Woman's experimental bionic hand passes major test | Hacker News Reader

Woman's experimental bionic hand passes major test

gizmodo.com

131 pointsjordigg49 comments

and provides sensory feedback

This seems like a major achievement that's just casually tossed in there with no ceremony or explanation.

I thought the same thing, feels like they buried the lede there a bit. I have a ton of questions, including if this could at all benefit from an approach like Toyota's robotics team recently demonstrated.

I've seen some amazing prosthetics on the internet, I've been seeing them for decades, but none of them get wide use. They're either all "experimental" or so insanely expensive that nobody can get them. These kinds of articles can make us feel good about science and hopeful about our future, but the reality is that the people who need these things are basically never going to have one or anything close to one.

You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

Look how much hatred there is for Neuralink. A company actually trying to productize and bring to market a device that will allow quadriplegic people to move and walk again, which could restore life for so many people who need help and have no other options.

So if you do try to bring it to market you’re pilloried by the press and everyone online and if you don’t it’s sad because it seems like there’s nobody trying to make the technology accessible.

I think the main concern with Neuralink isn't so much the technology/mission itself, it's Elon. We've seen with his other companies how he runs testing. Blow up rocket after rocket after rocket until it goes right. And even when it does go right, cause catastrophic damage to the launch pad, damage they were warned would happen. With earth Tesla Autopilots it was very finicky and absolutely should have gone through more in-house training rather than releasing it to the public, calling it a "beta" and hoping for the best.

We've seen his track record and have a perceived idea of how he prefers to advance technology. That's why a lot of people are very nervous about him putting a chip into people's brains.

If you’ve ever built anything you know that the only way anything gets built is with iteration. There are very few examples in history where something new got built and was a perfect finished product v1. The way we build new things is making something, testing it, measuring the outcome and then using the information to build v2.

Look at literally every product ever built, that’s how it was made. Rockets especially need this treatment, you have to blow up a lot of rockets to refine the process in any reasonable time frame.

It’s not just Elon’s methodology that’s all new things. How many iPhone prototypes do you think they created before they shipped the first one?

Neuralink is doing the same thing with lab animals, which by the way is an established practice used in all of science. The end result will be a cure for people who desperately need it and it will be within our lifetime if they are allowed to continue without regulatory roadblocks.

Yeah, but it is Musk doing it, so it is different!

It is funny, because so many other programs have had similar failures. How many people have Autopilot like things on their non-Tesla cars that they don't even use because they are uselessly bad? All of these things have been through iterations, including potentially dangerous public iterations.

All the poor naming criticisms of "FSD" and even "FSD Beta" are fair game though.

> Look how much hatred there is for Neuralink. A company actually trying to productize and bring to market a device that will allow quadriplegic people to move and walk again

People are wary of Neuralink because of how big tech manipulates peoples and pollutes society for profit, not because they are opposed to helping quadriplegics.

I agree there are things to be wary of, all new tech is a double edged sword. But the pro’s obviously outweigh the cons in the same way the internet and smart phones have.

You’ll find very few people who will say they would prefer to live in a world where all humanity’s collective knowledge is not instantly accessible to everyone. You used to have to drive to the library to look things up! Is that old world better? Heck no.

It will be the same with neural implants. Overcoming neurological illness and giving everyone’s brain super computer capabilities are worth the risk.

> in the same way the internet and smart phones have

I think the jury is very much still out on that one. I just got on Facebook for the first time in almost 10 years, and the comments on 'suggested' content have made me seriously question whether society was ready for these technologies. The corrosive impact of the falsehoods that are being thrown around has only begun to take effect.

People have always thrown around corrosive falsehoods like you wouldn't believe. At least modern social networks also let others spread corrections and counteractions to common myths and bullshit political beliefs.

I'd love to see some modern polyannas about "misinformation" hop into a time machine and then spend even a few days talking to any average group of people about their general beliefs in the mid 20th century on downard, or just take a look at the kind of utter invented garbage and hyperbole that was constantly peddled and regularly sold to wide swathes of the public by government and media organizations of all kinds so much more easily in previos decades and centuries.

Humans love to invent stories based on tribal notions and biases, so falsehoods never go away even in the most advanced communication age in human history, but historically, we're not doing so bad, simply because the cost of spreading any idea is now lower than ever previously and the means for doing so are more widely available than they've ever been, letting things average out much more rapidly towards message dilution. Anything in the opposite direction, and any centralized "vigilance" of supposed wrong ideas will only take us back to a place where a small number control more narrative than they ever should, and that small number will always tend towards dictating based on selfish interest.

> But the pro’s obviously outweigh the cons in the same way the internet and smart phones have

I suspect we're just starting to realize the extent of the cons for both of those things. The internet we probably have to accept was worth it, but you can probably already imagine ways that smart phones could be abused today which would be far worse than the convinces they offer. We're just sort of hoping that those types of abuses wont happen or aren't already happening.

The problem we have is that good tech designed to work for us is increasingly being turned against us, and new tech is being explicitly designed from day one to be adversarial. I'm already avoiding a lot of technology and modifying other technology to avoid the harms. No way would I ever risk handing direct access/control of my brain to a third party who wants to exploit me.

Generating knowledge and novel concepts requires privacy and control over the concept.

Instant access to knowledge has cheapened and diluted the process of creating new concepts.

The guys who put knowledge on the 'internet shelf' are not the guys who made the valueable knowledge in the first place.

The best way to create knowledge is to isolate concepts, structures and relationships into the human mind.

As soon as a concept stops being literally secret, it becomes infintely less worthwhile. Nobody works on hard intellectual problems any more because they've been massively cheapened by CTRL C, and CTRL V functionality.

The James Bond-ian culture of spies fighting over a hidden concept, is not just a flight of fancy at the movie theatres, it is one of the best culturally visible examples of how to develop and keep secret, aka. a new concept.

Spying, duplicating and publicating knowledge into instant-access platforms, is way more dangerous than anyone publicly admits.

Neuralink is incredibly sloppy. A great example would be the “whoopsie-daisy, we spilled toxic glue on your brain” fiasco.

Very rarely does any technology start off cheap enough to be mass-produced. If you don't build prototypes then expensive bespoke initial models you'll often never get to the "half of all who need it can afford it" let alone "90%+ can afford it".

If you don't like that then the government will need to step up with public funds.

I guess you're right, this has to start somewhere and it won't ever happen if the tech isn't being developed. I guess I just wish this were publicized a little more honestly. It's always "life changing tech is here!" or at least "right around the corner!" when the reality is we've got a lottery system where year after year and decade after decade a lucky few get some great cyborg tech in exchange for marketing while most people who need them only have prosthetics with utility limited to being a hook or even just a cosmetic assuming they can afford to get any kind of prosthetic at all. History tell us that things aren't likely to be any different 10 years from now.

I thought the DEKA arm was shipping, but apparently https://www.unionleader.com/news/scitech/dean-kamens-new-luk... it's finally coming to market this quarter - "testing by nearly 100 amputees for more than 10,000 hours of use" now that it actually has FDA approval; earliest demo that turns up in a quick search was 2007 ... so it's the kind of success that makes your point :}

That article is from 2016.

ugh, you're right, I'd seen a bunch of older articles but thought that one had a September 2023 dateline. I haven't found anything else with usage numbers either, sorry.

This is pretty amazing, but I wonder--how does the body adapt to having a piece of hardware that extends through the skin? Does the body not see this as an open wound? It seems like being permanently impaled with a metal pole.

Not a doctor, but semipermanent ports are common. I imagine with the right coatings and materials, we know how to manage natural rejection.

Would probably assume some level of immunosuppressants might be necessary.

Like an earring? The skin typically forms a fistula-like sheath around the metal.

A fistula from a piercing connects two surface exits to each other, like a wormhole through your body. Once complete, the piercing touches nothing internal to you, just skin.

But in this case, the prosthetic must penetrate through the skin to connect to bone.

Then transdermals as popularized by Steve Haworth. They go through skin and are mounted to flesh and bone.

I'd have the same question about them. I'm not disputing that it works, I just don't understand how the body isn't constantly fighting it. Or leaking.

In the case of the Metal Mohawk, it actually was difficult for the owner to maintain. He kept bumping the spikes on things and eventually had them removed. Granted, his was a cosmetic change and not a functional one. I would be willing to put up with extra care to effectively replace a hand. Additionally, consider that people who receive donor transplants will use immune suppressants for the remainder of their life. That said, material selection is also important.

There are some metals that are well known to be biocompatible, as in no immune response. The video in the article has diagram of the inner screws into her arm. I'd guess the screws are Ti6Al4V, which is frequently used in knee replacements and other orthopedic surgeries.

It’s more or less the same idea as a dental implant, where the gum grows over it and closes it off to the exterior.

They do have a fairly high rate of both superficial and deep infection but advancements in coatings have improved the situation.

From what I remember, the major challenge was in the nerve-electrode connection, as they have a high failure rate and sending “sensation” signals back can easily cause nerve damage.

That is metal af drilled into the bone. Edging closer to cyberpunk

This is the kind of stuff I wish I worked on tech wise, I genuinely feel empathy

in a 'perfect' future: we would cut off our own limbs to get the nimble-tron 5000 with magnetic finger extensions and predictive AI that totally doesn't strangle anyone even a little.

I joke... but I unironically can't wait for replacement limb tech to be that desirable. Imagine the upgrades people would get...

The vision and ideas from the game Deus Ex are waiting to happen.

This is not an "upgrade". A replacement is a concession, a patch, a crutch, a mere instrument. It doesn't matter if the crutch can crack open Brazil nuts or turn your TV on or allow you to fetch the keys that fell behind the fridge. Metaphysically, it is always an inferior, if sophisticated, instrument. Ridding yourself of perfectly good limbs to replace them with an instrument is not only a "downgrade", but gravely and grotesquely immoral.

You can blame the incoherent travesty that is mechanistic metaphysics for the strange notion it is otherwise.

whoa...

hold on there...

I replace my 2080ti with a 4080ti... is that's not an upgrade: that's instead categorically always a 'patch' to you?

metaphysically - a replacement says nothing to the quality of replacement.

Silly to think any change on anything is always for the worse...

A replacement can also be an upgrade. those are not mutually exclusive labels.

Why don't you see the arms you were born with as an "instrument"?

The technological singularity actually occurs when the prosthetic hand gives a hand jibber unrecognizable from a real one.

Karin Silverhand.

Does it come with attachments?

Not sure why you're downvoted here - in the video they show at least one non-hand attachment, a computer terminal which lets her control a virtual hand for training purposes. Two wires run from her implants to the terminal.

People probably thought that they had a particular kind of attachment in mind. One that can't be mentioned in polite society.

What, a dildo? It can be mentioned in a polite society. Just not in a prude one. (Now, whether it's a reasonable question or just being immature is another thing...)

Or people thought asking if a prosthetic, which is an attachment, came with an attachment to be a pointless question

Why not a leatherman attachment?

I will not be strong-armed into silence!

This is amazing. Soon we'll be at the bionic arms featured in iRobot.

No, not soon.

Do you think it's possible in 20 years?

Another nameless woman in the title FFS.

The woman shouldn't be in the title at all. This is about the bionic hand, not her.

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