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Comment by transitivebs | Hacker News Reader

The example they gave of another company getting IDE Approval (Synchron) makes it seem possible, but I don't know how much of this is just general governmental inefficiencies and some level of systemic bias against Elon (stemming from big oil & auto). Or is the startup mentality of move fast and break things just not as applicable in this domain?

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I’m having some trouble interpreting your comment, and I don’t know how much context you have for Neuralink, so I will share a small amount of context which you may already know.

The basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.

The improvements that Neuralink advertises aren’t there, scientists in the field don’t believe that they will materialize in the foreseeable future, and there are a ton of problems you need to solve first which you could probably solve by first working with organisms like worms or whatnot, instead of pigs and monkeys.

Adding a jet engine to your car won’t shave twenty minutes off your commute to the office, it will just kill you and spread your body across the pavement. Sticking one of those Neuralink interfaces in a monkey won’t give us insight into brain-computer interfaces, it will just make the monkey suffer and die.

Any advances that Neuralink is actually making could probably be made with less suffering.

>The basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.

... and without the fraud? You can't get Neuralink installed at wallgreens, for example.

It feels distinctly possible that Nueralink is fraudulent. What is the point of the demos, slideshows, and general hype that comes from the company? They aren't selling anything, and don't expect to for years. Even then, the first customers will find the product medically necessary, and this broad marketing approach will be unnecessary. It's just odd to have so much PR for this.

How can it be fraudulent if they aren't selling anything? Fraud requires damages.

Is that a material difference? The basic elements of the formula are there—promise some kind of revolutionary advancement in medical technology, fail to deliver it, but keep going down the same path anyway. I think that the people at the center of these schemes are believers, or at least, they start out that way. You believe that this technology will provide great benefits in the future, and so you do whatever you feel you must do to keep the research going forward. You believe that with more time, more money, you can close the gap.

At least, at first.

Fail to deliver? Wut? They never commited to any timeline and have just began. What do you expect, brain computer interfaces and robot brain surgeons in less than a decade of development? That's crazy. I expect at least 2 decades, if not more.

The technique Neuralink is using to fail to deliver is a bold one where they make outrageous claims about what kind of problems they can solve with brain-computer interfaces.

There are other companies doing similar BCIs and rather successfully. There is a pretty good understanding of what such interfaces can do because it has already been tried in humans - see what is being done with people who have severe epilepsy, for example.

The innovation of Neuralink is not the idea of BCI itself nor the benefits it can bring - that's old news. Neuralink is about the surgery procedure and bringing it to mass market.

Neuralink is right to want to improve BCIs and make the technology more available, but the stated goals include things like controlling computers, using AI assistants, and telepathy. As far as I can tell, Musk likes to make promises or prognostications with a casual disregard for whether they are possible, and then apply significant amounts of pressure to the employees at his companies to make those things happen. This is a bad recipe.

It's already tested in humans, we know it's possible. Currently we have a proof of concept of roughly 60 letters per minute. It was tried with people who needed BCI because of epilepsy. It's also tested that it's possible to transfer what the person is seeing as well as what they're imagining.

Neuralink is most importantly about the surgery procedure, not about BCI itself, that's really nothing new at this point. They're building their own BCI because of their specific idea about the surgery (they don't want to need to remove the upper half of your skull like it's done today), but the tech itself is already proven.

Do you even watch the news of this field? This was tried like 5-10 years ago already, and is now steadily improving. I don't understand how you can make claims about Neuralink or Musk when you don't know the basics about the state of this field.

> general governmental inefficiencies and some level of systemic bias against

Imagine trying to get government permission to drive a car, but you don’t want to talk to anyone who has ever driven a car, or engage with the “overly burocratic” process for getting a drivers license. You might end up feeling like the system is biased against you, but it should be obvious that you are just being intentionally difficult at every step. Musk should have brought on people with experience rather than try to sidestep the system. This isn’t like his self driving cars where he can just put it out I beta and blame end users for getting killed or killing others.

What are you talking about? They have professionals working on this. Look at LinkedIn.

Professionels in the actual field of conducting animal trials and getting medical devices through FDA approval. No one who has ever worked even just as a week as an intern in the field would ever have the blatant disregard for proper procedures they had. It’s just as insane as if Elon had said “just put a dozen or so untested self driving cars in the city center and see if they crash”. Animal testing isn’t something where you go “Oh it’s only an animal so we don’t give a fuck how we treat it”, there are very high bars that you need to stick to. People know that if they work in the field, which is why you need professionals and not just biohackers who don’t care about any established processes and just want to skip them in the spirit of “the ends justify the many animals we carelessly brutalized without any care taken to avoid it”

Did you actually look? I am pretty sure they have experts in this field.

It is, but you need people who have made medical devices before, people who have done animal work before, surgeons, etc. You can still move fast and break things, just in an ethical and respectful manner that gives respect to the sacrifice that cadaver doners and animal sacrifices deserve. This is not that.

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