosaichek wrote:
| I think you're overestimating the speed at which these
| changes will happen. It will likely be ~a decade before the
| first non-paralyzed person uses this device. It'll take many
| more decades before they're widely available, much less
| widely installed.
| alexslobodnik wrote:
| It looked like the dexterity of the mind was quicker than the
| dexterity of the hand.
| cloudking wrote:
| No brain signal to hand latency
| subw00f wrote:
| That's just replaced with brain signal to chip then "decoder"
| then game software, which I would think is greater than nerve
| conduction velocity[1]. But then again, there's no "latency"
| of hand movement + joystick signal -> game software, so maybe
| it evens out?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Mind cursors seems amazing but I believe it must be very
| quickly exhausting hence preventing useful adoption for the
| mainstream.
| drusepth wrote:
| To be fair, the same was said about touchscreens and VR.
| nemo1618 wrote:
| Isn't the idea that currently we already do the "mind cursor"
| _plus_ the actual muscle movements?
| quilombodigital wrote:
| "What better reward for a monkey, than a banana"? what about
| FREEDOM?
|
| I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should
| allow terminally-ill or death-row volunteers for this kind of
| experiment... With good money for the family, and I think some
| people would like to help mankind in the end. It is better than
| dying without accomplishing anything in life.
|
| So, you have at most one year with an inoperable tumor, and you
| will not travel because you want to be close to your family.
| Would you be a volunteer for this research, for 500 thousand
| dollars? (monkeys are cheaper, but you are the real deal)
| NavinF wrote:
| Yeah I'd volunteer for implant testing if I had a 6 month life
| expectancy due to a terminal illness.
|
| I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do
| this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as
| the only way to delay the execution.
| quilombodigital wrote:
| I did not thought about this, but at the same time,
| "punishment" cannot coexist with "reparation"? Money would go
| to victims.
| logicchains wrote:
| This sounds like the plot of a movie: death-row inmate forced
| to volunteer for implant testing, but he manages to connect
| to some kind of military robot and fights for his freedom.
| castratikron wrote:
| Death Rowbot (2022)
| seesawtron wrote:
| Patients undergoing brain surgeries are routinely asked to
| volunteer for neuroscientific studies and they often do so.
| Terminally ill patients also donate their brain tissue for tons
| of studies more often than you would think. But the scope of
| experiments that one can do with them and the available
| multimodal data available from parallel studies in human cortex
| is extremely limited.
|
| On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in
| a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts
| of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that
| you just can not do on the human patients.
|
| The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to
| decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of
| experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred
| different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to
| first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then
| (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific
| applications in medicine and so on.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| You said you're not a vegan, so to be clear your okay with
| factory farms crushing pigs to death but minimally invasive
| surgery on monkeys so they can play pong is too far? I don't
| care about your stance on animal consumption particularly, but
| don't you find that a little hypocritical?
| quilombodigital wrote:
| Yep, I agree this sounds hypocritical,but everybody has
| different "lines" to cross. I guess mine is how close they
| are to humans. (98%), and I also differentiate "food" from
| "experiment".
| antoinexp wrote:
| Is your first statement not a kind of strawman argument? (
| https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman ) I mean, I am not
| vegan too but it doesn't mean I am ok with pigs crushed to
| death anyway. I think I see the point that you want to make
| though: somehow it should feel as if this minimal surgery
| ought to be "logically" more morally acceptable than killing
| animals to eat them. But don't you think morality could be
| just the name of a preference function deeply encoded in each
| individual brain and which doesn't require to be "rationally
| tuned"? (So that it can lead to weird irrational situations
| as in, I am ok with eating meat but I feel uncomfortable at
| the idea of killing animals)
| 55555 wrote:
| They crush pigs to death? What? Nothing would surprise me at
| this point, but I couldnt find a citation for that at first
| glance.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| OP might be referring to pigs crushing each other to death
| because of overcrowding in badly-run farms and during
| transportation. Farmers don't throw pigs in trash
| compactors (and why would they? Non-compacted pigs is how
| they do earn their money.)
| stevenringo wrote:
| What's the pipe for?
| madsushi wrote:
| Banana smoothie.
| [deleted]
| DC1350 wrote:
| Soon we will have physical DDOS by IoT monkey bot net. What a
| time to be alive
| bubuanabelas wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbtR4vorgY
|
| Two years ago without a brain implant.
| anonytrary wrote:
| This has been possible for decades without an implant.
|
| The problem is that without an implant, _only_ this is
| possible. Anything significantly more complex than moving a
| cursor on a screen is just not possible or feasible without an
| implant, because of physical (electromagnetic) limitations.
| addy34 wrote:
| Similarly
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMXfyZc_Gvg
| fireeyed wrote:
| The mindpong is mindblowing
| imranq wrote:
| An engineering feat, definitely. However there are so many ways
| this technology can be abused.
| mlindner wrote:
| Well right now the technology is unidirectional.
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