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First human brain implant malfunctioned, Neuralink says (thehill.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

151 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The first Neuralink implant in a human malfunctioned after several threads recording neural activity retracted from the brain, the Elon Musk-owned startup revealed Wednesday.

The threads retracted in the weeks following the surgery in late January that placed the Neuralink hardware in 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh’s brain, the company said in a blog post.

This reduced the number of effective electrodes and the ability of Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, to control a computer cursor with his brain.

“In response to this change, we modified the recording algorithm to be more sensitive to neural population signals, improved the techniques to translate these signals into cursor movements, and enhanced the user interface,” Neuralink said in the blog post.

The company said the adjustments resulted in a “rapid and sustained improvement” in bits-per-second, a measure of speed and accuracy of cursor control, surpassing Arbaugh’s initial performance.

While the problem doesn’t appear to pose a risk to Arbaugh’s safety, Neuralink reportedly floated the idea of removing his implant, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company has also told the Food and Drug Administration that it believes it has a solution for the issue that occurred with Arbaugh’s implant, the Journal reported.

The implant was placed just more than 100 days ago. In the blog post, the company touted Arbaugh’s ability to play online computer games, browse the internet, livestream and use other applications “all by controlling a cursor with his mind.”

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My goalposts are in precisely the place they started: a collection of basic international gestures to facilitate the most basic communication. Where are you jumping to colonization? Where did I say that my cultural group gets to decide what the signs are? You're, again, wildly overestimating the scope of my proposal and jumping to ridiculous, unsubstantiated conclusions.

You get a group of signers from around the world to develop an international pidgin (like they already do informally at international gatherings) and come to consensus based on commonality. When the majority agree on a sign, use it. Where there's little agreement, choose a new sign. No finger spelling, no complex abstract concepts, just a formalization of gestures most people could probably figure out anyway. I fail to see how that perpetuates colonization unless that's what you're setting out to do with your methodology.

[–] LustyArgonianMana -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I didn't provide a conclusion, I asked you a question - how do you pick the official, global sign for eating? What will it look like?

come to consensus based on commonality. When the majority agree on a sign, use it So then why even debate? If majority decides, why not just use Chinese sign language for everything?

If you can't understand the colonization aspect, then please read the books/authors I listed previously. Having a majority decide language for others/everyone is pretty classic colonization. That's part of why native Americans were forced to learn English (many of your arguments are very similar to why colonizers believed English should be established as a global lingua franca)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

"It would be nice to develop an auxiliary sign language to bridge the accessibility gap between the hard of hearing and those who don't learn a dedicated sign"

"You're just as bad as the colonizers that decimated native American cultures"

Get out of here with that bad faith savior complex nonsense. Teaching indigenous people English wasn't the problem, the problem was beating children for using their native language. I guess you think literacy is racist too because literacy requirements were used to disenfranchise black Americans, huh?

Your sanctimonious colonization comments are dripping with irony. I asked a question, directly to another person, about their opinion of the concept as a deaf/hard of hearing person. You interceded uninvited, deliberately ignored the explicitly stated context of the question (gestural languages having unique properties from verbal ones) so you could shoehorn in your opinion about a topic explicitly excluded by that context, which you smugly assumed I wasn't familiar with, purporting the relevance by referencing authors who wrote very little about the actual topic at hand.

You want to talk about colonizers, look at your own actions here.

[–] LustyArgonianMana -1 points 7 months ago

Never said that. Strawman. 🥱