Neuralink

[Yazata]

Neuralink, another one of Elon's seemingly endless stream of crazy Sci-Fi-movie style companies (Devs!) is based on the idea of perfecting brain-computer interfaces and ultimately creating true cyborgs. The idea seems to be to be able to access computer size memories and equally fast sorting and searching, along with computerish pattern recognition and maybe entirely new sensory inputs. All seamlessly, just by thinking.

Here's a paper about their vision, their robot brain-electrode inserter and their early experiments with rats.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/...4.full.pdf

Here's C/NET's video of their June 2019 company unveil at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. (UCSF has world-class neuroscience and neurosurgery departments, so lots of talent. Plus Silicon Valley nearby.) Elon talks about the future danger of even benign AI and actually says, 'If you can't beat'em, join em.' Science fiction's "posthumans". At least it's one vision of how to do it. (Another is through genetic engineering.)

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/lA77zsJ31nA

Well, Neuralink is planning a big update presentation on Friday August 28, to unveil what some are saying will be news about the first clinical trials on human beings. I believe that they plan to live-stream it and will be posting a link on the Neuralink company website soon.

https://neuralink.com/

It's hard to imagine people agreeing to let them open up their skulls and have a robot insert thousands of electrodes in their brain, but it might be attractive to quadriplegics or people with traumatic brain injuries. Apparently the initial applications that Neuralink envisions are clinical applications for people with neurological damage. Creating "post-humans" might still be a bit... out there, though I guess that the kids with the piercings and body modifications might like it. (The FDA regulators probably won't.)

I'm not 100% convinced, but can't totally write it off. It certainly bears watching. (Damn it, I've been waiting decades for my flying car. Where are the Moon cities and Mars colonies? I gotta love Elon who might actually deliver the future we were all promised.)

[Syne]

(Damn it, I've been waiting decades for my flying car. Where are the Moon cities and Mars colonies? I gotta love Elon who might actually deliver the future we were all promised.)

Well, part of Trump's second term agenda is a permanent manned presence on the moon and manned mission to Mars. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/trump...ng-for-you

[C C]

Creating "post-humans" might still be a bit... out there, though I guess that the kids with the piercings and body modifications might like it. (The FDA regulators probably won't.)

They were preordained for the morphological aspect of transhumanism. There were freaks surgically embedding mohawks of metal spikes in their heads back in the '90s -- probably a few adding two extra breasts via silicon-gel implants.

When ET groupies come across the elongated skulls of Mayans, they seize upon them as examples of just that: remains of space aliens. Various tats and body mutilations throughout history were arguably examples of humans trying to resemble sacred animals and familiars -- or get as desperately close to chimeric metamorphosis as their primitive means would allow.

Seems like John Varley was writing about stuff like that in the late '70s or early '80s. I vaguely remember some story about a kid with the downsized body of Godzilla or a dinosaur, and his friend whose rendered-into-AI mother had locked him into a Peter Pan like permanent childhood.

[stryder]

RE: Neurolink

I don't agree with the method posed mainly down to two factors.

• Technology is constantly being improved and for the most part ending up obsolete within days of being launched. Consider the nature of how Apple implies that it's older Iphones are now a "Security risk" and will no longer support or update them. Can you imagine the same methodology being applied to physical cybernetic adaptions transplanted into a human being? One day your top of your game with the most recent update, the next you are dumb as literally a brick (since the hardware has been updated to brick since it's now obsolete and open to rogue code)
  
  So in short hardwired tech is a bad idea.
  
  
• In the rare case of electric shock. If a person was hit by lightening or just happened to get a shock of the mains, as a pure biological there is the chance for the charge to pass through them with limited amounts of damage, however if they have refined levels of wires embedded within their brain, those wires themselves might well melt over the energy level potentially yielding a higher level of damage to a person augmented in such a way compared to pure biological.
  
  
• There is already cybernetic technologies that are currently out in the wild (but not mentioned of) that are BCI's however they use radiofrequency to interact with a humans brain, meaning their is no hardware to have errant code to run on or end up out of date. The draw backs are however that it undermines everyones privacy, there is no off switch at the cyborgs end, there is limited control as to who might use or manipulate the equipment upline. *as well as the concerns for long term bombardment of frequency ranges causing a number of physiological and psychiatric problems.
  

In a nutshell it's only a good idea if it's localised (GPS locked) to a place so a person can leave should they feel overly exposed. Of course it's a fair way from the old Damocles sword (VR)

[Yazata]

The Neuralink presentation is scheduled for 3 PM PDT (6 PM EDT, 22:00 UTC). Talk is that they will demonstrate a working device, in early prototype form at least, perhaps in a human being.

Neuralink still hasn't posted the url of their livestream of the event. But C/NET will be rebroadcasting it on their youtube channel and that should be here:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sr8hzF3j2fo

Edit: Here's where the direct-from-Neuralink stream will be: Live in 111 minutes.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DVvmgjBL74w

[Yazata]

Already 30 minutes late and still hasn't started yet. Speculation is that the system that they want to live demonstrate isn't cooperating.

Elon just tweeted Ahem. Starting soon.

It's on. (40 minutes late.)

[C C]

Already 30 minutes late and still hasn't started yet. Speculation is that the system that they want to live demonstrate isn't cooperating.

Finally happening almost 40 minutes late.

[Yazata]

Already 30 minutes late and still hasn't started yet. Speculation is that the system that they want to live demonstrate isn't cooperating.

Finally happening almost 40 minutes late.

The uncooperative "system" proved to be small pigs.

The presentation turned out to be a bit underwhelming, given the huge expectations. (There were approx 150,000 people watching the Neuralink and C/NET streams.) But it was interesting, particularly the Q&A with the young and smart Neuralink crew.

They have some improved hardware that's directly implantable in the skull. No wires or usb ports, all wireless by Bluetooth. Still haven't implanted them in humans, but they say they have a fast-track FDA approval.

They (kinda) demonstrated them in small pigs. A pig without the implant, behaving normally, a pig that had the implant and then had it removed also behaving normally, showing that the implant is reversible. And the pig that currently has the implant, which proved unwilling to come out into the enclosure. Apparently nothing to do with the implant, the pig was just shy and was spooked by all of the gathered humans. The implant pig finally appeared and appeared to be behaving normally. I believe it, since the brain has no pain receptors and the pig probably couldn't even feel the implant. The implant was just feeding data from the pig's large cortex area devoted to its very sensitive snout, producing activity on a screen as it snuffled around.

Really nothing about how well they are decoding their data into this-means-this and that-means-that, for sensory, motor and (especially) memories and ideas. That's going to be the hard part.

One of their crew did make some interesting and seemingly philosophically informed remarks about consciousness, saying that correlating phenomenal awareness with neural activity has long suffered from the lack of good data about what's happening at the neural end. He's hoping that neuralink will help break that logjam.

[Yazata]

Elon wants YOU! To work at neuralink.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1356027336387252235

"Feels weird helping make (hopefully good version of) Cyberpunk come true"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1356027847073140740

A neuralink test subject:

[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ffm.cnbc.com%2Fapplicati...f=1&nofb=1]

[Yazata]

Monkey with neurolink implant playing pong better than I used to be able to, simply by thinking

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3Ya-bAYri84