Second patient receives the Neuralink implant According to company boss Elon Musk, its Neuralink implant is now at work in a second patient, and this time, almost half of the device's electrodes are working. During a podcast discussion, which also featured Neuralink's first human subject, Noland Arbaugh, Musk said, "We've got, I think, on the order of 400 electrodes that …
The main fixes for the thread retraction issue that the first patient experienced were going to be inserting the threads deeper (I think it was going to be 8mm instead of 2mm), and not altering the CO2 levels in the brain during the surgery, as that caused shrinking/expansion that contributed to the retraction issues. I can't find confirmation, but I assume they'll have done both those things with the second patient. It's going to be really interesting to see if the retraction problem is 100% solved, and assuming it is, what the second patient can do with a full complement of electrodes. Noland lost most of his threads, he was down to 15% after a few months, so although he managed to recover the initial performance with just the remaining threads, I'm not sure he ever got to maximise the full set of electrodes. So fingers crossed for the second patient that the threads stay put, and we'll see what the interface can really do.
Musk said, "The long term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve the AI human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication. Because, even in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words."
Or, maybe, you could program the AI* not to do boredom. There is no reason why the AI should need to feel bored, and several downsides. An AI that gets annoyed at slow users probably doesn't need faster users. It needs to be a better AI. The same goes for all sorts of other emotions such as anger, schadenfreude, terror, hatred, etc. In fact, we could probably manage without some of the positive ones as well.
The more I hear from "visionaries" or "futurists", the more I see people who read a lot of science fiction without thinking as much as any one of the authors that wrote it. The writer was trying to write an interesting book. The visionary is trying to predict the future and plan the way there. You would think they'd recognize that they need to think even more to successfully do that.
* AI: The science fiction concept of a conscious, intelligent program. Not an LLM. Those don't have emotions.
No, absolutely not. There's a ridiculous amount of shit that goes on in my brain, and thankfully the slowness of speech (or typing) allows it to fall into something vaguely resembling order.
If you're neurotypical, direct communication with a neurodivergent will be like watching a movie at the wrong speed with the entire movie randomly and frequently switching to something else that might not be in the same language. It may even be movies in the plural going on concurrently.
And God help you if you connect to my brain when I'm trying to go to sleep. My stupid lump of grey matter takes that time to try to think of everything at the same time, how I wish I was one of those people that could look at a pillow or count sheep and be asleep in minutes, not hours. Assuming it's not one of those nights where I just stare at where the wall would be (in the dark) all bloody night...
Us neurodivergents will DDoS you hard. We won't mean to, that's just how our (I hope it's not just me!) brains function. We're used to the chaos. You.....really won't be.
So please allow me to apologise in advance. Go pop the kettle on, dear, we'll both need copious amounts of tea afterwards to get over the shock.
ND to ND communication at high speed will make those turns in conversation so rapid that the NTs won't have a chance of understanding what's going on after a few seconds.
I'd love to see them struggle to comprehend what's happening when the bandwidth increase allows effective info dumping in seconds instead of 20+ minutes. They'll think matrix "I know kung fu", when in reality it's more like "I know the mating habits of Atlantic deep sea creatures that live near volcanoes"
significantly reducing the system's capabilities."
It would, wouldn't it?
Completely out of context but still...
Ming of Mongo's prattling on about ziga bps connections between human brains is about as dystopian as I can imagine and I can only imagine Mr Arbaugh's wasn't the only brain that came loose but the emperor of Mongo's is not just loose but positively unhinged.
On a more fundamental level I suspect the world represented in the mind/brain of each human being is unique. The fact that we can communicate our perceptions of our environment to others in a way that appears to correspond with their pereceptions of the same environment is like as much a consequence of biological, cultural and linguistic evolution than any real correspondence between each individual's mind's representation of his or her world.☆ (And an enormous leap of faith.;)
The idea that you could meaningfully beam the electrical activity of (part of) one brain into (the corresponding part of) another brain appears pretty ludicrous.
☆ a corollary of this would be that a proportion of population would lack this correspondence to varying degrees having a divergent perception and world representation of their environment. A claim sadly not exactly lacking contemporary evidence.
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