The first Neuralink implant in a human malfunctioned after several threads recording neural activity retracted from the brain, the Elon Musk-owned startup revealed Wednesday.
The threads retracted in the weeks following the surgery in late January that placed the Neuralink hardware in 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh’s brain, the company said in a blog post.
This reduced the number of effective electrodes and the ability of Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, to control a computer cursor with his brain.
“In response to this change, we modified the recording algorithm to be more sensitive to neural population signals, improved the techniques to translate these signals into cursor movements, and enhanced the user interface,” Neuralink said in the blog post.
The company said the adjustments resulted in a “rapid and sustained improvement” in bits-per-second, a measure of speed and accuracy of cursor control, surpassing Arbaugh’s initial performance.
While the problem doesn’t appear to pose a risk to Arbaugh’s safety, Neuralink reportedly floated the idea of removing his implant, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The company has also told the Food and Drug Administration that it believes it has a solution for the issue that occurred with Arbaugh’s implant, the Journal reported.
The implant was placed just more than 100 days ago. In the blog post, the company touted Arbaugh’s ability to play online computer games, browse the internet, livestream and use other applications “all by controlling a cursor with his mind.”
Hate Elon or love him, this is pretty cool honestly. I hope it succeeds.
Nah this is a pretty dumb idea that is going to go poorly. It’s just techobros wishing we lived in a science fiction novel.
Maybe someday, but that’s not the point of the tech as it stands. It’s accessibility.
They guy who it failed in (Noland Arbaugh) is a full on quadriplegic. The ability to use a computer in a semi-normal way is absolutely beyond life changing for him.
How dare you state anything but “I hate Elon and he’s a POS and everything he does is bad”. Elon is a garbage human being and I dislike him just as much as the other person, but I’m still going to give credit when it’s due. This is a fucking cool idea and will help a lot of people.
But those options were available to him without a risky brain implant. There’s a large amount of alternative interface methods and tools available for these purposes, they just don’t have Musk’s marketing budget and they aren’t run by someone that owns a newspaper, so they’re not well known outside the disabled community.
We’ve had wearable (and thus removable and non invasive) neural interfaces for years now that have been able to do mouse control.
We’ve had robust eye tracker control since Steven fucking Hawking.
This is being framed as though this was the only way for this person to have these abilities and options available, and that is patently false.
Based on your reaction, I’d hate to hear your opinion on AI. Let me guess, its corpo data theft and only data theft?
What about the multitude of FOSS projects that even you could use if you wanted?
Everything’s “techbros living in a sci-fi novel”, until one day it isn’t.
I’m only 42 and I have seen very incredible advancements made in my lifetime that I never thought would be reality as a child. Handheld mobile communications devices that allow you to talk and share media instantly with anyone on the planet, for instance. That’s some literal Star Trek shit. Or the fact we now have the equivalent computing power of all the world’s supercomputers in the 80s put together on our desks. Or RNA vaccines, instead of using dead or dying viruses, we can now reprogram the body to make whatever antibodies it needs.
The USB-C set a new benchmark for the popular Apollo 11 comparison. With the release of the USB-C, your phone’s charger now is about 563x faster, can store about 75% more commands, and has about 2x the RAM vs the Apollo 11.
It’s the first attempt. Failure is gonna happen. This isn’t big news. If they were rolling it out to market that would be different.
Sure failure is gonna happen but neuralink hasn’t been particularly successful with all the primates that have been tested with for previous version either.
Yeah that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in medicine for ever. Are you supposed to just stop trying?
so, hate to break it to you, but we in fact don’t take that attitude with medical research, anything that had a tendency to kill the pre human control groups generally doesn’t keep going, Musk can do this because he is a high profile case, ironically it’s how he slips regulations all the time, because there would be backlash from the musk sycophants, but also the general wealthy community who use people like musk as a barometer on how much corruption they can get away with
“DAddy mUsk laav mme uskahdkadvbgbdg” said the first Neuralink volunteer, Mr. Guinny A. Peeg.
This was to be expected and they handled it well imo. I’m not gonna get one though.
Agreed. I was flippant after reading the headline, since I don’t like Musk, but once I read the story I was like "oh yeah this tech does have big potential for the differently abled. "
A quadriplegic being able to control a cursor on a screen with the implant for 100 days seems like a legit first attempt.
Could be great for the accessibility movement in the long run. But I could be naive or too optimistic.
A quadriplegic being able to control a cursor on a screen with the implant for 100 days seems like a legit first attempt.
Why, when we already have non-surgical solutions that allow the same thing but don’t come with the risk of killing you?
differently abled
Please dude I promise you this is near universally hated by disabled people 😭
I get that there are better choices now, but let’s not pretend like a straw you blow into is the technological stopping point for limb-free computer control (sorry if that’s not actually the best option, it’s just the one I’m familiar with). There are plenty of things to trash talk Neuralink about without pretending this technology (or it’s future form) is meritless.
I agree with not liking ‘differently-abled’ as a term. To me it reads along the same lines as ‘disabled people are built different’. Pretty awkward.
Not that I have a horse in this race. Or a neuralink, as the case may be.
Why
Why not? Nothing wrong with research and development as long as everyone participating in the test is an informed, consenting adult IMO. The advancements could make current accessibility tech even better. For one reason or another, a quadriplegic person decided they were willing to take the risk, so maybe they consider current accessibility tech for quadriplegics to be insufficient and wanted to try for something better?
Please dude I promise you this is near universally hated by disabled people 😭
Well damn, I didn’t know.
There are some politically correct terms that are not well liked by the people they describe:
- Differently abled
- Houseless
- Latinx
I cannot speak to any of these, however, I learned that that you should just ask. If you can’t ask, put the “human” first such as people with disabilities or people who are deaf, blind, etc. Latine is another term I’ve heard, but in the community, there are those that like it and those that don’t.
I will never not post this. This is what anyone who gets one of these is destined for :
Of course it is. The what neuralink is touting is the exact same situation that company was in. What happened there was they were creating an application for types of rare retinal blindness with the hopes that some other research would magically come along that makes it apply to other types of blindness and give them a market they could properly scale in. Surprise Surprise, no such deus ex machina occurred and the company could not see a path to profitability.
Neuralink is the exact same, cervical vertebra paralysis has less invasive adaptive mechanisms that are cheaper to implement, so there’s no way this will ever be a profitable approach with that alone. They’re hoping that this will magic into some brain machine interface without any actual hope that is going to happen.
The basic research just isn’t there to be doing this shit, but the investor dollars need to be put somewhere.
And yet we’ve been implanting Cochlear devices in humans for eons but you can’t meld a Musk joke out of that so.
