Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 75% of threads retract in 1st

In an interview with the Journal, Neuralink's first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, opened up about the roller-coaster experience. "I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard," Arbaugh said. "I cried." He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.

Neuralink isn’t just treating humans like guinea pigs, they’re treating them like disposable guinea pigs.

You cherry-picked the first part of that paragraph. The end goes like this:
Arbaugh went on to say that he has since recovered from the initial disappointment and continues to have hope for the technology.
And then the next part of his statement is found in the following paragraph:
"I thought that I had just gotten to, you know, scratch the surface of this amazing technology, and then it was all going to be taken away," he added. "But it only took me a few days to really recover from that and realize that everything I’ve done up to that point was going to benefit everyone who came after me.” He also said that "it seems like we’ve learned a lot and it seems like things are going in the right direction."
Of course, the goal here is not to have an honest assessment of what happened. . .but to simply choose what we want to further our hatred (justified, IMO) of Musk.
- None of that concerns Neuralink’s treatment of him—just his process of learning to live with it.
- Thank you for showing how much bias is on this website and standing up for it.
  People really need to chill out with their preconceived notions.
  This website is going to be a shower of shit if it just people circle jerking.
- If there is a reason not to like Musk this isn't it. Honestly I could care less about some random guy.
You could actually read the article. The guy is glad to have helped make some one else's life better. He doesn't have brain damage and he is not dead nor is he worse off.
- Oh boy he's a currently happy disposable guinea pig, that makes it all better!
Or they want to actually have something that has a chance of working before doing it again...I doubt installing one of these things is a walk in the park and every install carries a high risk ... I sure hope patient #2 is getting something with a possible fix...
The patient fully embraced the Elon propaganda and spouted his praises on the dozens of media interviews he agreed to.
No sympathy for someone who invited a leopard into their house to catch the mice
- If such a person doesn't deserve sympathy, who does?
- Yeah, everyone who signs up for experimental medical trials is a stooge.

Neuralink, owned by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, believes it can prevent thread movement in the next patient by simply implanting the fine wires deeper into brain tissue. The company is planning on—and the FDA has reportedly signed off on—implanting the threads 8 millimeters into the brain of the second trial participant rather than the 3 mm to 5 mm depth used in Arbaugh's implantation.

Yeah, "just shove it in deeper" sounds like a brilliant plan.

Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but if I was that second patient I wouldn't exactly be feeling super confident about their approach.

Yeah, “just shove it in deeper” sounds like a brilliant plan.
Does your past experience in brain surgery suggest that this might be a bad idea?
They're volunteers with next to nothing to lose. This isn't some healthy person who just wants to play angry birds with their mind. They're getting an experimental device planted into their brain. I'm sure they're aware of the risks.
- You'd think somewhere amongst the literal thousands of animals they maimed and killed, they'd have figured out how to prevent a simple mechanical issue like "the electrodes won't stay in place"
- There is non-zero risk in every surgery, and this is a major surgery. There is non-zero risk of very very severe consequences: brain infection, stroke being just some. While these risks are low, they are non-zero. The volunteers have the possibility of losing everything.
I think my confidence would be tied to if there were any complications on the monkeys or pigs with going deeper.
My intuition says go as shallow as needed to get the data you need as the deeper you go the more something could go wrong, but as we see here, going shallow also has problems.
I'm assuming they tested different depths on animals, so as long as deeper in the animals didn't specifically cause problems, I think I'd be fine with it as a solution.
Now, if they didn't try these depths during the animal trials, well, that's another matter entirely.

Man I deleted my account because I didn’t want Musk involved in my newsfeed. I can’t imagine giving that fool direct access to my brain.

I wonder what it was like for all of the fools that ever bought an Oculus headset and might've been force fed anything Mark projected on that thing.
- Well tbh Quests dont really bug you much about anything FB related. After you setup the account the only thing you deal with is the initial menu starts opened to the app store with suggestions based on what you already bought.
  But that initial menu let's you also set quick access buttons for your favorite apps.
  So it's only a single click to go from "put on headsst" to "open thing I want" usually.
  It's not any different from steam starting you out in the store tbh, I can accept that level of advertising as it's pretty transparent and half the time it has something of interest for me anyways.
  It's about as big of a deal as a gift shop at a museum.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they're eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I'd rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough...

Someone paralyzed from the neck down for whom this enables the use of computers, which they before couldn't do, probably would rather have the outdated model than none
- Would they still want it if it became hackable and someone could do nefarious things to them which they no doubt will try?
No surgery needed. Just insert the ElonDongle into your rear port to upgrade your ElonOS. The process might be a bit stretchy, be patient and don't remove the ElonDongle before it finishes the load to avoid unwanted residue leaking out of the port.

Plot twist: he already has one but stays quiet about it, because the result is apparently bad
Is every non-blindly hateful person a fanboy? Any chance that some of us just look at things as they are instead of getting emotionally invested with it?

Bro, just a few more disabled people sacrificed to the machine and I swear we’ll get it right! Move fast, break things! Technology always good!

Everyone like a week and a half ago pitching a fit over me saying that this is an unethical way to treat disabled people can go fuck themselves, lol.

The dude is fine and actually pretty lucky. Its sad that it stopped working but its not like he died or something.
- You have no idea what the long term effects of the rejection are going to be, and neither does the corporation doing this to human beings after killing a bunch of monkeys and still failing.

Imagine when they put ads directly into your brain.

- The funny thing about this ad is that it's already lodged deep in my brain and anytime someone says they have a headache I think about it
Or Musk decides that you don't need some part of your brain. Or worse, rents it out as server space.
- Don't worry, the dolphins will save us if it gets that far.
!unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org
A little glimps how it could be…
From Hyper-reality
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Hyper-reality
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is the bigger concern. For that matter imagine if a government mandated mind control.
- I’m loving the typo.

Stop letting this shit head do what ever he wants!

- Yes, good point. These people are desperate, so we should let a wildly irresponsible company, who during animal testing had identified the thread retraction issue and not fixed it, we should let them experiment on desperate humans because fuck them I guess.
  Yeah the guy was able to do something cool for a while, but now he's quickly getting back to where he was and with bonus bits of metal all over his brain and no way to fix the problem.
  I don't know if that's a trade he or anyone would have made going in.
  They need to stop messing around with this Musk "fail fast" approach, that's not acceptable in medicine. You can't speed up your research by endangering the most desperate people in society.
- People can find purpose by joining a cult lmao what's your point
- He literally said he “was a waste”
  And now he's not a "waste" anymore, right?
  He's now a piece of meat to be used and abused for the egotistical whims of one of the world's most notorious capitalist parasites.
- No one has an issue with the notion of creating a technology that allows paralyzed people to control a computer with their mind.
  Where people have an issue is that Musk was told multiple times by multiple people that an implant likely will never be 100% feasible because the brain moves around in the skull, making keeping a connection tricky at best and likely impossible. (hence why the threads have retracted)
  He's been told on multiple occasions that a non-invasive tech that is both more reliable and less risky is actually FAR more feasible. But his ego and his hard-on for being "edgy" basically makes him want to do things as "sci fi" as possible because a node that sticks to the side of your head isn't as cool as an implant (to him).
  Nolan would be just as happy. Just as capable. and just as helpful to the research with something less intrusive, but then Musk wouldn't think of himself as cool.
  tl;dr - No one has a problem with the concept. But the invasive way it's being implemented is 100% because of Musk's ego driven self-delusion of himself.
- When someone claims they want to improve your quality of life, you need to consider the source, especially when it's Elon Musk. And especially when he wants to screw with your BRAIN.
  Your faith in the benevolence of billionaires is adorable but history has shown us that for the most part, billionaires are vain, greedy, brutal sociopaths. Especially Musk, who is an apartheid-loving fascist.
- Looks like we got an Elon Cuck

What a world we live in, huh?

We've got corporations who've successfully contaminated the world with their waste in a systematic fashion.

We've got corporations who've blindsided the political system.

We've got corporations who've blindsided affordable living.

We've got corporations who've given us a filtered and artificial companion in AI.

And now we've got a company that is actively seeking ways possible to ruin your way of being and living through chip implanting.

Enjoy the world, people.

What a myopic view of the world.

I almost want to work there just to know exactly how it all went down. Plus who knows maybe I could help.

First we had piles of monkeys, now piles of paralyzied people.

Relax, the guy is fine.
I really hope a good lawyer can find some kind of flaw in that liability waver
- He was already paralyzed, there’s nothing to sue over…

I'm not sure wtf they expected to happen when they aren't addressing the core problem with neural interfaces. Fix scar tissue buildup around the electrodes or GTFO

In other words

Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 85% of first one failed.

we are just chattel to them, why would they care

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Only 15 percent of the electrode-bearing threads implanted in the brain of Neuralink's first human brain-chip patient continue to work properly, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The adjustments were effective enough to regain and then exceed performance on at least one metric—the bits-per-second (BPS) rate used to measure how quickly and accurately a patient with an implant can control a computer cursor.

He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.

The Journal's report adds more detail about the thread retraction as Neuralink gears up to surgically implant its chip into a second trial participant.

According to the report, the company hopes to perform the second surgery sometime in June and has gained a green light to do so from the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees clinical trials.

Neuralink, owned by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, believes it can prevent thread movement in the next patient by simply implanting the fine wires deeper into brain tissue.

The original article contains 481 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

First one failed, let's try another one.

Hey it's worked out for SpaceX.
- Trial and error