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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I really found "The King of Hearts" a fascinating book.

Early open-heart surgery was ... jaw dropping.

For a child with a heart defect they sewed the mother's circulatory system to the child, and she would pump blood for both of them while the child's heart was stopped and being worked on.

There were other wierd attempts to create a heart-lung machine to oxygenate and circulate the blood during an operation, and by today's standards they would be apalling. Monkey lungs and complex machines that never saw the light of day.

but now open heart surgery is commonplace and taken for granted.

That said, I don't know if neuralink is doing something really important or is too fast-and-loose.

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....

ISBN 0812930037 King of hearts : the true story of the maverick who pioneered open-heart surgery

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I'd like to point you to the wikipedia article of Werner Forssmann, who performed the first cardiac catheterization. Using himself as the test subject. And more.

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

> He ignored his department chief and persuaded the operating-room nurse in charge of the sterile supplies, Gerda Ditzen, to assist him. She agreed, but only on the promise that he would do it on her rather than on himself. However, Forssmann tricked her by restraining her to the operating table and pretending to locally anaesthetise and cut her arm whilst actually doing it on himself. He anesthetized his own lower arm in the cubital region and inserted a urinary catheter into his antecubital vein, threading it partly along before releasing Ditzen (who at this point realised the catheter was not in her arm) and telling her to call the X-ray department. They walked some distance to the X-ray department on the floor below where under the guidance of a fluoroscope he advanced the catheter the full 60 cm into his right ventricular cavity. This was then recorded on X-Ray film showing the catheter lying in his right atrium.

Amazing. He was 25 and had just passed his state exam when he did that. Seems like it caused him some strife in his career for a while.

Whilst absolutely bloody brilliant, I think I've had enough internet for today!

> That said, I don't know if neuralink is doing something really important or is too fast-and-loose.

When I was young, I thought the concept of neural interfaces was fascinating, and couldn't wait until it would become available. Now I understand that they would be nothing more than an excuse to wire advertisements directly into our brains, and I think maybe humanity doesn't need them, after all.

> Now I understand that they would be nothing more than an excuse to wire advertisements directly into our brains

Unless you can afford the Premium+ subscription, of course.

Which will eventually include "reduced advertising", which you can get rid of by upgrading to Premium+ Ultra.

and then the company goes under and you have a useless chip rotting in your brain!

See https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

I think that someone would buy out the failed company and then suck up all of your thoughts so they could sell that to advertisers and maybe the police.

Other benefits for politics: if you are reluctant to go to war or planning to escape it, then you can be detected early and be sent to re-education camp (until thoughts injection is developed)

Whoa, I remember reading about these things in some "How Things Work" book when I was a kid. Sad to see that this is what became of them, but I'm not surprised.

You don't "understand" that you "fear" that. It's a profoundly important difference.

With a little a/b testing we can normalize these advertisements.

As a cheesecake factory waitress once told me when I commented on the advertisements inside their menu, "Lots of customers really like it!"

Actually, now that you say that, I realize how most medical devices are connected to one (or more) motherships. If you define "advertising" correctly (surveillance) this will definitely happen.

just use an ad blocker xD

This is such a tired, vapid take tho. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of BCI tech (and Neuralink in particular) but "they will just use it to serve us ads" completely overlooks the potential of this tech.

Is it? The internet has incredible potential. For a brief period of time in the early 2000s it felt like it was going to live up to that potential. Now it's a festering wound on our collective psyche as a species.

Augmenting our minds directly with our technology probably does have the potential to bring humanity to soaring heights. But in our current state, the powerful people who will be responsible for this technology will not use it for our good. They'll use it to further enrich themselves.

... which yes, probably means serving us advertisements.

It doesn't overlook the potential. It decides the potential, however amazing, isn't worth it.

There is amazing potential in this tech. But also incredible potential for abuse by the powerful. And the powerful have a way of getting away with such abuse.

well i am reminded of the artificial 3d-printed tracheas this doctor implanted in Russia, it took an ocean of whistleblowers and documentaries and journalist, all of whom were threatened and attacked with legal abuse, before anything was done about the out-and-out medical fraud he was perpetrating, with the help of US institutions no less, basically used human beings like guinea pigs by flat out lying to them about the test results of the procedure.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/16/sweden-surgeon...

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

Check out "Ticker" about artificial hearts too...

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