https://www.dezeen.com/2020/09/02/neuralink-elon-musk-brain-...
Previous discussion of surgical robot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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).
The new skill you learn may reinforce existing areas if its components are transferrable. Also, I see schemas as compression in the brain; eidetic memory shows how much some brains are capable of.
Forgetting is very good for clarification. I think your example suggests that your spelling in English hasn't been established deeply enough; I understand why you might have an adverse reaction to learning it though (German spelling is far more reasonable).
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.
Obviously tactile and proprioceptive feedback through the chip would enable better / quicker control, given the sufficient plasticity hypothesis.
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..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collec...
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.
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.
I’m asking in part because Elon’s suggested this could eventually lead to whole brain uploads and downloads. Partly asking because it’s pretty easy to be very destructive with a comment like yours and offering a glimpse of where this stands out from the crowd balances the attack.
Does anyone have book, talks and other material you'd suggest looking at?
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
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...
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.