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this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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Yeah, "just shove it in deeper" sounds like a brilliant plan.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but if I was that second patient I wouldn't exactly be feeling super confident about their approach.
Does your past experience in brain surgery suggest that this might be a bad idea?
They're volunteers with next to nothing to lose. This isn't some healthy person who just wants to play angry birds with their mind. They're getting an experimental device planted into their brain. I'm sure they're aware of the risks.
You'd think somewhere amongst the literal thousands of animals they maimed and killed, they'd have figured out how to prevent a simple mechanical issue like "the electrodes won't stay in place"
Like by sticking them deeper?
If this was something they knew could happen, why didn't they prepare the patient so he'd know what to expect? Informing the patient of what can go wrong is an important step in even routine surgery, let alone experimentation.
Moreover, it would have blunted this exact criticism if they were simply to say, "yes, this is something we expected from our trials but we specifically chose this depth to start with for these reasons".
The actual blog post only mentions the thread retraction in passing: https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience/
There is non-zero risk in every surgery, and this is a major surgery. There is non-zero risk of very very severe consequences: brain infection, stroke being just some. While these risks are low, they are non-zero. The volunteers have the possibility of losing everything.
And I'm sure they're aware of that. What are you trying to say here? Abandon development of this technology?
Or focus on the non-invasive form of this technology.
I don't think it's capable of doing what the ultimate goal of Neuralink is, which is much more than being able to move a cursor on the screen. Science and technology wont stop advancing just because it's potenttially risky.
I think my confidence would be tied to if there were any complications on the monkeys or pigs with going deeper.
My intuition says go as shallow as needed to get the data you need as the deeper you go the more something could go wrong, but as we see here, going shallow also has problems.
I'm assuming they tested different depths on animals, so as long as deeper in the animals didn't specifically cause problems, I think I'd be fine with it as a solution.
Now, if they didn't try these depths during the animal trials, well, that's another matter entirely.