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Monkey MindPong

neuralink.com

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Re: Monkey MindPong

#71

Post by syspec »

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 ends justify the means. You're benefiting from ages of actually cruel animal experiments, they got us to where we are today.

Nobody loves them, but they're important in this case to help parralyzed humans maybe with ALS or some other disease communicate with loved ones

Re: Monkey MindPong

#72

Post by lwansbrough »

sdwr wrote: post #31

This is honest-to-god magic. Some cyberpunk, neuromancer, hardcore reality-bending shit. The brain is the final frontier, if technology gets a foothold in there things are going to get WILD. Also, as this stuff gets further along, there's going to be large incentives for unethical testing. Rockets can be tested with unmanned flights, but you can't really dry run brain implants.

Well, that’s what animals are for honestly. They didn’t volunteer but we’ve deemed it “humane” nonetheless for our own moral comfort.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#73

Post by syspec »

jm4 wrote: post #53
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'm not buying the idea that the animals somehow benefit from this. I'm not necessarily against animal testing either. But it's one thing to test on animals to develop lifesaving cures and another thing entirely sure to experiment with brain implants with the potential to take away a living creature's free will. Or the ability to intrude on thought. The whole thing is pretty gross. It's great that this tech could hel…

Absolutely worth it. It's not ideal, but how else could we advance such technology that could help the paralyzed?

Re: Monkey MindPong

#74

Post by swordsmith »

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?

Noninvasive signal modality directly from the cortex are certainly possible (e.g. Ultrasound, fNIR). But they lack the spatial and temporal resolution of implanted electrodes. Intracortical brain signals are the most well understood and mature in terms of instrumentation as well. So in the short term, implanted electrodes offer the highest capacity for a BCI.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#75

Post by lwansbrough »

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…

You said you’re not a vegan, so to be clear your okay with factory farms crushing pigs to death but minimally invasive surgery on monkeys so they can play pong is too far? I don’t care about your stance on animal consumption particularly, but don’t you find that a little hypocritical?

Re: Monkey MindPong

#76

Post by challengly »

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…

On the flip side, what if this comes to pass?

First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs

Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1380315654524301315

Re: Monkey MindPong

#77

Post by logicchains »

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.

This sounds like the plot of a movie: death-row inmate forced to volunteer for implant testing, but he manages to connect to some kind of military robot and fights for his freedom.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#78

Post by swordsmith »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #64
swordsmith wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Funny you should compare understanding biological neural networks to a microprocessor. Check out this paper (https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...), which systematically addresses how applying traditional neuroscience methods to analyzing a microprocessor would get you.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#79

Post by anonytrary »

This particular exercise could've been done with EEG. Where Neuralink excels is in having a much higher possible bitrate.

Pong is the absolute POC. Neuralink will most likely be able to achieve higher differentiability and thus be able to complete tasks of higher complexity, so stay tuned for even more impressive tasks. EEG can't get past pong; it's limited by physics itself. The solution is to put the electrodes in the brain, and there is likely no other solution.

Looking forward to the future.

Re: Monkey MindPong

#80

Post by babesh »

JanSolo wrote: post #13
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??

My understanding is that neurons are like a higher-order connected mesh. A bit like many fully-connected layers in a Machine Learning model. You can't just read fine motor signals from any neuron, but given enough neurons, since they're deeply connected, you can infer a close approximation of the intended motor signals given a known output. That's why they need a lot of sampling wires in the brain; to makes sure they…

This reminds me of dropout where the neural network won’t be dependent on a specific connection. Instead, it will be statistical which will actually be a good fit for this approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_(neural_networks)

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