161–170 of 291 posts
I know I'm conforming to a stereotype by saying this, but I cant stop thinking about how this could be the premise of a Black Mirror Episode. I also think we should restrict such technology. Without restrictions we can play God, and I am in no way approving of doing anyhting similar to that. The part about pairing the monkeys NeuraLink Device "like you do with a speaker" made me laugh. Not becuase it's funny, but bec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe pong has less entropy than the initial task of putting the cursor into the box. Pong is a 1D game with one degree of freedom, where you are effectively moving the cursor along the Y-axis. The previous task involved moving the cursor on the XY-plane, which involves two degrees of freedom. Therefore, pong is less impressive than the previous task.
This is difficult to say because pong involves moving components while the box stays still. In order to play pong the monkey must first estimate where the ball will go and then give the command to move the cursor. This indicates that Neuralink may be able to handle complex multitasking, i.e. you may be able to walk or drive and the system will still be able to decode you correctly.
I think this gets deep into the difference between premeditation and action and what that means at a neural level. I would guess that Neuralink is not processing the "logical thinking" as much as it is on the neurons that dumbly encode an association with ping-pong racket location.
As long as some set of neurons uniquely fire approximately when the pong moves along its degree of freedom, different electrodes will pick up different voltages, and that can be learned by an algorithm. So we don't need to know how the monkey arrived at a decision, but rather just be able to index the possible outcomes of the decision. Which is why I thought that the entropy of the decision space mattered. It's easier to learn a smaller space.
I would tend to think this is a dumb pattern matching cluster (e.g. see visual encoding[0]) that's being picked up by Neuralink, and not the actual "logical decision making". Although, there may be more subtle neurons that fire in a sort of "premonition" which have learned the correlation of the racket position with the ball over time.
I can link to more papers on that -- it's not just visual encoding, but rats can "plan" where they are going to go, a sort of premonition. Humans also do this. It's like an echo that happens before you yell. That's what the brain does when you plan to go to the grocery store.
This is all really interesting stuff, but I'm not an expert!
For those who don’t know much about this field, this seems incredible. The reality is that this a tech demo that Neuralink is using to practice the basics. For other research groups in this field, this is tech from 20 years ago. The current state of the art is humans, mostly quadriplegic people, with chips which let them control robot arms with enough accuracy to pick up small delicate objects, play games, and type b…
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…
This is how progress is made. Similarly, people in DaVinci's times were sickened by his autopsies but that doesn't mean there was something wrong about them.
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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
The assumption being that human lives are far more valuable than non-human lives. Where it gets funky though is trying to quantify that to an extent: how many monkey disfigurements is worth fixing one human disfigurement? Ten? A thousand? How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
Is it even controversial that yes, of course they are?
I mean, Boeing and the FAA kept 737 MAX's in the air after brown people died in the first crash when we all know they'd have grounded them if it was a crash in Kansas. We value human lives differently let alone animals.
> How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
None. But I'd blind as many as are needed to trial human eye transplants, for example.
I believe our morality base for these types of decisions is mostly based on the religious traditions of humans somehow being 'special' in the scheme of things. Domestic pets also partially fall into this category.
For those who don’t know much about this field, this seems incredible. The reality is that this a tech demo that Neuralink is using to practice the basics. For other research groups in this field, this is tech from 20 years ago. The current state of the art is humans, mostly quadriplegic people, with chips which let them control robot arms with enough accuracy to pick up small delicate objects, play games, and type b…
For those who don’t know much about this field, this seems incredible. The reality is that this a tech demo that Neuralink is using to practice the basics. For other research groups in this field, this is tech from 20 years ago. The current state of the art is humans, mostly quadriplegic people, with chips which let them control robot arms with enough accuracy to pick up small delicate objects, play games, and type b…
Would it be possible to control an extra arm somehow? Or brain plasticity doesn't go that far?
I suspect it would be possible if you can do some kind of real-time feedback/tuning of the ML model. Reinforcement learning stuff.
By slowly adjusting the model to reward hitting the ball back in pong, but also to penalize moving the real physical hand, you might achieve it.
This seems to be very similar to the early 2000s demos at Brown University/Cyberkinetics[1]. In 2008 they demonstrated it in humans[2] after lots of work getting FDA approval. The core difference here (from my non-expert reading) seem to be electrodes are along a thread rather than on a chip. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPbpHoPWo for a video of the pong demo in humans. The motor cortex seems to have a clear…