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Monkey MindPong

neuralink.com

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Re: Monkey MindPong

#61

Post by kbenson »

gopiandcode wrote: post #47
mlindner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused why you'd even feel that way? Neuralink goes into a LOT of effort for animals to feel good. Animal studies happen all the time for medical testing, and from what I hear Neuralink is much better than the average. As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free will. They don't harm the animal if it refuses to participate. Are you familiar with the term "luddite"?

I initially thought GP was being overly hyperbolic, but after watching the video I can't say I fully disagree. It's not so much the animal studies aspect, but rather the fact that they used bluetooth via a mobile phone to connect to the monkey. That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's b…

> That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's being used to interact with a _live_ monkey.

I understand that, but I think to some degree, you're letting somewhat unrelated things influence your opinion of this.

You know what else it interacted with and controlled wirelessly? Pacemakers. Nobody thinks of those people are replaceable commodities.

Also, what about those that don't live a life of luxury and have access to lots of commoditized devices that wirelessly pair through a cellphone? People in less affluent countries might be less jaded about controlling something wirelessly and still view that as an amazing new technology associated with things they can rarely afford.

So, to what degree are those associations useful and accurate, and to what degree are they you bringing unrelated prior biases to bear?

Re: Monkey MindPong

#62

Post by jm4 »

gopiandcode wrote: post #47
mlindner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused why you'd even feel that way? Neuralink goes into a LOT of effort for animals to feel good. Animal studies happen all the time for medical testing, and from what I hear Neuralink is much better than the average. As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free will. They don't harm the animal if it refuses to participate. Are you familiar with the term "luddite"?

I initially thought GP was being overly hyperbolic, but after watching the video I can't say I fully disagree. It's not so much the animal studies aspect, but rather the fact that they used bluetooth via a mobile phone to connect to the monkey. That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's b…

I think you articulated it well. It trivializes life. Countless animals die horrifically for science, but much of it is ultimately in the pursuit of valuing human life. This is something different. This animal has been reduced to a device accessory.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#64

Post by jonnycomputer »

swordsmith wrote: post #4
2bitencryption wrote: post #2

I don't understand how you can gather such a targeted signal by sticking wires in just a few places. Like, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone and start getting text messages through it. But somehow you can put some wires just as few mm into the surface of a brain and extract fine motor signals??

The location of the electrodes aren't arbitrary. The region of implantation is likely the hand-motor cortex (which has thickness on the order of mm), the area associated with arm movements (check out somatotopy), so the signals acquired are actually targeted for the demo task. This relationship has been known in neuroscience for almost a century and has been validated in decades of brain-machine interface experiments…

I think the source of wonder here is that neural networks are very un-CPU like, in the level of correlation between the units. I'm not sure you could probe a CPU in a similar manner and be able to recover meaningful information. A binary 101X10 are entirely different numbers depending on what X is, for example, and you woulnd't necessarily expect X to correlate with the place values elsehwere (e.g. 1st and 5th bit). Similar arguments, apply, to probing different components, such as registers or instruction memory.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#65

Post by quilombodigital »

NavinF wrote: post #60
quilombodigital wrote: post #56

"What better reward for a monkey, than a banana"? what about FREEDOM? I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should allow terminally-ill or death-row volunteers for this kind of experiment... With good money for the family, and I think some people would like to help mankind in the end. It is better than dying without accomplishing anything in life. So, you have at most one year with an inoperable tum…

Yeah I'd volunteer for implant testing if I had a 6 month life expectancy due to a terminal illness. I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as the only way to delay the execution.

I did not thought about this, but at the same time, "punishment" cannot coexist with "reparation"? Money would go to victims.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#66

Post by NavinF »

2bitencryption wrote: post #2

I don't understand how you can gather such a targeted signal by sticking wires in just a few places. Like, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone and start getting text messages through it. But somehow you can put some wires just as few mm into the surface of a brain and extract fine motor signals??

>Like, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone and start getting text messages through it.

You can get a 128 key out of most electronic devices in a reasonable amount of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_attack#Known_a...

Re: Monkey MindPong

#67

Post by neolog »

mlindner wrote: post #37
jm4 wrote: post #35

That was difficult to watch. While the technology is impressive, it is sickening to watch. The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit. It is obviously unnatural, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about seeing that animal, oblivious to what's happening, and that implant with the ability to directly record thoughts and/or remote control. The whole thing doesn't sit well wi…

I'm confused why you'd even feel that way? Neuralink goes into a LOT of effort for animals to feel good. Animal studies happen all the time for medical testing, and from what I hear Neuralink is much better than the average. As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free will. They don't harm the animal if it refuses to participate. Are you familiar with the term "luddite"?

> As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free will.

Why don't they do it on humans then?

Re: Monkey MindPong

#69

Post by swordsmith »

visarga wrote: post #39
jm4 wrote: post #35

That was difficult to watch. While the technology is impressive, it is sickening to watch. The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit. It is obviously unnatural, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about seeing that animal, oblivious to what's happening, and that implant with the ability to directly record thoughts and/or remote control. The whole thing doesn't sit well wi…

> The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit. I had the same reaction. I just recently had a lot of trouble pairing Airpods to Macbook (both no more than 2 years old). If Apple can't make it work between their own devices, it's doomed. A piece of shit technology, a black stain on the whole stack. The demo is impressive otherwise, and I don't think it's weird to control a device with yo…

> Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.

Check out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1

And yes it is definitely orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick

Re: Monkey MindPong

#70

Post by lwansbrough »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most interesting thing here is not the mind reading, it is the miniaturization of computing and sparse data transfer. Neuralink off-loaded the computation to the sensor, sending back aggregate data snapshots. Usually you will need massive ASIC/FPGA computation banks with a lot of messy to handle the data transfer and readout but they took a shortcut bye sending only counts of spikes that exceeds a certain thresho…

Is there anyway to get this signal non invasively (magnetic field detection or photonically)? Or are implanted electrodes table stakes for a neural interface?

Not really, that we know of. To appreciate the complexity you could read this post[0] from Wait But Why? Your brain has approximately 40,000 neurons in the space of a cubic millimeter. Each saying something completely different. It’s incomprehensible noise unless you start dividing it up like Neuralink has. They get a few thousand probes in the size of a penny, which is a far greater level of resolution than you could probably ever expect from a wireless solution.

[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

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