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Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

62 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant's brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.

It's unclear what caused the threads to become "retracted" from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

When a computer reads some signal, the 0s and 1s in it's memory is the data. The data must be processed so that the computer can understand it.

This computer is using threads to read neuron activity. It must necessarily receive data because if it didn't it wouldn't be reading neuron activity. They're the same thing.

This data is processed so that the computer can make sense of the brain. Once it understands some activity it generates signals that can control external devices.

Here's an example. Imagine a device that monitors the heart and does something to fix a problem. The device would get data on the heart and process the data so that it can perform it's function.

Wouldn't monitoring health concerns and mitigating data loss be extremely important in these scenarios?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The point is that this is the opening paragraph about something going wrong in human brain surgery, and the first thing they tell us is "don't worry, the data's fine", rather than anything about the human. Indeed, you have to read to the last paragraph to find:

Arbaugh's safety does not appear to be negatively impacted.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

and the first thing they tell us is “don’t worry, the data’s fine”, rather than anything about the human.

I do agree it would have been significantly more considerate to mention that the person is ok first, but I feel like you're confusing data storage (ie something they're collecting) with data processing (ie how the device operates). The data in question is the latter. In other words, they are explaining that the problems are being accounted for so that the device can still function in the human it's attached to.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

No, I understood that, I did read the article. I'm lambasting the fact that in an article about "brain chip gone wrong", burying the "but human seems to be unharmed" at the end of an article is indicative of a set of priorities wildly different from my own.