[frankinstien]

This is science fiction becoming reality, a brain link.

[MagnusWootton]

The monkey is dead.

This is not good science.

I avoid this kind of thing like wild fire.

No thankyou.

[ivan.moony]

All of that for a few bananas and a life in a cage... I'm ashamed to be a human. 

[LOCKSUIT]

I'm ashamed to be a human. 

Don't worry, you don't have to be human anymore, with NeuralLink you can become a true ....

[MagnusWootton]

You wouldnt last 10 years after doing that to yourself.

[WriterOfMinds]

What's being achieved here isn't as novel as the news hype might suggest. Playing pong with your brain has been possible since at least 2004, with non-invasive methods no less:

https://www.nature.com/news/2004/040823/full/040823-18.html
https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050926/full/050926-5.html

Surgically implanted electrodes are also not new -- they have already been successfully used to help paralyzed people communicate, and to treat illnesses like Parkinson's Disease. So I don't think Magnus' prediction of inevitable death is justified. But they *do* carry some fairly serious risks. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/deep-brain-stimulation/about/pac-20384562

One of the long-term problems is that the brain views the electrodes as foreign material, and will corrode them or build scar tissue around them, rendering them less effective over time. They can also move around, such that they no longer contact the same neurons anymore and cause even more scarring.

As far as I can tell from what I've read so far, Neuralink's main innovation is the use of thinner and more flexible wires. These might have an easier time sliding around with moving brain tissue, but they could also be less durable and more likely to break. Whether they will solve any of the major issues blocking widespread use of brain implants seems to remain an open question. https://www.businessinsider.com/we-spoke-to-2-neuroscientists-about-how-exciting-elon-musks-neuralink-really-is-2019-9

Personally I would not let anybody put wires in my head yet, and I wouldn't do it to a monkey either. Since some similar results have been achieved with devices that stay outside the skull, I'd rather try to exhaust that avenue of research.

[infurl]

Thank you for making such a well researched and reasoned post WriterOfMinds. I wish all our posts could be this good.

Given that all of our cognitive functions are located in the surface of our brains in a layer barely a millimetre thick, a non-intrusive means of reading our thoughts ought to work much better than anything that interferes directly with brain tissue, especially with the subsequent potential for damage.

[frankinstien]

Personally I would not let anybody put wires in my head yet, and I wouldn't do it to a monkey either. Since some similar results have been achieved with devices that stay outside the skull, I'd rather try to exhaust that avenue of research.

Every technology has its risks. If you consider the millions of people, inclusive of children, that have died in car accidents and how our society views such deaths as usual, and even common where we know people will continue to die from car accidents as we simply accept that as a part of life. The ambition of Nueralink's approach, which is to provide a very high resolution capturing of neural monitoring and stimulation with obvious applications to treat diseases and open that window to an ability to communicate with just thoughts the risks involved are justified. Realize that because this is a medical innovation it will be scrutinized and tested to levels of safety that car manufactures don't have to stand up to.

Monitoring brain activity from outside the skull isn't a very effective approach since it is difficult to get resolutions that can pinpoint individual neurons, let alone a dendritic or synaptic connection, which technologies like optogenetics can do, but have not be tried on humans yet. Such a technology, optogenetics, allows for detail mapping, monitoring, and controlling neural connections to a point of integrating humans and machines to create a symbiosis where both the biological brain and the machine brain act as one, no different than right and left hemispheres of the brain operate as one. If and when the biological brain dies the machine brain seamlessly takes over. This is literal immortality, rather than an upload of your biological brain's connections that would only produce a copy of yourself.

So, personally, I can't wait to have wires in my head, considering the life-threatening risks I take every day on the freeway...

[ivan.moony]

Excuse me, but I'd give my life for that monkey. At least i would like to if i was a half a man as i should be. Exploiting other living beings for our own benefit is just... I don't even have a word for it. I hope to die right now, sorry. I'm waiting for some meteorite to hit me right in the center of my forehead right now, splatting my brain over 100m radius, so that worms can eat it and make out of it a pile of ... you know what. 

[Edit]
And I don't like ANNs, they must have been killing living beings to dissect their brains, getting all that knowledge about it. BLURPGH!

[frankinstien]

Excuse me, but I'd give my life for that monkey. At least i would like to if i were a half a man as i should be. Exploiting other living beings for our own benefit is just... I don't even have a word for it. I hope to die right now, sorry. I'm waiting for some meteorit to hit me right in the center of my forehead now, splatting my brain over 100m radius, so that worms can eat it and make out of it a pile of ... you know what. 

Well...I can't imagine how you can be so distraught about this than the millions, if not billions of animals that are harvested for food every day?

[ivan.moony]

Why do I even bother?

The world is not mine anyway.

[LOCKSUIT]

Haha franky!!! Yeah the raw nature of direct brain-electrode contact is most powerful. Yeah we need work done and not recreation right now, we are in hell! Roasted game? Send my little man to the guillotine!! Honestly I don't see much use for BMIs...AGI is all we need and we are so close just look at openAI.com and this guy's song completion if you don't believe.

[LOCKSUIT]

This video comment was interesting, extinction is, desired:
"I believe the surprise is after eating the snail, the snake drinks the water from the foliage/leaves. Very simple to understand. Nature isn't a mystery. Every creature on this earth has a purpose in life and if humanity wasn't so destructive many creatures wouldnt be extinct or close to extinction. Life on this earth cannot exist without creatures such as bees, frogs, earthworms, snakes plus many other species neccessary for our existence and survival. Also, without trees and plants which supplies our oxygen to breathe and we supply them with carbon dioxide."