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Comment by 234dd57d2c8db | Hacker News Reader

You can't compare the two because one was created by humans and one was not. It's ridiculous to compare these two. Here's a more accurate scenario:

You need to debug this software without a keyboard, mouse, monitor. The language is an assembly language written by aliens with no documentation that uses quantum states in protons to manage the machine. Oh by the way, it's encrypted and obfuscated into nothing but MOV instructions. And there's 100 billion MOV instructions.

That's the kind of complexity we are talking about here. So get off your highhorse and let the experts who just made a paralyzed monkey walk do their jobs.

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Actually, the electronics analogy is apt for more difficult cases than the OP's. If communications are encrypted or signed you may be out of luck unless you can extract the software from one of the devices; sometimes that's almost impossible, sometimes it can be done but only by disassembling the device (frequently an irreversible process) and reading the data off an EEPROM chip or something. If the protocol directly involves hardware (e.g. hardware crypto), then the state of the art permits nothing better than experimentation, combined with some crude 'in vivo' attacks like differential power analysis. In theory, after decapping and delayering the chip (also irreversible), a scanning election microscope can show the transistor layout clearly enough to reconstruct its functionality, but no software exists to do this automatically, and with billions of transistors good luck doing it manually.

Except they didn't exactly make a paralyzed monkey walk, did they? They simply paralyzed a monkey.

There are parts of this study that seem quite legit (another poster referred to them above).

However, the paralysis, surgery, and replay of data into the nervous system, just to be the first to "claim" they made a monkey walk was not one of them.

I already mentioned software is very different to biology, my issue is with reckless experimentation that has caused a lot of harm to a creature and provides no real gain. What were they actually hoping to achieve with this part of the experiment? It's already well understood that we can interface with nervous system, this is nothing new.

P.S. concern for the well being of other creatures isn't a particularly high horse. It's called empathy.

It's not "reckless experimentation" for "no gain" at all.

Here's a practical application for this research. Someone with a disease will eventually suffer from paralysis due to the degen. nature of the disease. Applying the technique from the research, we could record their body movements before they become paralyzed and then restore their ability to walk later.

I think that's a pretty real gain. Just because it's in a fledgling stage of research doesn't mean it's worthless. Medical research is a much longer timeline than even complex software. You make incredibly small baby steps precisely because you don't have tools like a debugger, logic analyzer, etc, etc.

> It's already well understood that we can interface with nervous system, this is nothing new.

Ok, let's not do anything then because actually putting this understanding to use involves touching actual brain matter and seeing what works.

The phrasing is a bit harsh, but the example is a nice one. It's easy to forget how complex living creatures are.

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