• EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      The guy volunteered for it, knowing the risk, and calls it a luxury that he uses all the time and has helped him “reconnect with the world.”

      Don’t let your justified hatred of musk blind you to reality.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    Before anyone gets too excited: some of their electrodes are no longer able to record a signal from the patient’s brain. They’re reprogramming their software to work with fewer electrodes. No one is being turned into a borg drone.

      • TJA!@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Well it’s also what NASA is doing. Only logical if you don’t want to dig it out again.

        • mynachmadarch@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          Do you mean with the Voyager FDS? There’s a big difference between patching a system 30+ years past it’s planned mission date because at everyone’s amazement it just keeps going and being valuable versus the Neuralink developing issues a few months after being installed when many expected it to fail because of the news of high failure rate among the primate test subjects beforehand.

    • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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      6 months ago

      I don’t know. Even if the outcome is just that the implant just stop working, with no other issue, it’s looking pretty bad to me.

      Since it required literal brain surgery just to be installed, which I assume is already a serious risk, it’s not something you want to potentially be useless.

      • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        The implant is already malfunctioning after a few months. Makes you wonder how many more of these threads will retract over the next following months.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I find the wording weird: The neuralink’s threads have retracted from the brain.
    The threads can’t move or disconnect on their own. Neither can brain cells. All that can be measured is a loss of connection.

    The far more reasonable explanation is that the brain cells at the connection point have died.

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      6 months ago

      I seem to recall that scarring around the electrodes, which eventually causes them to stop functioning, is a known failure mode of older experiments along similar lines. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t hold out much hope for this iteration.

      I just hope the patient doesn’t take any long-term damage from the implant.

      • Ænima@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        If the moneys are anything to go on, that dude’s in for an extremely painful death.

    • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      In principle they could have pulled out slightly, if there’s jostling and tiny movements in skull then you’d expect them to work loose over time if they’re not securely anchored

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          In one of the interview with Nolan he says he has full body spasms when he sits in the chair and those spasms take him out of position from being able to use the mouth stick controller. With neuralink he doesn’t need intervention by someone else post spasms to continue.

          Definitely enough to be jostling the head, but he didn’t get into explicit detail of how serious they are movement wise.

          Edit: side note, makes me wonder if they’re a build up of spinal signals and the cord briefly connects and suddenly a pile of commands go through and he spasms.

        • Zron@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Paraplegics still need to move or be moved.

          If they don’t rotate into different laying or sitting positions, they’ll develop bed sores they can’t even feel, which can be extremely dangerous. They also still need to move their limbs to avoid blood clots.

          All this shows is that Neurolink isn’t ready for one reason or another. Either the wires are so fragile they become dislodged or broken by gentle movements during physiotherapy, or the surgery damaged the brain. Either way this is a major issue with the technology. No way are they going to be putting robot limbs on people if the chip that can control them is this unreliable.

          • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            No way are they going to be putting robot limbs on people if the chip that can control them is this unreliable.

            Let me just go ahead and remind you that the cyber truck exists.

  • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    About a month after surgery the implant started to perform poorly. They tweaked some software settings and now it’s running better than it did before the drop-off for a longer period, based on the actual blog post the story is talking about https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience.

    This is obviously prototype technology with insane risk. The guy only signed up because he’s paraplegic. It’s not in any way remotely ready for normal humans and probably won’t ever be in our lifetimes. IMO this is like self driving technology, it’s easy to promise the world but hard to actually accomplish what they say.

    • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I really feel conflicted about this. I hate Musk as much as anyone and think this experiment is a little irresponsible, but if I were going through what that guy is dealing with, I’d probably want to give it a try.

  • retrospectology@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Not totally surprising, I feel bad for the person who was in a desperate enough situation to become a con man narcissist’s guinea pig.

    It looks like we’re learning the lesson we already learned back when Bill Gates tried to mess around with the education system and faceplanted; just because billionaires made a bunch of money selling a fancy toaster they invented or whatever, doesn’t make them experts on anything else.

    I’d sooner put a bullet in my head than something Elon Musk had a hand in.

  • Fades@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Literally WHO did not see this coming??

    Did the fucking chimps begging for death not tip these people off???

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      6 months ago

      Generally the World Health Organization doesn’t make a statement on procedures until results are shown. /s