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Comment by picafrost | Hacker News Reader

I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave. I do not know much of anything about medical science, but my impression is that we are still very, very far from having a deep grasp of how both the brain and the immune system work. Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.

Many tech professionals work on projects that effect people's lives in very serious ways. But a lot of folk seem to feel a bit of meaninglessness in this career and the threshold of making a mistake isn't very high. If it's an off day, sloppy work yesterday can be fixed with another PR.

Building something that is meant to attach to someone's brain would be quite the burden to carry.

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> I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave.

Brave and/or incredibly desperate.

> would be quite the burden to carry

only if you care

The kind of amount of regulation around this makes me think they are not in that big of a danger, especially as previous devices in this class are way more invasive than Neuralink. I remember that even in their earliest own presentations the width of the "wires" is fraction to previous solutions

Once again, regulation getting in the way of innovation in the name of "safety". Why can't we just sacrifice the vulnerable so I can think messages to my iPhone!

> Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.

I get your point but, there's a lot of foreign objects going in by the way of various pores and openings. Biological beings are surprisingly resilient & fragile at the same time.

Not remotely the same thing.

Pesticides and micro plastics are equally foreign even if not absorbed/ingested in as one big unit. Besides, in modern medicine, implanting devices in organs (ex: pacemakers, valves, electrodes) isn't unheard of?

Those openings lead to spaces that are not "inside" the body, though. For deuterostomes like humans, the digestive tract is still "outside" in a lot of important ways.

Well good golly miss molly, that's a word I had never heard of. Thanks!

For the lazy it basically means as embryos our anus forms before our mouths do. So we have to talk out our asses before we even leave the womb!

I think you narfed your own point by using objects getting into various pores and openings.

Pacemakers are somewhat similar devices that get implanted into bodies and still effectively are "foreign objects".

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