It looked like the dexterity of the mind was quicker than the dexterity of the hand.
No brain signal to hand latency
Monkey MindPong
111–120 of 291 posts
Re: Monkey MindPong
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is nothing compared to what we were doing in lab several years ago. Neuralink is the least invasive of the invasive ways to conduct this research. I had to put animals down, because they would be defunct after trying to remove those bulkier devices. Neuralink is relatively humane, speaking as someone who has seen this technology in its infancy.
You're right. This monkey gets to earn banana smoothies all day. I'm sure it is quite happy. Much less happy are the animals we eat, those confined in zoos, and many of the pets people lock in tiny spaces.
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Re: Monkey MindPong
#113That 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…
It's not hard to imagine them implanting Neuralink-type devices in humans to make Minority Report a reality. And that's just read-mode. With write-mode, I bet they could easily figure out a way to make wrong thoughts physically impossible to think.
It's only a matter of time before certain governments start alpha-testing this type of technology in places like Xinjiang or Myanmar.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#114"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?
They crush pigs to death? What? Nothing would surprise me at this point, but I couldnt find a citation for that at first glance.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or the metal conductor plays a huge role in the electrical signals they get from the implanted electrodes I highly doubt that, you must be talking about non-invasive electrodes such as EEG. When the electrodes are inside the brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected from outside EM activity since they're in an effective Faraday cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity.
>When the electrodes are inside the brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected from outside EM activity since they're in an effective Faraday cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity. Pretty much this on a different and somehow related note I would still try to check if the algorithm does not just trick us into thinking that it is doing what the monkey wants it would be nice if they post some…
True, the post-processing algorithm could just be doing a randomish walk towards the answer, but I highly doubt that is what's happening. 2D cursor movement is well understood to be within the realm of possibility for EEG, so I imagine it is actually much easier with an in-vivo device. From what I understand, this is entirely supervised learning. The monkey is "telling" the device what neural pattern corresponds to moving the cursor. If I had to guess, then this chip is planted extremely close to the hippocampus, which is known to have cells that encode spatial information. The algorithm is probably doing a basic supervised learning on the cells that fire for a particular location of the cursor.
I'm just guessing on this, but the "training" session probably involved having the monkey stare at the screen for a while, while the cursor moved, which allowed the device to capture a spatial heatmap of which cells fired at which locations. There's probably some online optimization happening as the monkey then continues the "training" process by completing the task. Overall, this task is completely doable with the current technology, so I would not assume any foul play here. If the monkey was writing Shakespeare, I would definitely doubt it.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#116What is the metal stick the monkey puts into its mouth?
it's a straw thru which he is drinking a banana smoothie.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#117Super cringy banana quip.
Also, as this comment suggests, it seems to be more of an advance in wireless data transfer than neuroscience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746553.
I hope I'm wrong, but Muskuito's misleading marketing is never far on the horizon.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#118The next step for Neuralink is write mode. No, not writing memories, but reprogramming motor function. If you can capture the signals of limb movement synapses for say, a paraplegic, you can read those signals and convert them into write signals in another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor function. Over time, that neuron pathway gets reinforced and could potentially teach a person how to walk again.…
I was about to say that the Link (Neuralink) is already bidirectional, so they should already be able to spike each electron as well as read from it. But I had troubles finding any sources supporting this, so I'm not so sure anymore. I know that Elon talked about this in the early presentations though.
The implant definitely can write, but it's more power intensive than reading, and lower priority.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#119Earlier 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"?
> 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?
It's legally prohibited until a certain amount of animal testing has been performed. They're aiming to do the first human implants within a year.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#120Soon we will have physical DDOS by IoT monkey bot net. What a time to be alive