Neurolink: What went wrong?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/business/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-cruelty-intl-scli/index.html

So 15 of 23 died. :/ As of this article anyways..
I mean those are good numbers for biohackers but id expect more from dude. Do you think we'll ever get a run down of why? So, if it was as simple as some biobond agent being at fault, i'd say they did poor preparatory research. I hate that we'll never know. It isn't right.

Comments

  • How exactly does being a biohacker mean that killing half a dozen monkeys would be good numbers? The numbers suck no matter who presents them. And one doesn't get a special pass for crappy numbers and monkey killing just because one is a "biohacker".

    Why didn't it work? It was unsafe. They used money to rush the process. They probably didn't complete all their safety tests. And if the skimped on those, they probably weren't being 100% on top of it in the surgery too. This isn't a complete mystery. They fucked up. Everyone who knows about this tech knows it was a bad idea to rush. Everything he said about being ready was a lie.

    Oh god we'll never know... -_-

    and it isn't right or wrong. Nobody owed us anything. It was a hype machine. You shouldn't have an emotional attachment to it.

  • edited September 2022
    I have no emotional attachment. Saying its ok for biohackers is a joke. The point being that one might expect such shit numbers were this being performed in some shitty garage. No one owes us anything?
    Entitlement is irrelevant. I want these results because they're potentially valuable regarding what I'm doing. Simplifying it as they fucked up is so assumptive. We've been really good at killing animals for a long time and I'm sure it could be done far cheaper. If you're going to kill animals generally considered self aware, perhaps you should be required to publish your findings rather then have others repeat the same mistakes.
    The same could be said for all the studies Ive pulled from sci-hub. I dont "deserve" such studies right? I'm not owed them. So you're against sci hub right? Once again, irrelevant to me but it seems a pretty weak position.

    Sure are a lot of assumptions above. Without any source I'm not sure where you're getting things like they screwed up the surgery etc. I'm not much of fan of this dude, but I'm not arrogant enough to assume some billionaire is stupid and all those he hired are incompetent. Maybe. Maybe youre right. Maybe, it was unsafe and not ready despite some of the best engineers saying it was. And yes, maybe all the surgeons involved.. turns out totally faking it. They screwed up and then hid it from all the other biologists, animal caretakers, and other physicians like you propose. Oh and all the people hired to test the devices? They all screwed up and their managers also failed to catch these mistakes... i could make all those assumptions. But why?

    Maybe it's simpler to say, hey. There are people doing work in cybernetics and since its related to our field it's good to keep an eye on it. Pay attention to novel approaches. Read what they're working on and discuss it with other biohackers.

    My objective is to learn and collaborate. Shoulders of giants and all that. Does believing everyone else in the world is stupid and faking their result get us somewhere better then this?
  • As @Cassox states in a previous response, it's best to move on and find the correct war forward to intelligently and practically building BCIs. Perhaps Musk wasn't prepared for the amount of innovation that is still needed in order to turn this dream into a reality?

  • The Stentrode by Synchron seems like a much more reliable method of getting BCI to market.
  • I know right. I love that approach. I've sat through a number of heart stents. It sure looks easy to do. Lol. Something tells me that I shouldnt try doing a brain Cath in the lab. Hmmm..

    The thing with neurolink though is like 3000 independent electrodes. I'm still hopeful. There's a lot we can do as independent researchers but opening up the skull? It's a pretty bad idea. I don't feel like were in a race to beat the billionaires to the most invasive type of surgery possible. I don't know enough about Musk to like or hate the dude, but I mean.. are people hoping the neurolink fails?

    I hope it works. I wish I was involved honestly. The nearest device to it had what? 256 electrodes?
  • edited September 2022
    > @Cassox said:
    > I don't know enough about Musk to like or hate the dude,

    He likes to reinvent things that already exist but worse (see tweet below), and seems to be mostly motivated in doing everything either for LOLz (buying Twitter) or to prolong his own existence at any cost (escaping climate change on earth by fleeing to mars)

  • I think the three major things that went wrong were:

    1. Not enough public backing. Much of the public fears and distrusts brain implants, and not without good reasons. The governments and mega corporations that would be producing these implants have done everything in their power to make the public distrust them.

    2. Musk's approach wasn't scalable with current technology. We don't have the Brain surgeon robots that would be needed inorder bring the chips to the mass. It is difficult to get people to invest in technology that is decades away.

    3. The procedure was pretty invasive. There are other less invasive ways to make BCIs. I read a news article awhile back where DARPA used a ferrofluid to target certain areas of the brain so that could be one approach.
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