First Neuralink Implant Completed

Now we are headed in to strange, civilization changing, new areas of exploration.

Thoughts? Ramifications of a bionic future will likely touch everything we care about.

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Wild. Interesting as hell. Could be amazing, but fucking wild.

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My first thoughts are that a few product generations in, some form of AI will be implanted in to our brains.

I just wonder if we will retain an ability to discern self from the internet once wired in as the technology undoubtedly advances and follows trends.

And, who will engineer our existence?

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An old friend of mine had an implant in his brain for OCD at Johnā€™s Hopkins, similar to the one used for Parkinsons to interfere with the bad signaling. It broke the feedback loop, and greatly reduced his ocd. It was also able to be tuned to dial in for accuracy. Really neat stuff. He described the tuning like waves of emotion washing over him and changing his perception.

Unfortunately after about 6 mos. in use, one of the electrodes became displaced and it killed him by interrupting the signal that tells you to breathe.

So the brain can be really tricky. One minute you feel great, next, ptth. Dead.

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This stuff has been happening for decades, even helping paralysed people to walk again, my biggest concern would be letting anything that Musk has a hand in near my brain!

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The Six Million Dollar Man had better abilities than these poor saps getting a lousy chip implant. Unfortunately, if you adjust for inflation, the surgery Col. Steve Austin underwent would cost about 42 million dollars today.

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Six billion dollar man

Iā€™m aware of implants stimulating electrical synapses within the body. Pacemakers come to mind. Iā€™m unaware of chips implanted inside of a brain that can pull thoughts to a computer and allow a person to control the computer with thought power alone.

Has this been done before? Iā€™d love to read about it and canā€™t find anything in a search.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06094-5

Itā€™s not an area Iā€™m massively familiar with, but I know 2 decades ago a friend of mine was doing his masters in cybernetics and they had already created brain implants that restored outline ā€œvisionā€ in blind patient a quick Google tells me this is still a big field of work:

Not sure if thatā€™s what you meant, like I said itā€™s not an area I know much of anything about, so not sure if your question was different from my answer?

My main point was keep Musk away from my brain, as limited as it might be I trust myself with it more than that guy! :joy:

Iā€™m more interested in the technology itself than opinions on the creator, but in your post Iā€™m still seeing implants within the body helping a failed body system work, as far as I can tell neuralink is the first to actually attach a person to a computer.

Neuralink appears to be going a step deeper, or at least aspires to.

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Fair enough, but Iā€™d personally always be more sceptical of both the purposes and the claims of the technology itself, when the creators past actions donā€™t give me confidence in them - but Iā€™ll leave that discussion there.

Still not sure I understand (sorry if Iā€™m hijacking your thread here) - these implant devices are computers, but not devices for connecting to external systems (i.e. controlling your internet or phone), is that what Iā€™m missing?

If so, Iā€™d ask whatā€™s the point?

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Transhumanism and immortality.

See Raymond Kurzweil

But we need to establish a useful interface between the brain and outside objects and systems.

Think like now, we have routers, wifi & bluetooth.

Before that, old modems that converted tone frequencies to binary code.

This is the old modem, but for the brain.

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Money.

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Iā€™m out!

Bingo.

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You donā€™t want to download your consciousness into a supercomputer generated virtual universe of your own creation?

:man_shrugging:t2:. Ok. Fine. I just replicate you in mine. :smiley:

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Haha, go for it. I still very much doubt that itā€™s ever going to be possible to do that, but that might just be my religious disposition!

And now we are getting to the heart of it.

Not liking the idea is fine, but should we sort of meld with AI and truly be conjoined with the internet (vs. using machines to send impulses through a nervous system), what will it mean?

I believe it comes down to how we are connected, because Iā€™m sure we will be.

Do we simply think what we want to see on the screen and bypass the need for a keyboard, but have an ability to unplug, or are we tied in and going on ā€œairplane modeā€ of sorts leaves us catatonic and dysfunctional? Very Matrix-y, but on our doorstep.

Will religion even matter? What does a moral code look like in general? Can hackers literally steal our existence? Itā€™s an interesting Pandoras Box.

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It becomes the ages old plot of man vs. nature or man vs. God.

If we can do or create something it is a manifestation of our nature.

So man vs. God. If we can create the experience of our own virtual universe, maybe we deserve everything we get in it?