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Comment by throwaway60701 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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