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Comment by mrwnmonm | Hacker News Reader

A comment from techcrunch:

As the scientist who first published data on neuronal firing in the brain of freely-behaving primates (available at: Ludvig N. et al., 2001, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 900, pages 179-187) , I am curious to see this demonstration. I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts -- which is absolutely impossible with each and every currently available and envisioned electrophysiological technique loved or not, claimed or not, advertised or not by Musk.

--- Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD

Source: https://tcrn.ch/3b3YGGC

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Nandor Ludvig follow up comment:

> I did watch this presentation for an hour -- but it was so painful for me to experience this scene of incompetence and mockery of neuroscience getting worldwide attention simply because of Musk's money (while true scientists lose their jobs because of the lack of NIH or NSF grants for their quality research) that I add some sentences here and just leave. They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty: not just to move each microelectrode close enough to the targeted neuron but to make sure they can be kept there for long periods while not damaging the cell either. To do this, as claimed by Musk with 1,000 microelectrodes within an hour with "surgery without anesthesia", in the pulsing brain with no neurosurgeon present is not just impossible but even its proposal is an outright embarrassment for people with more education than the Twitter-audience encouraged to send their questions. Enough. Carl Sagan's prophetic 1996 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" predicted an America sinking in "superstition and darkness". This time has arrived. -- ---Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD

I must say, it does feel like history repeating itself. It seems that anyone who is an expert in a field that Musk enters ALWAYS bets against Musk.

And then, in the fullness of time, they are often proven to be wrong because Musk finds another way they couldn't imagine - probably because he works as a multi domain expert and from a viewpoint of first priciples.

It will be interesting to see if that is how this one plays out.

It makes me sad that a technical comment from someone in the field thats widely echoed somehow compares to funding an EV and space travel startup. No one claimed Musk couldn't do that...

You don't think that Musk had any naysayers thinking SpaceX would fail?

Certainly there were: https://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2011/05/31/the-case-aga...

A quick googling probably will find early naysayers for any significant today's success.

Of course they had naysayers.

But launching rockets is not impossible. Recovering them is hard. But it's a bounded problem.

This is another one or two orders of magnitude harder.

But they were people loudly claiming that landing and recovering the rocket is impossible. And uneconomical. All the way past first demonstrations, and it was only until SpaceX started doing it as a matter of course that these voices finally stopped.

You had people saying that trains were impossible and that passengers would suffocate once they started moving (in the 1800s)

There are always going to be delusional people at every occasion in history.

Musk’s current wealth is higher than the total revenue of all the companies of which he was CEO, combined. Not profits, revenue. I don’t get why people are impressed that he sent astronauts into space when he’s been funded by equity markets and subsidies to the tune of billions of dollars. His feats are impressive in the same way building a skyscraper is impressive, but the trick is to find a way to do it sustainably and honestly. Musk has failed at both.

That being said, Tesla is currently bigger than the 4 biggest auto makers in the world combined. Remains to be seen if they can justify that valuation.

What does his wealth have anything to do with the companies revenues?

Nothing apparently.

Musk will drive his Tesla on Mars and you'll still be calling him a failed huckster because you don't like him.

He won't.

His Tesla is already in the general area of Mars, so he's half-way there :P.

No, it isn't.

It is, ∆v-wise.

Where did I say he failed? He’s obviously succeeded. Of course he’s a huckster but he’s good at it, or people are just easy to fool these days.

> His feats are impressive in the same way building a skyscraper is impressive

Um, but isn't he chief rocket engineer at SpaceX for example? And are there not numerous stories and anecdotes of people working at SpaceX who say they are amazed at how good his brain is, how fast he calculates ridiculously complex equations in real time. And, didn't SpaceX send people to ISS and create reusable rockets and design new machines to weld steel in a way that had never been done before and, well, so much more.

Isn't that a little bit more impressive than building a Skyscraper? But anyway, building a skyscraper is pretty cool why is that the bad thing to do here?

Musk the media legend is a much different person than Musk the man. He is not a rocket scientist, he didn’t drop out of a phd at Stanford, he didn’t found Tesla, and he almost killed PayPal. Link me to one piece of technical work he has ever done, not something his employees have done that he slapped his name on.

Are we applying the same measuring tape to Musk as to other great businessmen?

How many lines of code did Steve Jobs write? How many circuits boards did he design? Show me the work that wasn't done by his employees that he slapped his name on?

How many lines of code did Bill Gates write for Windows? For Excel? For Internet Explorer? He's clearly a technically incompetent fraudster stealing credit from his employees.

How many warehouses did Jeff Bezos design and build? What's his technical contribution to Kindle? How many packages did he personally deliver? Clearly he's technically incompetent fraudster stealing credit from his employees.

Musk conceived, funded and managed all his extremely successful companies. In case of Zip2 he was even the first (and only) coder. I really don't get this desire to bring him down by denying that his achievements are extremely impressive.

Musk didn't conceive Tesla, he joined as investor and is called founder after a payoff in a lawsuit to get the title.

Also unlike many other business leaders Musk has demonstrated his exceptional technical knowledge of the fields he works in as demonstrated by his Physics first principles approach.

This is moving the goal post. The reply that started this chain had the following to say:

> Um, but isn't he chief rocket engineer at SpaceX for example? And are there not numerous stories and anecdotes of people working at SpaceX who say they are amazed at how good his brain is, how fast he calculates ridiculously complex equations in real time.

There's a difference between being a good business person (Elon is exceptional at marketing and execution) and a genius scientist / engineer. Elon has tried to market himself as the latter, and has a following online (mostly male and interested in tech) that believes it.

There hasn't been a groundbreaking paper, a patent or some other innovation that Elon personally contributed to that I'm aware of.

> There hasn't been a groundbreaking paper, a patent or some other innovation that Elon personally contributed to that I'm aware of.

What about these?

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&source=hp&ei=4iuVW4jkO...

This link is better, since the results in your link is doing a full text search on the document:

https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Elon+Musk

While great, having worked in these environments before, we almost always put our bosses on the patent if they contributed to the discussion in any way[1]. Giving the benefit of the doubt, would those contributions be considered substantial?

1 - https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Jeffrey+Bezos https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Steve+Jobs https://patents.google.com/?inventor=William+H.+Gates https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Mark+Zuckerberg

what the fuck does fucking being male have to do with this?

I don't know. It's the demographic on social media gravitating towards Elon.

If I had to guess: it's an inspirational story if you look, think and have a similar background to Elon and that demographic idolizes and sees Elon as a role model.

i just dont get why this deserves mentioning? espefially in a clearly negative way

> Are we applying the same measuring tape to Musk as to other great businessmen?

Why wouldn't we?

Gates was some kind of computer whiz kid in his early days, and who did write a lot of code. I noticed you picked certain later products, I guess he wasn't a involved in those? Jobs obviously wasn't the technical mind in his ventures. We can give these people credit for achievements as entrepreneurs without getting caught up in mis-attrtibuting credit for technical skill.

Steve Jobs never slapped his name on other people's work. He never claimed he was an engineer. The original Mac went to manufacturing with the names of the whole team engraved on the inside of the case [0]. For better and for worse, he viewed himself as a product visionary, and that's exactly what he was.

[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/122408/signed-by-steve-jobs-co-sig...

>> Steve Jobs never slapped his name on other people's work

I'm not sure he told Atari he couldn't program:

>Jobs convinced Wozniak to work on the game during his day job at Hewlett-Packard, when he was meant to be designing calculators. At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester.

>Allegedly, Jobs told Wozniak that he could have half of a $700 bounty if they were able to get the chip count under 50 (typical games of the day tended to require around 100 chips). After four sleepless days that gave both of them a case of mono (an artificial time limit, it turns out: Jobs had a plane to catch, Atari wasn't in that much of a rush), the brilliantly gifted Wozniak delivered a working board with just 46 chips.

>Jobs made good on his promise and gave Wozniak his promised $350. What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. Though it's often reported that this caused a rift in their friendship, Wozniak seems to have no hard feelings.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...

Jobs could and did program. He couldn't do what Woz could, though. Nobody could. And nobody could create or sell a vision like Jobs. Apple was a great division of labor.

> What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000.

That part is crappy for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2

> how fast he calculates ridiculously complex equations in real time

The sad part is that this is not sarcasm.

I vaguely recall from the first Neuralink presentation that the cameras used on the robots are fast enough to take the pulsing of the blood into consideration and compensate for it.

Personally I think even though it's an amazing technical accomplishment, the robotic electrode installation might be the simplest part of this whole thing. Once you have the electrodes installed, you might be able to pick out certain patterns, and maybe even restore motor function to people who have lost it.

But the part about being able to replay memories seems incredibly far-fetched. We have no idea how to really interface with the brain. We can only really talk to a small fraction of the neurons, because you can only fit so many electrodes and threads compared to the billions of neurons. It might end up being incredibly challenging to connect a new interface, like if you suddenly grew a tail and had to learn how to control it.

Consider that advances in decoding how memory and other aspects of the brain work isn't going to be possible until you can read from neurons in real time with high enough temporal and spatial resolution.

Neuralink may be the enabling factor in massive advances in neuroscience, not actually a consumer product, but a microscope.

That's not necessarily useful. Trying to understand the brain starting from the neuron level is arbitrary and certain to be an extremely difficult problem, because of the incredible scale of the brain.

However, computation doesn't happen solely at the inter-neuron communication level, but also inside each neuron itself.

Finally, trying all of this in mammals and even humans, instead of trying to first do it on something like a nematode or even simpler organism is such an obvious way of putting the cart before the horse that I can't take it seriously.

There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought. I am extremely hopeful they will do some extremely good work in helping give people with various spinal chord injuries some amount of control over their limbs, including the ability to sense, which would be a tremendous life improvement and would make the whole thing worth it. But it's much, much easier to reach half the speed of light with chemical rockets than it is to understand software by studying individual transistors in a running processor.

"There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought"

You don't need to understand it, you just need to be able to derive a correlation. Look, we've already been able to do this in a crude fashion with both brainwaves and PEM and fMRI.

What you're saying is that you'll never understand biology without studying DNA, and molecular biology, but you can "understand" a complex system at many different levels. Or locating say, the language center of the brain at a gross anatomy level is useless. All of these coarse grained high level scientific discoveries have advanced the state of the art.

Neuralink isn't try to decode the bits in your neurons. They're trying to construct a broad association between spike patterns and thought processes. We've already had success doing this, they're just upping the resolution. And to say that this can't grant your more than 0 insight into how memory works is as silly as saying that brain injuries to things like the hippocampus didn't grant any kind of help in understanding memory formation.

Put another way, 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yaQTR3KHI 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoPI-VoFV0 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2GDSYYCoA

I think the main difference here is that Musk's other ventures are all about technologies that already existed, but were prohibitively expensive or difficult to sell to a mass audience. He and his companies have done great things to promote these technologies, and to refine the tech to make it cheaper and more sustainable, not to mention fighting entrenched players who have a financial interest in seeing him fail.

But figuring out how the brain works and how to interpret its signals using a computer is in a completely different league. Maybe he'll prevail nonetheless -- he's assembled some really smart people in the field to tackle the problem -- but I think it's reasonable to remain skeptical at this point.

Yes exactly! He prefaced his presentation by saying the purpose of it is to attract the more talent. That’s the right move but by definition it will be very promotional in order to convey a vision for engineering things that are physically possible but face significant engineering hurdles.

To get this technology to work as envisioned will require hundreds of technical breakthroughs across many fields.

> by definition it will be very promotional in order to convey a vision

I think that this is where Musk's endeavors are different and why Tesla stock prices are constant source of disbelief.

He is able to successfully sell grand vision - and moreover - support it by showing results. Sure there is good old Toyota, it makes good reliable cars but it's just a car, there is no vision - I think that some people may want to buy Tesla or other Musk's company product just to indirectly support other projects.

> true scientists lose their jobs because of the lack of NIH or NSF grants for their quality research

Advertising and marketing is important. Doing things in the open does matter, live streaming double booster landing, pointing out that small steps here and there lead to big grand dream of landing on other planet does matter.

I am skeptical but hopeful as the technology can make a big personal difference for me. However i think one must be happy that someone is tackling the problem in the way Elon is doing.

Agreed! We're not going to get anywhere if we don't work on the problem. But I think people are expecting Neuralink to put an AI in their brain in 10 or 20 years, which isn't realistic.

And sure, as another commenter posted, a monkey could control a prosthetic back in 2008, but even now controlling a prosthetic with your brain is fatiguing to the point that you can't do it for very long. Time and research will improve that, but I think people are expecting that on a pretty short timeline too.

In a loosely sense, this is also a very old technology but refined. There are some fotages of monkeys able to brain control a prothetic arm back in 2008 on Youtube. [1] So, what they're currently doing is just an update on steroids from old science. It will remain a mistery to me if they'll be able to crack some basic science about consciousness as Hodak pointed out. The side effect while developing this tech will produce improvement of countless lives. That is highly doable, no doubts about that.

[1]: https://youtu.be/sm2d0w87wQE?t=49

Not only can you have animals control stuff, but you can control the animals with just thoughts too: https://www.cnet.com/news/scientists-connect-a-human-brain-a...

Intercontinental control via human-brain to rat-brain happened in 2016: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Heck, you can buy a controller kit for roaches right now, marketed for the kiddos: https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach

If you'd like, you can also hook your brain up to the cockroach : https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This kind of control is nothing compared to what Neuralink has set out to do. Also note that all of these existing brain control devices are incredibly fatiguing. You get minutes of use before you just can't do it anymore. That's light years away from embedding an AI in someone's brain. Their goal isn't steroids on old science, it's all the steroids in the entire world, plus all the cocaine in the entire world, plus all the caffeine in the entire world... and then some.

Also not sure how 12 years old is considered "old technology", when we're comparing this to SpaceX, that has been improving on tech originally developed in the 1960s.

Retro-propulsive landing of an orbital class booster has not been ever demonstrated. Falcon 9 First Stage is the only booster that ever existed able to do it. The full-flow staged combustion rocket engine is also a new technology that will fly for the first time in Super Heavy Starship. Rocket science is literally a synonym with "difficult".

Here you have how SpaceX looked like in 2002: https://i.redd.it/00ikcxo2z0f01.jpg

My guess is that in 20 years people will be also saying how he took an existing technology and sold it to a mass audience.

DC-X.

> Here you have how SpaceX looked like in 2002: https://i.redd.it/00ikcxo2z0f01.jpg

I've seen that dancing Elon picture everywhere but now I finally know the source. Thanks for sharing!

You should compare apples to apples right? SpaceX is a government contractor. The question is, in 18 years as a contractor, have they done more impressive work than other contractors. It took them 18 years to send people to space. Is that impressive for a military contractor? Just for context, project Mercury took 3 years to send someone to space.

The sad thing about SpaceX is that because NASA was tasked to build a commercial space industry (funding SpaceX and others) they slowed the pace of development of the technology by limiting the funds. I'm sure if NASA made SpaceX and it's other contractors cooperate, the funds would have been spent more efficiently too.

> project Mercury took 3 years to send someone to space.

On Nazi rockets. It wasn't from scratch.

Ha, and the other literal synonym for “difficult”?

Brain surgery!

Mitchell & Webb made a pretty clever comedy sketch about those two professions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

I think you underestimate the complexity of the human brain, and overestimate how much we understand it.

There is no even remotely existing technology that does what Musk wants to do. The stuff that does exist is in comparison a stone-age tool.

While SpaceX's achievements are considerable, they are not in the league of the achievements necessary to do what Neuralink has set out to do.

Again, I acknowledge that I could certainly be wrong about this in the long term, and Musk has put together an impressive team, but I think skepticism is warranted, and comparisons to Tesla or SpaceX are lacking in scale.

As somebody said, if a old and renowned scientist says something is possible, he's most likely right; if he says something is impossible, he has a very serious chance of being wrong.

Clarke’s First Law: “ When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

"If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion." — Richard Hamming

If it is possible, it's possible in the sense that it's possible to approach lightspeed with a chemical rocket. The predominant method in modern neuroscience for recording from a large number of cells is fluorescent microscopy with genetically encoded fluorescent sensors. Whole brain imaging is now routine (at least for drosophila, and albeit probably not at cellular resolution), afaik ephys tops out at 1000s of cells.

Gotta keep in mind that there are already several extant well-funded and highly motivated organizations devoted to studying the brain... and they're not doing whole-brain ephys.. they're doing advanced fluorescent microscopy

On February 25, a director at the CDC held a White House press briefing in which she said that the CDC anticipates that lockdowns will be necessary to contain COVID-19 [0]. In response, President Trump held a press conference on Feb 26 in which he said that the number of US COVID-19 cases is going to be 0 within a couple of days [1].

What I'm saying is that you can ignore and disparage the experts all you like and sometimes get away with it. But then sometimes reality sets in.

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/cdc-expects-community-sp...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

I mean, there's a difference between "impossible" and "impossible today".

and when an md/phd says something is "impossible today" and a salesman who thinks biology is a "software problem" says it's possible for the right price, I know who I'll bet on

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Even if it doesn't work for stimulation, this is _HUGE_ for capture. Nobody has captured anywhere near this much data non-destructively before.

It still isn't clear those will end up non-destructive in the long-term. biological processes surrounding physical brain health are far from fully understood, and it is possible there could be long-term maladaptive outcomes.

That's why they're testing on pigs first. But even if this is not viable in humans, this will be HUGE for neuroscience and our understanding of the brain. Because right now our understanding of the brain is limited to a large extent by the inability to capture information from it in realtime, and inability to selectively stimulate it. That neuroscientist quoted upthread should be in awe of these new capabilities. It's like he's working with stick and twine and someone showed him a rocket engine. Instead they just sound like sour grapes - Neuralink is doing something an academic has no ability to do and will never have the ability to do because he's in academia and he can't build surgical robots or microscopic tungsten carbide wires.

I have a hunch this will take longer but it will lead to interesting science and applications nonetheless. Also i believe the existence of a publicly discussed company like this increases the speed of research and nowadays people are much more responsive to accepting that not everything will work perfectly right out of the gate, the journey of Tesla is actually a great example.

So, Theranos for brain science?

Well, that's if you ignore Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Tesla auto-pilot - many failed experiments as well, or over-promising and under-delivering.

> Tesla auto-pilot

Huh? It's being improved constantly. Nothing like it in the car industry.

It is not, and will not become in the next 20 years, a self-driving mechanism, as it has been designed to be.

IDK about the 20 years claim, but he's definitely consistently said that full autonomy is just around the corner and that when you buy a new Tesla the hardware is already fit for full autonomy and just needs a software update with the algorithms to enable it... Both are bold claims and at least the first claim is consistently being proven wrong. I guess it creates more enthusiasm than "we are working on it", and saying that the hardware of a new Tesla is fit for autonomy means that fans buy a new one and not a second hand Tesla.

I think that given enough dedication and investment, it's certainly possible that we'll have fully autonomous cars one day, and it's likely that Tesla will be one of the first companies with such a car, but I'm just annoyed by their constant "it will be around in 6-12 months" that they repeat year after year.

Right now Tesla may literally be the last company likely to get there:

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/self-driving-study-naviga...

And those are not 'bold claims' as much as 'outright lies'. There is no known path right now to full autonomy, so to claim your hardware is ready for it is nothing but a fantasy.

That list may not be the most reliable. It pretty much seems like they put Tesla last because of the bold estimates Musk gives for full self-driving. The part where they criticize the software seems disregard-able because it's impossible to find a standardized measure of comparison when all the other competitors don't have a product one can buy and test, and the environments they run in are far less diverse than the landscape encompassed by Tesla owners.

What about the production efforts from Nissan and GM which have launched level 3 with higher safety and no fanfare?

What about the other 10 companies who have launched similar systems at level 2 with much better safety records and again no fanfare?

What about them? They only did it because Tesla is forcing them to do it. You think they would have pushed EVs and things like autopilot to the consumer at this pace for any other reason?

They haven’t really earned the right to be talked about.

Tesla is a pioneer of mass market EVs, but is not in any way a pioneer on self-driving cars.

Okay, which major car company is putting in auto pilot features in their cars today (as in, if I go out and buy this car I’ll have it today).

Open to being educated here, and I’m hoping the answer is ‘a couple believe it or not’.

Every Cadillac currently + the new GM EVs come with Supercruise.

Ever heard of the Nissan Leaf?

The Boring Company and Tesla auto-pilot are still alive though

The Boring Company is boring boring regular tunnels, nothing like Musk's fanciful visions that civil engineers have scoffed at.

Tesla auto-pilot is far behind even the state of the art in self driving (Waymo), and even that is far behind actual self driving. So sure, some good has come out of the project, no doubt about it, but the naysayers have also been right.

The tunnels themselves were never the innovation, it was the TBMs. Have they not made progress there? I imagine not much since I haven't seen them on here in a while.

What are you basing your assessment of Tesla auto pilot on? Genuinely curious, if you could point me in the direction of some resources on the topic I would appreciate it.

He has repeatedly said "full self-driving" is coming soon with the hardware that they've already sold. That is utter nonsense. Here is a very recent example but he's been saying it for years:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53349313

I've seen this described numerous times. Here is a quote from a research company called Navigant[0]:

"Tesla continues to make high-profile promises, including having one million robotaxi-capable vehicles on the road by the end of 2020," Navigant's report reads. "However, the performance of its systems remains inconsistent and its products do not match its proposed mobility business model."

[0]https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/self-driving-study-naviga...

Hyperloop was an idea, not a company. Musk only released a white paper containing his thoughts on the topic. You can't compare a successful (and arguably revolutionary) company to a glorified blogpost!

The Boring Company is still going on, with about as much speed as it was intended to.

Tesla auto-pilot is still work-in-progress. Behind the promised schedule, but so were propulsive landing of rockets and Falcon Heavy, and yet here we are.

> Behind the promised schedule

The promise has been full self driving robo taxi fleet by the end of the year for years now. Is there an actual "schedule" of features that are missing to reach that goal or is he just repeating the exact same promise without any sign of progress to back it up? His competition still doesn't have a general purpose solution and they at least aren't cheapening out on the sensor data.

Musk said that they feel confident to achieve the implant of the link in under an hour and without general anesthesia. Is their any difference between anesthesia and general anesthesia when working on the brain?

What do you mean by the qualifier 'when working on the brain'?

Typically avoiding GA is a laudable goal -- it's expensive (even in countries with public health cover), there's a lot more risk, and it would usually involve an overnight stay in a hospital (which might just come under the cost and added risk categories).

In the case of this process, it would also involve a human (anaesthesiologist), so on top of risk and cost, you then have resource constraint issues compared to avoiding GA and letting a robot do application of LA and the operation.

Open brain surgery often involves keeping the patient conscious as a good way of verifying nothing wrong and/or something right is happening during the operation -- this is probably less of an issue with this kind of repetitive, relatively low-risk, procedure.

> Open brain surgery often involves keeping the patient conscious

Many times they aren't fully conscious but still heavily drugged, just in a state of "not asleep" enough for basic tasks/communication needed to perform the surgery.

Also he doesn't explain why most universities lose funding. Unlike private companies (especially managed by Elon) most research teams are either incredibly inefficient or have to deal with an incredibly inefficient bureaucracy machine. Companies like Neuralink or SpaceX bring brilliant, efficient teams together with an efficient "machine" (the company), which is a winning combination.

>getting worldwide attention simply because of Musk's money

It's not though. A bit the money but more his track record of building cool high tech stuff that works - rockets, cars etc.

> To do this, as claimed by Musk with 1,000 microelectrodes within an hour with "surgery without anesthesia", in the pulsing brain with no neurosurgeon present is not just impossible...

The not-so-secret secret sauce that will make it possible is AI.

I'm certain it will be possible, in the not too distant future, to build AI models that can successfully control microelectrodes to penetrate into the cortex and find cells with superhuman precision.

Consider that we now have "dumb" AI machines like GPT-3 that can model the statistical structure of human language. And note that there's nothing new or interesting about GPT-3's design except its size. GPT-3 is just a sequence of really large transformer layers.

I can imagine a robot with the scale of a GPT-4 or GPT-5 successfully controlling those microelectrodes.

I must say, it does feel like history repeating itself. It seems that anyone who is an expert in a field that Musk enters ALWAYS bets against Musk.

And that's exactly what Musk said to himself when he told people to take their hands off their Tesla's steering wheel. [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-autopilot-60-min...

What an idiot. This has all the hallmarks of being wrong. It’s highly emotional. Lacks specific details. Best of all, it reveals a total lack of understanding of what is going on, which might have something to do with the fact that he freely admits he doesnt even bother to watch things all the way through because it’s... embarrassing? Pegging Elon as some fool with lots of money, the biggest indicator that this guy is just another academic idiot.

I just checked this guy out. He made yet another comment on tc about how musk is just another Theranos (obviously wrong, go watch the next booster landing if you disagree) and how his own device was much better, but couldn’t reach production because of evil venture capital culture, which musk is a part of. He really emphasized that his device was much better. Looking at the patents he filed, it was a sub-dermal drug delivery device with some electrodes to sense. So nothing to do with neuralink, not better than it in any way except maybe one could argue that the much simpler and practical device would be of more benefit overall in the short term. This guy is a liar on record as I have just shown. Academia is filled with these kinds of people. Loud mouths who are good at squawking the loudest to get grant money and brown nose all the necessary people to move upwards. Typical academia in 2020...

I work on these brain machine interfaces - the 5 billion number is made up but his point that we need high bandwidth is reasonable. I think the right answer is much lower, depending on the desired application.

Yes — and putting down on ‘only one bit’ of information as output is the same as saying ‘no one will want a computer’

Sorry, I don’t mean to imply that I work at Neuralink, but I work on BMI devices in general.

He and his teams seem to have been quite successful with other businesses and ideas that were within the limits of known technology: electric cars and orbital rockets and LEO communications satellites. All of these things existed before (and all credit to the mountains of hard work of SpaceX and Tesla for polishing and improving them as much as they have).

Perhaps he’s not pushing the envelope enough if they haven’t attempted the actually impossible yet.

I’ll be cheering for them in any case; the impossible has a pesky habit of becoming possible in the decades that building some of this stuff takes. There is no shame in trying to do the impossible and failing; proving the current impossibility of hard things has value.

I'm not sure any of those things you mention are "successful businesses". Interesting technologies, sure. But they have yet to prove they can make a dime off any of them. So far they are nothing but capital burning enterprises.

(No,Tesla is not profitable)

Profitability aside, SpaceX has indeed produced reusable orbital rockets, and Tesla has indeed produced salable, useful electric passenger vehicles. My comment (and this thread) is about the feasibility of the core technology itself, which is in question.

The idea is that if all of the things you have tried have worked out and done what it says on the tin, perhaps you aren’t trying to do a sufficient quantity of impossible things. :)

There’s a difference between trying impossible things and pretending you’ve already solved them. Lying about your capabilities takes resources away from more honest entrepreneurs.

Elon's work with tesla + spacex has greater value than any other entrepreneur this decade. He is honest, just pushes timelines back

Not just decade, This century

Tesla showed that electric cars can work (even if sustainable energy generation is still a huge issue), despite the oil lobby trying to monopolize cars to use only petrol engines [1]

[1] https://archive.org/details/vimeo-210171457 / https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/

More specifically they proved that electric cars can be "cool" and people would want to buy them regardless if they're electric. Before Tesla most electric cars were klunky, low performing, and generally meh.

You might be surprised to learn almost half of cars sold after the turn of the 20th century were electric. We knew electric cars could work for a long time.

How is Tesla not profitable?

Are you Tim Cook or something where anything under $10B is pretty much the same as 0?

Tesla has reported profit the last four quarters: https://fortune.com/2020/07/22/tesla-earnings-q2-2020-profit.... Are you saying their quarterly earnings reports are fraudulent?

I would say they could be fraudulent, certainly in the gray zone. Their profit in 1H 2020 was just $120M despite receiving $780M from regulatory credits, which is not sustainable and scalable. If governments stop giving Tesla money, they're deep in the red again.

The government gives Tesla money because Tesla is proven to actually pay that money back with interest.

They're not paying the money back with interest.

You're moving the goal posts. They're profitable, and the fact that a large part of their revenue is regulatory credits doesn't change that. There's a risk that they may not receive regulatory credits in the future, but we're not there yet.

If I moved the goal posts, what was their original position?

I didn't imply they were not profitable. You're not disputing anything I said.

This is a great example of the walled garden. There is a serious issue where experts refuse to accept that outsiders can have impact on their field. Let’s say neuralink does fail, it’s still very likely they push the field forward in some meaningful ways. Most likely they will innovate on hardware pushing the curve for what is possible outwards. But sure, let’s diminish all work that isn’t done by academics as impossible and merely false advertising. Track records don’t matter if you don’t have the degree.

I really want to know the inflammatory response over the long run — this feels too good to be true.

It's good that they are trying to do such stuff, but a lot of their goals are indeed impossible. This is like taking a running processor, connecting to a couple of its legs and trying to figure out what an operating system is currently doing.

Impossible is a word that has been often used with SpaceX and Tesla. I would be careful using that word to describe anything Elon is working on.

I like Musk, he is an awesome manager and inspirer, and clearly technically smart. But the actual breakthroughs come from the actual science by the actual scientists. And the actual scientists know how little do we know about the world (and brain in particular).

Thank you for joining the discussion. What do you think about the counterargument that they don't need to create a full mind-body interface, that they could offer a lot of benefit just by doing simpler things like predicting limb movements?

It is not my comment, I just found it interesting. Sorry for the confusion.

> I also know that in order to make any meaningful link between a human mind and a computer one must record the identified firing of at least 5 billion neurons from the "mind-generating" association cortex in behavioral and environmental contexts

Wrong. I'm no brain scientist, but this fungus [1] shows the way.

If the scope of the device is sufficiently constrained it wouldn't need to interact with 5 billion neurons.

> They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty (below)

If the difficulty lies in actually embedding the implants, then a biological solution such as this fungus should be used, with the work being done to genetically engineer it to make it programmable through a device.

Just mail me my royalties.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-the-...

> If the difficulty lies in actually embedding the implants, then a biological solution such as this fungus should be used

That article says that the fungus doesn't go anywhere near the brain.

"Hughes’s team found that fungal cells infiltrate the ant’s entire body, including its head, but they leave its brain untouched."

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