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.”
Neuralink reportedly floated the idea of removing his implant
This immediately sank when someone pointed out that it would be a PR nightmare, which naturally was more important than patient safety.
The implant failing when the subject’s connected tissue died has always been the best possible outcome from this, tbh.
When did they work? Prior to getting approved in humans they were killing animals at a high rate. To the point where animals were smashing their heads against shit to get the chip out.
Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate.
I understand testing on animals is tough but this was straight cruelty.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
It was working for a while for the guy. He was paralyzed from the neck down and he was able to use it to play some lame game like LoL or something.
IIRC dude went home and played Civ all night
Yeah I seen a money kinda play pong on it. It was cool and all but not ripping at your skull cool.
It sucks bc there are real companies developing the tech for an amazing cause. Elon is a dip shit that has no clue on how to run a company and he is actually hurting the research.
You don’t even need to be inserting probes to be able to do that…
OCZ had this ‘toy’ out in 2008.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16826100006
one of the reviews…
Ultra-sensitive, excellent response time. Partial hands free gaming. Cool looking blue LED glow from interface box. This is the future of computer user interface. While designed primarily for FPS games, works exceptionally well with MMOs. Makes Crysis WARHEAD and FarCry 2 a joy to play. As a disabled person, this unit has allowed me to game with all the “normal” folks on the same level.
I still have this, but suspect it’s bricked after I’ve pressed the “do not press” button on the side. (i’m a filthy button pusher) If anybody has some firmware dumps or at least documentation, I’d appreciate it.
Never managed to use the brainwaves, but it was sensitive to the facial muscle movement. Good enough to play pong.
ok but the real interesting stuff like reading hand writing from a paralyzed person imagining writing it and etc are all only for actual electrodes in brains.
This thing seems to be a later iteration of the Atari Mindlink idea from the 1980s, which presented the illusion of controlling the game with just your thoughts/brain waves/whatever but which was actually just reading the neuromuscular voltage from your forehead (meaning you scrunch your forehead muscles around to control it).
I’m not defending this, but at least a human electively chooses this procedure and understands why they have a device attached to their head. The monkeys must have had no idea what was going on and just wanted to remove the foreign object.
Very valid point.
I could argue that the person was mislead, thinking it was successful in animal trials when it wasn’t. Plus the mental manipulation on a person that is a paraplegic, having hope this will improve their life is sad. Musk falsely claimed it was safe and no monkeys died due to the implant.
Ah but you see, that was when they were testing the Worker Attitude Modulation software. (Researchers called it WAM for short and vehemently denied any connection to the word Wham.)
When I was in college working in a lab, we were worried about accidentally killing frogs with our equipment because we didn’t have anything filed with the IRB about frogs.
Everything with Elon bewilders me. I thought this is why we had regulatory agencies.
As we see most regulation agencies are underfunded and undermanned on purpose. I’m sure they are the same.
This is also why regulatory agencies have been systematically crippled over the last 40 years or so. Damn near every sector has had their regulatory agencies crippled by some combination of reducing authority, underfunding, and understaffing. When the agencies work, the message is “see, we don’t need those regulations anymore because we’re taking care of things fine on our own,” and when they stop working, the message is “we shouldn’t be spending money on these agencies! They don’t do anything anyway!”
“Humanity can not progress without heaps” - Hubert Farnsworth
This was to be expected and they handled it well imo. I’m not gonna get one though.
I will never not post this. This is what anyone who gets one of these is destined for :
When a company stops supporting devices like this, the devices and their documentation and code should be required to enter the public domain. It should not be allowed for assistive devices to become e-waste stuck in a patient’s body.
Was The Lawnmower Man a documentary?
This is the most Omni Consumer Products situation.
That’s weird. Did he try subscribing to Twitter Blue?
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.
This is an article saying it failed in a primate too!
Yeah it’s a really difficult problem. The criticism might be that it’s animal cruelty.
damn, imagine we did any other medical research with that attitude!
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
Maybe not now but a lot of what we know in medicine caused animals and people to die despite knowing the risks of experimentation
no, not really, that’s just a commonly believed myth
Wow. Tell that to all the dead people. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Anesthesia. Vaccines. More recently Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
ya, nothing was learned in the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”(see racist torture), Vaccines also didn’t one about because we just started injecting people with random shit, and we knew of Anesthesia for a long time, it just wasn’t seen as something you use in medicine in more recent history because of religious superstitions in medicine.
again, Myths, just like the idea that we learned anything from Mengele’s horrors
shocked Pikachu face
Not the first, first they told people about.
Definitely a closet full of dead bodies over there.
Dead monkeys and apes, yes. The bodycount in primates for the development of Neuralink isn’t… Fun.
I hope Noland has unlimited use because he might risk having to pay a sub to use the implant that they put in his brain
I would never put something in my brain that doesn’t at least have a public API documentation. If the company discontinued the product I want to be able to keep using it. Open Source software would be best.
Open source is the only way for anything that should enter our brains.
Really hope regulations will come to this.
That’s alot easier to type out when you haven’t been a quadriplegic for 8 years.
I understand and to a point agree with your points.
But think of it from Nolans perspective. He referred to himself as a waste before he had this implant. Regardless of how awful Musk is, other people who do care have in Nolans words “Given him purpose” again and has changed his life in only positive ways. If even just for a few months/years he is able to start enjoying life again.
Hate Elon or love him, this is pretty cool honestly. I hope it succeeds.
Elon is just the face and money man.
Understand that, and kudos to all the great minds who made this thing a reality.
And when it succeeds, next update will push ads directly in your brain.
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.
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.
Those alternatives are old tech that has way more limitations than a neural implant.
Just because there is old tech that SORT OF does this, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. That’s the same attitude behind “not needing more than 4mb of RAM” back in the day. You can’t stop progress all because YOU are fine with the current state of the tech.
I’m well aware of the existence of alternatives. But you must agree that what is achievable with an implant far outstrips the current alternatives?
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.
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?
You are making a lot of assumptions
And yet we’ve been implanting Cochlear devices in humans for eons but you can’t meld a Musk joke out of that so.
