Neuralink Is Recruiting Subjects For the First Human Trial of Its Brain-Computer Interface 85
A few months after getting FDA approval for human trials, Neuralink is looking for its first test subjects. The Verge reports: The six-year initial trial, which the Elon Musk-owned company is calling "the PRIME Study," is intended to test Neuralink tech designed to help those with paralysis control devices. The company is looking for people (PDF) with quadriplegia due to vertical spinal cord injury or ALS who are over the age of 22 and have a "consistent and reliable caregiver" to be part of the study.
The PRIME Study (which apparently stands for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, even though that acronym makes no sense) is set to research three things at once. The first is the N1 implant, Neuralink's brain-computer device. The second is the R1 robot, the surgical robot that actually implants the device. The third is the N1 User App, the software that connects to the N1 and translates brain signals into computer actions. Neuralink says it's planning to test both the safety and efficacy of all three parts of the system.
Those who participate in the PRIME Study will first participate in an 18-month study that involves nine visits with researchers. After that, they'll spend at least two hours a week on brain-computer interface research sessions and then do 20 more visits over the next five years. Neuralink doesn't say how many subjects it's looking for or when it plans to begin the study but does say it only plans to compensate "for study-related costs" like travel to and from the study location. (Also not clear: where that location is. Neuralink only says it has received approval from "our first hospital site.")
The PRIME Study (which apparently stands for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, even though that acronym makes no sense) is set to research three things at once. The first is the N1 implant, Neuralink's brain-computer device. The second is the R1 robot, the surgical robot that actually implants the device. The third is the N1 User App, the software that connects to the N1 and translates brain signals into computer actions. Neuralink says it's planning to test both the safety and efficacy of all three parts of the system.
Those who participate in the PRIME Study will first participate in an 18-month study that involves nine visits with researchers. After that, they'll spend at least two hours a week on brain-computer interface research sessions and then do 20 more visits over the next five years. Neuralink doesn't say how many subjects it's looking for or when it plans to begin the study but does say it only plans to compensate "for study-related costs" like travel to and from the study location. (Also not clear: where that location is. Neuralink only says it has received approval from "our first hospital site.")
About #2... (Score:1)
"...The second is the R1 robot, the surgical robot that actually implants the device. The third is the N1 User App, the software that connects to the N1 and translates brain signals into computer actions. Neuralink says it's planning to test both the safety and efficacy of all three parts of the system. "
About #2, do they plan to do the testing before, after or during the trials with live humans?
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They've been testing the surgical robot in animals for several years, it seems to work surprisingly well.
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I can't tell if this is sarcasm. The current rejection rate is 65% if you only factor in monkeys.
Around 40% of the pigs in the trial died due to negligence and not rejection.
They even went back and rewrote findings to comply with a federal review board, but forgot to tell Elon who claimed the opposite in a presentation.
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In today's America if you killed 65/100 patients but spoke funny on social media they might give you an award for excellence.
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And give you a cushy job running the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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Re: About #2... (Score:1)
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> In today's America if you killed 65/100 patients but spoke funny on social media they might give you an award for excellence.
True enough. Andrew Cuomo got an Emmy Award after killing nursing home patients and then trying to cover up the data. Granted they did rescind the Emmy later but that wasn't even for killing elderly people, it was rescinded for sexual assault allegations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0... [nytimes.com]
https://deadline.com/2021/08/a... [deadline.com]
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Regulator says found no animal welfare breaches at Musk firm beyond 2019 incident [reuters.com]
Look, I know Musk is an arse, but making up stuff doesn't help your case. The simple fact is that many tests are, by design, terminal procedures. Where the intent from the beginning is that the animal will be killed at the end of the trial (for various reasons, such as to dissect the brain). Other procedures are inherently high risk Unless you're a
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All of the Neurolink monkeys were slated to be euthanized before they even bought them, some were delivered dead (for the initial experiments with the R1).
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What is the need to test? It is from Clown Musk, it will work as well as the Tesla autopilot.
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Hopefully we don't end up with a Dr. Octopus :)
that may be why they're not starting with Elon Musk
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I'm tired of the "an Elon Musk owned company" tack-on in many stories. First, it's irrelevant who owns the company, if the owner is not hands on doing actual work. Second, I have no trust of Elon Musk and am also sick of obsequious worship of entrepreneurs, such worship leads to false gods like Bankman-Fried, Shkreli, Holmes, etc. Also worship of people merely because they're rich leads to bad outcomes. People should realize that entrepreneurs are like normal people, full of mistakes, hired for their abil
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"but the destruction caused from lithium mines cannot be ignored"
most lithium is obtained from brine ponds, not mining & makes up a relatively small percentage of a typical battery pack.
Nickel, graphite, aluminum, copper are far greater components by weight than lithium for an NCM-based pack
https://elements.visualcapital... [visualcapitalist.com]
for LFP batteries, the cathode is 4% lithium, 35% iron, 61% phosphate and Tesla has been one of the 1st non-Chinese automakers to use LFP in its cars.
IMO they should have started with
Re: Fascinating... (Score:2)
If the tech is not fundamentally limited, It has probably been in use before. Make a spy who uploads info captured from visual cortex? Too appealing for people with high budgets not to have tried.
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Put ordinarily someone like the FDA would step in to stop this but multiple court cases in right leaning packed courts have gutted nearly all of their authority, so here we are about to put brain implants in the human beings after they kille
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after they killed multiple chimps...
It was never tested on chimps.
Re: Fascinating... (Score:3)
"Sir, sir, a reporter is on the trail of the finances for Black Heli squadron 3!". "Don't panic private, let me see
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Humans are gullible, fundamentally. To stop that you rely upon getting unvarnished information from a variety of sources, continually educating yourself, and maintaining a level of skepticism. What we have in the military is a strict hierarchy of command. So fool a high ranking officer and you've got yourself a golden ticket, because no one below will dare to criticize. And if higher ups criticize they just respond "why spend billions when we can get away with only spending millions?"
We really don't hav
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The monkeys (not chimps) that Neuralink experimented on had been used in previous experiments and were slated for destruction already before they even bought them.
Re: Fascinating... (Score:5, Interesting)
If the tech is not fundamentally limited, It has probably been in use before.
The tech *is* fundamentally limited by time - it didn't exist before. You can't use what doesn't exist.
Plus, right now we're mostly working on cybernetics for the big, obvious parts of the brain driving motor neurons. Installing cybernetics to record the activity of a few thousand neurons is easy - trying to understanding what the brain is doing from the data recorded? That's a LOT more complicated. Especially when looking at parts of the brain that are doing things more complicated than sending signals to muscles.
We're still in "baby's first cybernetics" finger-painting territory. We're not pulling useful sound or images from people's brains. Certainly not compared to the quality of recording you can get from existing cameras the size of a grain of rice.
We absolutely ARE working on pulling such data from people's brains, but we're nowhere close to useful levels yet - we're still at the "we can usually tell which of the very distinct sample images you are looking at" level. And I'm fairly sure it's not our own spies we want to use it on - the prime use case for mind reading by the powerful is to pull information from the minds of people who don't want to give it to you. There's much easier ways to get the information from cooperative subjects.
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This research could be game changing for people with ALS
Maybe. The problem with ALS is that it's not just the nerves that degenerate, the neurons in the brain degenerate as well. And all the cybernetics in the world can't pull a signal from brain cells that aren't there.
As I recall that's why Stephen Hawking never got even the simpler brain implants that would have let him operate his typing system much more easily - the relevant parts of his brain had already degraded too far.
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Didn't all their monkeys die? (Score:2)
Re: Didn't all their monkeys die? (Score:5, Funny)
No. Elon is still running the company.
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I've come to the conclusion that when he is a good CEO, it is because he gives engineers cover (and reason) to take what would otherwise be career-ending risks.
If I were to get a neural implant, it would be from a company without such a persuasive CEO,
Re: Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
Wealthy industrialist with a focus split between advanced tech, aerospace (aircraft for Hughes, Space-X for Musk), and media (film for Hughes, social media for Musk). Flamboyant personality, history of dating lots of famous women, some questionable decisionmaking both in business and personal lives, some potential stability or maybe even mental health issues (at least pretty well documented for Hughes). The real world Buckaroo Banzai/Tony Stark archetype, but a little less stable.
Re: Elon Musk (Score:2)
But does Elon love Ice Station Zebra?
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aircraft for Hughes, Space-X for Musk
Except Hughes flew his. Elon just drew a dick shaped rocket on a napkin.
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You're thinking of Jeff Bezos. Ya know, the other billionaire with a focus split between advanced tech, aerospace, and media.
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Howard Hughes had actual mechanical talents and designed airplanes. Musk doesn’t design anything. Yes I know he’s the chief engineer at SpaceX but you really think he sits down and has design reviews and signs off on drawings? When you own the company you can give your any title you please. Elon didn’t start Tesla or Paypal, he bought in.
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Uh, yeah, people who know him and interact with him say he does exactly that. He's an incredibly hands-on micromanager with a focus on engineering and production infrastructure. That doesn't mean "he does most of the work at his companies" - he's one person, while Tesla alone has like 140k people. But yes, he has a pretty solid understanding of the engineering challenges of his companies and does get involved in the fine engineering details (to the extent that he's actually present - for example he's bar
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People can be good at some things and god-awful at others.
Ain't that the truth. I've lost count of how many times people tried to convince me to move from security engineering, which I excel at, into management, which I suck at. "You're really good at this, you'd be a great manager!" Why on Earth would I want to give up something that I really enjoy and am really good at to do something that I hate and which I'm really bad at?
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The best way to describe Elon Musk is that he's like Howard Hughes reincarnate, there are some really crazy parallels between the two:
Wealthy industrialist with a focus split between advanced tech, aerospace (aircraft for Hughes, Space-X for Musk), and media (film for Hughes, social media for Musk). Flamboyant personality, history of dating lots of famous women, some questionable decisionmaking both in business and personal lives, some potential stability or maybe even mental health issues (at least pretty well documented for Hughes). The real world Buckaroo Banzai/Tony Stark archetype, but a little less stable.
When did Hughes become a batshit crazy loon trying to control what people think via the media?
Yes, we all know he bought Twitter because he thought he could change the "woke lefties" (meaning anyone not to the right of Thatcher) into believing his nonsense.
Not really seeing the parallel here.
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Oh the projection, it drips. The US right are the extremists and conspiracy nuts, claiming the election was stolen and forcefully trying to reverse it. Claiming 95% of world-wide doctors and scientists are bribed by big corporations, yet Fox and OAN are magically immune to bribing.
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All of which has nothing to do with what I posted.
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You wrote:
> and the extreme fringes were not only NOT commanding much attention, but they also had little to no influence on how society carried on.....
Gender Laynes Law issues are a small problem compared with anarchy attempts.
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LGBT are not the "fringes", and their issues were around for many decades, or centuries. What we have now is just a new backlash against them, it's all a cycle. Some decades there's an upswing in accepting others for being themselves, and other decades there's a push back towards demanding conformity. The anti-woke is just more of that cycle, egged on by political leaders hoping to benefit.
I remember arguments over pronouns in the early 80s. It had many rolling their eyes but it generated nowhere near th
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Yes, homosexuals have been around forever, but they are on the fringes of sexual preferences/fetishes.
Homosexuals (men and women) are pretty much tolerated and accepted in society and have been for awhile.
The backlash is the pushing it to the forefront of normal society and exposing children to it and that's what's not acceptable to most people
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Maybe he's more like John Bigboote. I mean Tay, Tay!
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Yeah, I've made that comparison before. And the more time that goes on, the more unstable Musk seems to get, just like Hughes. I suspect he'll eventually get to the point where even his biggest fans won't be able to deny his decline - which like Hughes, simultaneously means fewer people treating them like a can-do-no-wrong engineering God, but also leaving a legacy with less virulent hostility against a person that is clearly Not Okay.
I suspect that when the story is written, it'll be like that of Hughes:
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The only really impressive bit of engineering that Musk has enabled is SpaceX's ability to rapidly iterate and fail.
The rest of it... Full Self Driving doesn't work and is way behind where other companies like Waymo and Huawei are. His tunnels are bog standard, only using less efficient and labour intensive cars instead of a trains. Hyperlink was just a scam to sabotage California's high speed rail plants. Twitter is a complete disaster. Starlink has failed to live up to his own expectations, in terms of su
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No they didn’t.
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ORLY?
https://www.wired.com/story/el... [wired.com]
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Even the rats died prematurely. I'm skeptical that they're ready to wire a cockroach, let alone a human.
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You clearly do not know anyone with ALS. With ALS you are completely locked into your body, unable to move, talk, and in some cases even breathe own your own. But you are still aware inside. Something like this would be a godsend for them.
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Yes, something like this, that WORKS. I had a close friend with ALS, and I'm unsure if she would have wanted to be a lab rat for a startup. Maybe they should first start with lab rats that are actual rats.
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No, they're using the Microsoft version, which is why he's been "glitching", it's a BSOD.
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Move fast and break shit (Score:2)
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Well, it's not rocket science!
Severance (Score:2)
No one should be permitted to sign the consent form until they have watched all the episodes of Severance.
"The installation is free..." (Score:2)
Uuh Elon Musk (Score:2)
Even if I was quadriplegic and the brain interface worked and all, I'd be worried that some deranged maniac might come in my Neuralink hospital room and carve a giant X in the middle of my face with a hunting knife...
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I dunno (Score:3)
I would be leery about this, regardless... but, with what I've learned about Elon Musk's mindset the past several years, there's no way I'd want one of his companies anywhere near my brain.
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Today some new details came out about the NSA's backdoors in American made CPUs, namely Marvell's. Marvell denies it, but would you want to risk having a backdoored chip in your brain, or even just connected to your brain in some way?
Even if the technology worked perfectly, you couldn't trust it.
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Honestly, I'd be far less worried about backdoors and more about just simple reality. I don't want my brain interface to go EOL and shut down because it can no longer contact it's licensing server.
Black Mirror (Score:2)
I saw this one already.
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You aren’t wrong, Black Mirror is a terrible show. Watched a bunch of episodes with the wife and most make me face palm when they’re finished. Like the writer was inspired by the Twilight Zone but can’t figure out the morality angle.
Cool, but... (Score:5, Funny)
...will I be required to subscribe to Neuralink Blue to block people?
Monkey see... (Score:2)
Blue Checkmark (Score:2)
If you want a Blue Checkmark on your forehead for all to see, you're going to have to let Elon stick a probe into your brain.
You first, Elon (Score:2)
Nope, he wants to test on sick people first then work out the bugs on healthy people then, finally use it himself.
Dear Elon (Score:2)
Why not be the first test subject ?
Neuralink Is Recruiting Subjects (Score:1)
PhD (Score:1)