I haven't followed Neuralink too closely since it was announced, so I was not expecting to see what I just saw. I've seen a handful of breakthrough moments in my life - I think this will be remembered as one.
Why would this be remembered as a breakthrough? Playing games with a BCI is many years old at this point. Here is an article from 2020 talking about playing Sonic the Hedgehog, amongst other games [1]. Here he is fist bumping President Obama in 2016 with a brain controlled robot arm.
I don't think the device itself is a breakthrough, the issue beforehand was that tissue in the brain tries to heal from the implant, it can be lethal, I don't know what they're doing to have a PERMANENT implant, completely stop that area from "healing" so tht the implant doesn't become a legitimate hazard.
The main issues with previous BCIs were that the electrodes were larger, less flexible, and not as biocompatible. This caused scar tissue to form around the electrodes, degrading the quality of the signals and eventually making the device useless. Neuralink has apparently reduced scar tissue formation enough that the implant receives usable signals for years. Neuralink also uses far more electrodes, improving signal quality and adding redundancy. The number of electrodes necessitates the use of a robot to place them. The robot is programmed to avoid blood vessels, which also reduces bleeding and scarring.
It will be quite a while before we know if they've managed to mitigate the issues enough to last a lifetime (and support upgrades), but it's better than previous devices.
Veserv|1 year ago
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/12/16/brain-...
dragonwriter|1 year ago
[2015] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/paralyzed-woman-op...
[2013] With a non-invasive interface: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2560/10/4/04...
[2011] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[2010] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20876032/
dev1ycan|1 year ago
ggreer|1 year ago
It will be quite a while before we know if they've managed to mitigate the issues enough to last a lifetime (and support upgrades), but it's better than previous devices.