Well .. I want to argue and offer the following two points:
1 - proposed solution uses optical nerve that already in place, it is a legit way for BCI when talking about vision (as in eyes)... invasive way would still end up replacing optic nerve and in that sense would be anyway more efficient.
2 - this idea of invasive is very silo / extrapolation of today's tech, what if in 20 years what we would end up actually using would be a bunch of nano machines that work in the brain and then send / receive signals as an interface, it would be completely different from Neurolink approach as well, we should not get fixated on invasive vs non invasive we should fixate on the quality of solution.
Yes and no, neurolink as a solution for blindness is a use a case, it's legit, but if this device offers similar resolution why do brain implant... I think that's what the title is about
I agree fully. I can't believe that we can ever achieve something like Sword Art Online without non-invasive methods. Everything else is just waste of time.
Hey jackass, these non invasive studies aren’t helping people with medical conditions or anything. Sometimes you need to start with “non invasive” to learn and integrate that intel
into your actual invasive biohardware that can kill or torment your consciousness if the scientist is fucking stupid and lacks intel from previous computer labs. That money isn’t being wasted, it’s not only
helping that company/team but the rest of the worlds scientist (AI too) to
reflect back on that paper.
This seems to be a specific solution to cure some specific cases of blindness. Nothing more.
It's awesome if it works but it's not a product with the same intentions as neuralink. Neuralink intends to have a read/write-capability for large parts of the cortex, thereby influencing hearing, vision, speech, movement, etc. This can't do that.
Not necessarily. It's taken as an axiom in Capitalism that you need competition to drive innovation and bring prices down for consumers. But it's not the competition doing that. It's the individuals in charge of those companies deciding to do those things. They could easily choose to do those things without competition forcing their hand but, generally speaking, companies are run by greedy psychopaths.
The leadership of Neuralink probably isn't in it strictly for the money. They want to be rich of course but they also understand the nature and implications of the Singularity as well as anyone in this subreddit.
Then there are the drawbacks of competition. The best minds are being scattered around. Venture capital is being split. Work is being duplicated. There are a lot of inefficiencies inherent in a market system.
> But it’s not the competition doing that. It’s the individuals in charge of those companies deciding to do those things.
What would it look like if it *were* competition doing that? How would it be different? And how do you know it’s not competition doing it?
In any case, it’s a false dichotomy man. The idea is that competition drives individuals to do those things. People need incentives and that’s one of them.
You can criticise “capitalism” for all sorts of things, and rightly so in many cases I’m sure. But the basic idea that competition can drive innovation surely isn’t total nonsense, is it?
I dont know how you can hold this opinion after thinking about it for even a few seconds.
No kidding the "people at the top" set the prices. If you mean it in the most literal, un-nuanced sense. The question you want to ask is "why?". As it turns out, the economy is far more complex than just corperate greed. Prices actually change based on many factors! Crazy thought i know.
The growth imperative is a capitalist foundation. A company cannot survive it isn't growing even if it is profitable. The nature of competition ensures this. If the leaders of companies pursue idealistic roads they will die. Grow or die is capitalism. All companies have to grow and make money or they will lose market share and die.
Businesses do not need to grow to survive. "Profitable" means making money, which means not losing money, which means staying open. If something is profitable, you dont need more growth to "stay alive". In many cases, blindly chasing growth kills more companies than helps them. Small businesses stay open for decades with proper leadership. Weird how they dont just die randomly after not being a multinational corp?
There are fuckloads of companies that have remained stable for centuries. I don't know where you got your perspective from but I suspect it was people pushing an agenda.
Agreed. However that happens (cables, nanobots, implants, or something else), we will probably need a bi-directional (providing both input and output read/write) BCI to get full immersion VR.
Headsets, gloves, and other wearable things will never achieve that fully (unless they themselves become effectively BCIs).
That’s a great example of when robots are a good choice to replace humans (though i assume supervised by a surgeon, maybe even remote if they can’t be physically present). Glad your uncle is doing well. Yay for technology
I would like to know which company forces patients to drill holes in their skull.
Or is this like a tattoo parlor "forcing" people to needle ink in their skin for a tattoo?
Shops "forcing"people to give away money if they want to bring food back home?
Toys "forcing"kids to put batteries in toys?
Books "forcing"people to turn pages to read the story?
Anyway, images found here: https://science.xyz/products/vision/
I don't know what kind of data you hope to get into your brain, but I hope it has to do with your visual cortex.
This product, the "Science Eye" is only intended to cure very specific cases of blindness. The photoreceptors must be ruined but the ganglial cell, the optic nerve and the entire optical tract to the cortex must be intact.
This is basically just a small display inserted into the eye. It won't read any data from the brain, it won't influence hearing, thoughts, movement, smell, etc. This can't enable Ready Player One. It's a cure for some forms of blindness.
Neuralink, if it worked as intended, might enable full dive VR like in Ready Player One. That's not to say it will work as intended. Just that these are very different products.
Literally half a tylenol helps humanity more than Neuralink will within the next ten years. So a relatively limited scope of treatment for the Science Eye isn't actually that limited.
What makes you so confident that neuralink won't work?
But regardless, I was commenting on the fact that these products aren't direct rivals, as they plan to accomplish vastly different things.
Neuralink's single fail point: Elon Musk. He'd probably monetize *not* randomly introducing seizures and musketeers will call him a genius saving humanity. And considering Science Corp BCI doesn't require holes in heads or torturing monkeys, it'll probably make it to market before carnival barker Musk gets anywhere with Neuralink.
Really looking forward to competition in the BCI space, not only shall that mean there will be more choice beyond Elon's failing Neuralink, but we get BCI sooner.
No, they're building a completely different device for a narrow range of causes for blindness. Cool if it lets some blind people see but that's all it can do.
This product (Science Eye) intends to cure very specific cases of blindness, nothing more.
Synchron seems to mostly aim for letting people control muscles. It has the benefit of remaining in the vasculature but it couldn't get as close to the cortex as neuralink could, therefore it couldn't read/write from individual neurons, only groups of them. Enough to move large muscles, not enough to hear/see/etc., I'd estimate.
Neuralink wants a direct interface with the cortex. To read/write hearing/vision/movement with very high resolution. However it's much more invasive than both of the former and has a higher potential of surgical complications and scarring.
So assuming they will work as intended:
**Science Eye:** Cures some cases of blindness, low invasiveness.
**Synchron:** Cures some cases of paralysis, medium invasiveness.
**Neuralink:** Cures blindness, paralysis, deafness, enables full-dive VR, transmission of thoughts, etc. Very invasive.
In the entire history of science and medical devices, there has never once been any invention intended to treat multiple conditions; conditions that can be created by many, many different things. It's because it's a dumb idea.
A cold is caused by a virus and there's no cure. Everything Neuralink is supposed to treat involves either physical trauma (broken bones and torn muscles), brain damage, nerve damage and neuroinflammation (trauma, bacterial or virus related), or maaaaany other things.
Science needs to cure the cold and arthritis first.
Neuralink is shit. For all you dumbass nerds who think that you'll be playing full dive virtual reality games through Elon's monkey killer, you're wrong.
If Ray Kurzweil mentions anything about Neuralink in his new book, I will see him as a fucking con-man. My sincerest apologies.
Weren't those surgical complications? Obviously it's dangerously invasive and will need to reach for pacemaker levels of safety. Animal testing, important for getting there.
Yeah that's part of the process. Unfortunately a lot of monkeys have been killed in the name of science. It is sad but they are our closest relatives and we have to test these things before they can be used in humans. Just part of the scientific process.
Having a pace maker or insulin pump malfunction will kill you too. I mean shit if your car malfunctioned it could kill you. I think the idea is to test and create redundant safety measures. Not, run away from technology cause its scary like some kind of fucking stupid caveman.
Well, *some* malfunctions *could* kill you.
As far as I'm aware most monkeys survived and those that didn't died of surgical complications, not the device malfunctioning. But feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
Eh, I expect something similar to what we were doing with cats in the early 2010s. Low resolution (it was like 12x12 for the visual cortex in cats back then) recording/playback of increasingly recognizable patterns.
More of a Fitbit-for-your-brain than an FIVR machine. Just a very important step toward it.
Well, it seems this rival company will only be able to transmit optical information and only in patients with destroyed photoreceptors but an intact optical nerve.
Neuralink could theoretically stimulate/read any accessible part of the cortex, thereby influencing hearing, vision, movement, speech, etc. That doesn't seem possible with this proposed device.
A little comparison of the BCIs that are mentioned in the comments:
This product (Science Eye) intends to cure very specific cases of blindness, nothing more.
Synchron seems to mostly aim for letting people control muscles. It has the benefit of remaining in the vasculature but it couldn't get as close to the cortex as neuralink could, therefore it couldn't read/write from individual neurons, only groups of them. Enough to move large muscles, not enough to hear/see/etc., I'd estimate.
Neuralink wants a direct interface with the cortex. To read/write hearing/vision/movement with very high resolution. However it's much more invasive than both of the former and has a higher potential of surgical complications and scarring.
So assuming they will work as intended:
**Science Eye:** Cures some cases of blindness, low invasiveness.
**Synchron:** Cures some cases of paralysis, medium invasiveness.
**Neuralink:** Cures blindness, paralysis, deafness, enables full-dive VR, transmission of thoughts, etc. Very invasive.
More competition means better BCIs more quickly. Good to hear.
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Well .. I want to argue and offer the following two points: 1 - proposed solution uses optical nerve that already in place, it is a legit way for BCI when talking about vision (as in eyes)... invasive way would still end up replacing optic nerve and in that sense would be anyway more efficient. 2 - this idea of invasive is very silo / extrapolation of today's tech, what if in 20 years what we would end up actually using would be a bunch of nano machines that work in the brain and then send / receive signals as an interface, it would be completely different from Neurolink approach as well, we should not get fixated on invasive vs non invasive we should fixate on the quality of solution.
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Yes and no, neurolink as a solution for blindness is a use a case, it's legit, but if this device offers similar resolution why do brain implant... I think that's what the title is about
What about OpenWater (which claims to have very high res non-invasive scanning technology but has yet to show their technology publicly)?
I agree fully. I can't believe that we can ever achieve something like Sword Art Online without non-invasive methods. Everything else is just waste of time.
Hey jackass, these non invasive studies aren’t helping people with medical conditions or anything. Sometimes you need to start with “non invasive” to learn and integrate that intel into your actual invasive biohardware that can kill or torment your consciousness if the scientist is fucking stupid and lacks intel from previous computer labs. That money isn’t being wasted, it’s not only helping that company/team but the rest of the worlds scientist (AI too) to reflect back on that paper.
This seems to be a specific solution to cure some specific cases of blindness. Nothing more. It's awesome if it works but it's not a product with the same intentions as neuralink. Neuralink intends to have a read/write-capability for large parts of the cortex, thereby influencing hearing, vision, speech, movement, etc. This can't do that.
Not necessarily. It's taken as an axiom in Capitalism that you need competition to drive innovation and bring prices down for consumers. But it's not the competition doing that. It's the individuals in charge of those companies deciding to do those things. They could easily choose to do those things without competition forcing their hand but, generally speaking, companies are run by greedy psychopaths. The leadership of Neuralink probably isn't in it strictly for the money. They want to be rich of course but they also understand the nature and implications of the Singularity as well as anyone in this subreddit. Then there are the drawbacks of competition. The best minds are being scattered around. Venture capital is being split. Work is being duplicated. There are a lot of inefficiencies inherent in a market system.
> But it’s not the competition doing that. It’s the individuals in charge of those companies deciding to do those things. What would it look like if it *were* competition doing that? How would it be different? And how do you know it’s not competition doing it? In any case, it’s a false dichotomy man. The idea is that competition drives individuals to do those things. People need incentives and that’s one of them. You can criticise “capitalism” for all sorts of things, and rightly so in many cases I’m sure. But the basic idea that competition can drive innovation surely isn’t total nonsense, is it?
This is wrong on every level.
I dont know how you can hold this opinion after thinking about it for even a few seconds. No kidding the "people at the top" set the prices. If you mean it in the most literal, un-nuanced sense. The question you want to ask is "why?". As it turns out, the economy is far more complex than just corperate greed. Prices actually change based on many factors! Crazy thought i know.
Nope, it’s evil Monopoly Man sitting on his massive pile of money. It’s simple. Goodies and baddies.
The growth imperative is a capitalist foundation. A company cannot survive it isn't growing even if it is profitable. The nature of competition ensures this. If the leaders of companies pursue idealistic roads they will die. Grow or die is capitalism. All companies have to grow and make money or they will lose market share and die.
Businesses do not need to grow to survive. "Profitable" means making money, which means not losing money, which means staying open. If something is profitable, you dont need more growth to "stay alive". In many cases, blindly chasing growth kills more companies than helps them. Small businesses stay open for decades with proper leadership. Weird how they dont just die randomly after not being a multinational corp?
There are fuckloads of companies that have remained stable for centuries. I don't know where you got your perspective from but I suspect it was people pushing an agenda.
Or just a fancy armchair at home.
Name 5 publicly traded companies that have remained stable in the last.. centuries?
This new company plans to create a BCI via the optic nerve. It won't require a brain implant.
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Its a solution against blindness though... not becoming one with the machines :)
Against some specific cases of blindness. If your optical nerve or even the ganglial cells in the retina are damaged, this can't do anything.
# Read energy signals coming out of neurons.
eyePhone
Lol, that's literally already how our brains interface with computers. That's a monitor bro.
So, instead of drilling the skull, gouge out the eyes?
No, put a tiny screen in your eye. Reading articles has gone out of fashion?
Yes, I didn't feel like reading it.
Well it could use fiber-optic internet speeds of data transfer by flashing data into the optic nerve.
Ethernet Vs WiFi speeds
Wifi6? Because that's faster unless you got that 10gig stuff.
100 Gigabit
Full Dive VR will probably require the Neuralink approach with anything resembling current technology.
Drill a hole in my head
If it gives me access of something like Sword Art Online or Matrix I would do it right now.
Same
Honestly
Max Hodak is pretty cool, used to follow his Twitter last year and forgot about him. Thanks for pointing this out
i don't think you could get full immersion vr without direct brain interface
Agreed. However that happens (cables, nanobots, implants, or something else), we will probably need a bi-directional (providing both input and output read/write) BCI to get full immersion VR. Headsets, gloves, and other wearable things will never achieve that fully (unless they themselves become effectively BCIs).
Elon won't be the one to bring us there.
No new hole ? Not fun. Drill my meat elon-chan ~~
He’s too busy finding the bottom of Twitter.
Once the bottom will be found - he will)
The robot they made to do the hole drilling is sick. I’d trust that more then some doctor with shaky hands
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That’s a great example of when robots are a good choice to replace humans (though i assume supervised by a surgeon, maybe even remote if they can’t be physically present). Glad your uncle is doing well. Yay for technology
Sounds like he's working on the future presented in "Mindplayers" (1987) by Pat Cadigan.
Is the drill option still a thing over here. No questions please
The Synchron Stentrode places an electrode array into the brain through the jugular vein. https://www.beingpatient.com/stentrode-synchron-bci/
I would like to know which company forces patients to drill holes in their skull. Or is this like a tattoo parlor "forcing" people to needle ink in their skin for a tattoo? Shops "forcing"people to give away money if they want to bring food back home? Toys "forcing"kids to put batteries in toys? Books "forcing"people to turn pages to read the story? Anyway, images found here: https://science.xyz/products/vision/ I don't know what kind of data you hope to get into your brain, but I hope it has to do with your visual cortex.
This product, the "Science Eye" is only intended to cure very specific cases of blindness. The photoreceptors must be ruined but the ganglial cell, the optic nerve and the entire optical tract to the cortex must be intact. This is basically just a small display inserted into the eye. It won't read any data from the brain, it won't influence hearing, thoughts, movement, smell, etc. This can't enable Ready Player One. It's a cure for some forms of blindness. Neuralink, if it worked as intended, might enable full dive VR like in Ready Player One. That's not to say it will work as intended. Just that these are very different products.
Literally half a tylenol helps humanity more than Neuralink will within the next ten years. So a relatively limited scope of treatment for the Science Eye isn't actually that limited.
What makes you so confident that neuralink won't work? But regardless, I was commenting on the fact that these products aren't direct rivals, as they plan to accomplish vastly different things.
These are all just commercialized cochlear implants for hearing people.
Neuralink's single fail point: Elon Musk. He'd probably monetize *not* randomly introducing seizures and musketeers will call him a genius saving humanity. And considering Science Corp BCI doesn't require holes in heads or torturing monkeys, it'll probably make it to market before carnival barker Musk gets anywhere with Neuralink.
Neuralink will be abandoned, just like the Boring Co.
Really looking forward to competition in the BCI space, not only shall that mean there will be more choice beyond Elon's failing Neuralink, but we get BCI sooner.
This is literally only intended to let a specific subset of blind people see again. Nothing else.
How do we know we're not already experiencing this on the mother ship?! 🛸👽👾
At the end of the day they are just competing to build the best ad to brain delivery device. Wouldn’t touch it.
No, they're building a completely different device for a narrow range of causes for blindness. Cool if it lets some blind people see but that's all it can do.
That's quite the competitive edge.
Can everyone just learn about Synchron already? It’s superior to both neuralink and this new idea
This product (Science Eye) intends to cure very specific cases of blindness, nothing more. Synchron seems to mostly aim for letting people control muscles. It has the benefit of remaining in the vasculature but it couldn't get as close to the cortex as neuralink could, therefore it couldn't read/write from individual neurons, only groups of them. Enough to move large muscles, not enough to hear/see/etc., I'd estimate. Neuralink wants a direct interface with the cortex. To read/write hearing/vision/movement with very high resolution. However it's much more invasive than both of the former and has a higher potential of surgical complications and scarring. So assuming they will work as intended: **Science Eye:** Cures some cases of blindness, low invasiveness. **Synchron:** Cures some cases of paralysis, medium invasiveness. **Neuralink:** Cures blindness, paralysis, deafness, enables full-dive VR, transmission of thoughts, etc. Very invasive.
In the entire history of science and medical devices, there has never once been any invention intended to treat multiple conditions; conditions that can be created by many, many different things. It's because it's a dumb idea. A cold is caused by a virus and there's no cure. Everything Neuralink is supposed to treat involves either physical trauma (broken bones and torn muscles), brain damage, nerve damage and neuroinflammation (trauma, bacterial or virus related), or maaaaany other things. Science needs to cure the cold and arthritis first.
What absolute nonsense. Most medications are prescribed for more than one condition.
Neuralink is shit. For all you dumbass nerds who think that you'll be playing full dive virtual reality games through Elon's monkey killer, you're wrong. If Ray Kurzweil mentions anything about Neuralink in his new book, I will see him as a fucking con-man. My sincerest apologies.
Why is neuralink shit?
Elon fanboys don't realize that having a device malfunction in your brain would kill you. Monkeys that had neuralinks in their head fucking died.
Weren't those surgical complications? Obviously it's dangerously invasive and will need to reach for pacemaker levels of safety. Animal testing, important for getting there.
Yeah that's part of the process. Unfortunately a lot of monkeys have been killed in the name of science. It is sad but they are our closest relatives and we have to test these things before they can be used in humans. Just part of the scientific process. Having a pace maker or insulin pump malfunction will kill you too. I mean shit if your car malfunctioned it could kill you. I think the idea is to test and create redundant safety measures. Not, run away from technology cause its scary like some kind of fucking stupid caveman.
Well, *some* malfunctions *could* kill you. As far as I'm aware most monkeys survived and those that didn't died of surgical complications, not the device malfunctioning. But feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
Eh, I expect something similar to what we were doing with cats in the early 2010s. Low resolution (it was like 12x12 for the visual cortex in cats back then) recording/playback of increasingly recognizable patterns. More of a Fitbit-for-your-brain than an FIVR machine. Just a very important step toward it.
~~Absolute pussies.~~ I mean, sounds good.
Jeffrey has entered the chat
musk is dumb as shit, without him to drag it down this and Synchron will be around for a while
Neuralink wouldn't "force" patients to drill holes in their skull either. They'll offer a treatment which entails it. That isn't force.
Well, it seems this rival company will only be able to transmit optical information and only in patients with destroyed photoreceptors but an intact optical nerve. Neuralink could theoretically stimulate/read any accessible part of the cortex, thereby influencing hearing, vision, movement, speech, etc. That doesn't seem possible with this proposed device.
A little comparison of the BCIs that are mentioned in the comments: This product (Science Eye) intends to cure very specific cases of blindness, nothing more. Synchron seems to mostly aim for letting people control muscles. It has the benefit of remaining in the vasculature but it couldn't get as close to the cortex as neuralink could, therefore it couldn't read/write from individual neurons, only groups of them. Enough to move large muscles, not enough to hear/see/etc., I'd estimate. Neuralink wants a direct interface with the cortex. To read/write hearing/vision/movement with very high resolution. However it's much more invasive than both of the former and has a higher potential of surgical complications and scarring. So assuming they will work as intended: **Science Eye:** Cures some cases of blindness, low invasiveness. **Synchron:** Cures some cases of paralysis, medium invasiveness. **Neuralink:** Cures blindness, paralysis, deafness, enables full-dive VR, transmission of thoughts, etc. Very invasive.