Second human being implanted with Neuralink brain chip | Hacker News Reader

Second human being implanted with Neuralink brain chip

neuralink.com

57 pointsnilv10 comments

I imagine a dystopian feature where ransomware hackers encrypt people’s brains and ask for ransom to unlock the contents.

Anyway, this seems cool tho.

It'll be somehow worse.

Your brain won't be encrypted, but your ability to communicate with the outside world will be. You will be fully locked-in until you send 100 BTC to an address. Seeing you have been hacked, they can reverse it with a surgical procedure, but unfortunately they can't get your consent. After seven months they turn off your brain interface due to missed payments and now you can communicate (badly), but the interest on your debt is such that you will perpetually be in financial hardship. You have a legal right to dispute the costs, but within 0.00000892 seconds GPT-42 decided you didn't have a case, and you have no right to take your complaint further. It's back to the lithium mines for you with your crippled legs - an accident resulting from a bug in an autonomous vehicle that damaged your spine. At least the accident got you a one-month free trial for the brain chip.

More realistically: they'll just brick your expensive brain implant directly with a remote update, and cryptolock it.

Try sending that back in for repair :D

We can write safe, un-hackable software, when we have to. I doubt this will be an issue.

This is impressive, it's hard to imagine all the implications of a BMI.

> "I can [think about where to] look and it goes where I want it to. It's insane.”

Aimbot! :)

I wonder if they've done anything to slow the rate of fiber retraction. I recall the first one lost most of its connections very quickly.

They mention they did in the article...

> Thread Retraction Mitigations

> With our first participant, Noland, we observed a degree of thread retraction that temporarily reduced his BCI performance. The threads have stabilized, and the performance of Noland’s Link has since recovered — more than doubling the prior world record for BCI cursor control.

> To reduce the probability of thread retraction in our second participant, we implemented a number of mitigations, including reducing brain motion during the surgery and reducing the gap between the implant and the surface of the brain. We discussed these measures in greater detail in our live update prior to our second participant’s surgery.

> Promisingly, we have observed no thread retraction in our second participant.

The release explicitly states that while they saw 85% retraction in the first subject, “Promisingly, we have observed no thread retraction in our second participant,"

Obviously it is quite early but they also talk about mitigation strategies that were taken to directly address the problem.

Edit: typo

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