this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Are other forms of BCI not permanent? I was kinda under the impression that they were, and the only upside of neuralink was the form factor, and maybe trying to bring down the costs by automating it, or whatever the idea was, but it the others aren't permanent, that would kind of make more sense. Though, I kind think it being temporary would kind of be an upside, for the most part, since that would prevent scar tissue buildup on the brain, and other potential problems like that.
No, typically they're just sensors on a cranial harness.
Yes, there's no real advantage to making it permanent other than convenience. However this convenience is imo massively outweighed by the very real possibility of meningitis. It's crazy that they got approval to transect the blood brain barrier for an implant. Other implants do this, but that risk is being weighed against things like potentially deadly seizures, not mild convenience.
Do you mean EEG stuff, or are you referring to like, inter-cranial implants, which I don't know shit about?
Do you mean counteracting potentially deadly seizures, or causing them? Also, there's probably too many other problems to list about the technology generally, but since you seem like you know what you're talking about, could you give me like, a kind of general overview on BCI, or your opinion? Maybe like, challenges, what you see as being the most promising stuff, that sort of thing?
For the most part, yes. If we're just needing enough input to control something like a mouse, then there's no real reason to go with an invasive implant. You can pull the same data from eeg and ocular tracking.
It would be counteracting seizures.
The problem with BCI is that there's just not a lot of uses for them. The quadriplegic community is already small, and their range of cognitive ability runs the gamut. So creating a cbi that is useful to the entire patient population is going to be tough. The largest obstacle would be patient education, and training care takers.
This is part of the reason I discount Musks interest in BCI as medical device, there's just no money in it. I think his only real motivation is to sell it to gullible wealthy people.
Another inherent problem with BCI is that it's not seamless. It takes a lot more concentration to operate a mouse with your mind than it does with your body. People don't really understand how much of their movement is handled by their spinal chord instead of the brain.
People have a hard time utilizing interactive spaces when we separate them from physical input. Which is why a lot of people struggle with VR,. When your physical senses like proprioception don't reflect the interactions the same as our visual senses we can become physically ill.
I always got more the sense that musk was looking more for some sort of, mass adoption for this technology. Ghost in the shell, matrix type shit, that we're still probably like, a century away from. If we don't boil ourselves first, anyways. But that also might be marketing mumbo jumbo from him, and none of that really kind of solves any of his short term problems that he'd have, which you've done a good job pointing out, and are probably more relevant.
The toughness of figuring out use is definitely a good point, and it's one you see all over the place with all manner of disabilities. It's sort of unnatural enough to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse already, and those are relatively simple technologies, which is to say nothing of the maybe months of training it would take to learn how to use a prosthetic limb. I think maybe kids, children, could learn and pick up on stuff much faster, but I really don't think it would be a popular decision to decide to start testing your BCI on kids, even if you were to reach a state where it was benign, useful, and guaranteed to be stable.
I also think musk probably doesn't understand how BCI probably won't help much for easing human-computer interface, because it sort of, puts the onus of everything on the person, as being at fault for not being able to interface with the perfect, "flawless" machine, rather than just viewing them as another kind of being, with distinct, even somewhat hardwired limitations. Humans can't really split their attention and do dual processing, they can only focus on one thing at a time, and that strikes me as a pretty big limitation on the amount of data that you're going to be able to extract from someone with one of these interfaces, even if it was effortless to use. If you want them to be able to walk around and still be a functional person, anyways, and not be insane and schizophrenic maybe. I think we also have been saying that we can solve a lot of those processing problems much easier on the computer side with these horrible organoids that are stitched to mice and computers and stuff. So that would be pretty neat.
In any case, to me, this would all seem to be a little bit overkill, for those intentions, when you could just get everyone to learn stenotype, if you really wanted to "increase output". Which, again, I'm not sure would really work.
That's also all taking musk strictly at face value on his intentions, but I'm pretty sure the guy likes rockets and electric cars because he has a retrofuturist "I'm the great man of history" kind of deal going on, so I don't think I'd put it past him to think that having a plug that goes into your brain and puts you in the matrix would be a "cool" idea.