Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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I’m having some trouble interpreting your comment, and I don’t know how much context you have for Neuralink, so I will share a small amount of context which you may already know.

The basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.

The improvements that Neuralink advertises aren’t there, scientists in the field don’t believe that they will materialize in the foreseeable future, and there are a ton of problems you need to solve first which you could probably solve by first working with organisms like worms or whatnot, instead of pigs and monkeys.

Adding a jet engine to your car won’t shave twenty minutes off your commute to the office, it will just kill you and spread your body across the pavement. Sticking one of those Neuralink interfaces in a monkey won’t give us insight into brain-computer interfaces, it will just make the monkey suffer and die.

Any advances that Neuralink is actually making could probably be made with less suffering.

>The basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.

... and without the fraud? You can't get Neuralink installed at wallgreens, for example.

It feels distinctly possible that Nueralink is fraudulent. What is the point of the demos, slideshows, and general hype that comes from the company? They aren't selling anything, and don't expect to for years. Even then, the first customers will find the product medically necessary, and this broad marketing approach will be unnecessary. It's just odd to have so much PR for this.

How can it be fraudulent if they aren't selling anything? Fraud requires damages.

Is that a material difference? The basic elements of the formula are there—promise some kind of revolutionary advancement in medical technology, fail to deliver it, but keep going down the same path anyway. I think that the people at the center of these schemes are believers, or at least, they start out that way. You believe that this technology will provide great benefits in the future, and so you do whatever you feel you must do to keep the research going forward. You believe that with more time, more money, you can close the gap.

At least, at first.

Fail to deliver? Wut? They never commited to any timeline and have just began. What do you expect, brain computer interfaces and robot brain surgeons in less than a decade of development? That's crazy. I expect at least 2 decades, if not more.

The technique Neuralink is using to fail to deliver is a bold one where they make outrageous claims about what kind of problems they can solve with brain-computer interfaces.

There are other companies doing similar BCIs and rather successfully. There is a pretty good understanding of what such interfaces can do because it has already been tried in humans - see what is being done with people who have severe epilepsy, for example.

The innovation of Neuralink is not the idea of BCI itself nor the benefits it can bring - that's old news. Neuralink is about the surgery procedure and bringing it to mass market.

Neuralink is right to want to improve BCIs and make the technology more available, but the stated goals include things like controlling computers, using AI assistants, and telepathy. As far as I can tell, Musk likes to make promises or prognostications with a casual disregard for whether they are possible, and then apply significant amounts of pressure to the employees at his companies to make those things happen. This is a bad recipe.

It's already tested in humans, we know it's possible. Currently we have a proof of concept of roughly 60 letters per minute. It was tried with people who needed BCI because of epilepsy. It's also tested that it's possible to transfer what the person is seeing as well as what they're imagining.

Neuralink is most importantly about the surgery procedure, not about BCI itself, that's really nothing new at this point. They're building their own BCI because of their specific idea about the surgery (they don't want to need to remove the upper half of your skull like it's done today), but the tech itself is already proven.

Do you even watch the news of this field? This was tried like 5-10 years ago already, and is now steadily improving. I don't understand how you can make claims about Neuralink or Musk when you don't know the basics about the state of this field.

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