Neuralink

BowdonUK said:
It is interesting stuff.

I remember years ago in the 1990's I used to travel to 'special' school on taxi's with the other kids. I remember a kid who was deaf. I think he was probably only about 5 or 6 years old. He had a brain implant. I think there was something on his head, similar to the suggested skull device Musk is talking about, and then small cables that went down to his ear. I think the device let him hear without having to use hearing aids.

So the basic technology as been around for 20+ years. It seems like Musk is expanding its applications. Probably with more efficient technology it is possible to do what he's saying. It's not that much of a big leap from what we have today.
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Cochlear implant.

A friend of mine has had similar done when she was in her teens and had follow up surgery to update the hardware a few years back once she was around 30. Very interesting and impressive tech, but I think like many things in that area there's a lack of funding and drive for it to go as far as it should have done. With someone like Musk pushing similar tech it'll be exciting to see where things go.

I'm all for a bit of transhumanism personally, there's so many areas of life that could be improved upon for so many people.
 
Gray2233 said:
I'm all for a bit of transhumanism personally, there's so many areas of life that could be improved upon for so many people.
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Hundreds of years away that is, probably.

A while ago there was a world-leading neurosurgeon on BBC Hard Talk. He was talking candidly about how much they don't know about the human brain. We've barely scratched the surface.

You can stick wires in a pig's brain all day long, but a complex man/machine interface like in sci-fi is very, very, very far away.
 
FoxEye said:
Hundreds of years away that is, probably.

A while ago there was a world-leading neurosurgeon on BBC Hard Talk. He was talking candidly about how much they don't know about the human brain. We've barely scratched the surface.

You can stick wires in a pig's brain all day long, but a complex man/machine interface like in sci-fi is very, very, very far away.
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I think it depends on what is meant by transhumanism really, although I admit I was a little tongue in cheek.

I'd also argue it depends on whether or not we hit a singularity anytime soon, at least when speaking of the upper echelons of 'artificial improvement' or flat out uploading copies of ourselves onto computers.

Slightly off topic but I really, really enjoyed the TV series Caprica, which was a prequel to BSG back in 2010. I enjoyed it a lot more than BSG personally, fantastic bit of sci-fi that explores the subject. Unfortunately it only ran for 19 episodes, I think it was too much of a slow burn and confusing for a lot of people, especially those expecting something similar to BSG.
 
FoxEye said:
Hundreds of years away that is, probably.

A while ago there was a world-leading neurosurgeon on BBC Hard Talk. He was talking candidly about how much they don't know about the human brain. We've barely scratched the surface.
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The post-demo round-table discussion mentioned this. By the very fact they have this device which has 10x the bandwidth of the nearest competitor and is much easier to implant means they will be pulling in more data from more people. Learning will accelerate and they have teams eager to work with it.
 
Love this, makes me think of Revelation Space series or The commonwealth Saga and any number of other scifi settings where neural meshes are normal for daily life enhancing peoples lives.
 
With advances in cloning, stacks & sleeves could become a reality in the not to distant future....


Bonus points if you get the reference without clicking the spoiler

Netflix series - Altered Carbon, but only series one, series two is a hot mess because they switched Joel Kinnermann for Anthony Mackie
 
Resident said:
With advances in cloning, stacks & sleeves could become a reality in the not to distant future....


Bonus points if you get the reference without clicking the spoiler

Netflix series - Altered Carbon, but only series one, series two is a hot mess because they switched Joel Kinnermann for Anthony Mackie
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I recommend the books! Agreed about season two. Mackie ruined it for me tbh. Funnily enough, the woman playing the protag' at the start of episode one was actually really good! Shame she didn't play the role for the full season.
 
firstborn said:
How can you say "for its day it was quite advanced technology" when you didn't even know what it was?
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Because I knew what it did, and I knew its name, though needed a memory jog to recall the name.

If you saw someone with something implanted in their skull (it was visible) that made it possible for them to hear instead of using hearing aids, wouldn't you think it was amazing?

There was a deaf part of the school I went to, so I was used to seeing kids with hearing aids.

We're talking more that 25+ years ago that I saw it.
 
Having read the wiki on them, cochlear implants are not brain implants. They have electrodes which are placed into the cochlear which stimulate the hearing nerve.

Amazing tech especially for 1957 when they were invented, but not comparable to what neuralink is which has the prospect of opening all doors rather than just one.
 
BowdonUK said:
We're talking more that 25+ years ago that I saw it.
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It wasn't worth your responding to, although I did laugh at his response.

As a caveat there's a very odd subset of deaf people where the 'deaf community' gets very angry at the prospect of someone curing deafness.

I've family and friends involved in this, it's never made sense to me personally.
 
Gray2233 said:
As a caveat there's a very odd subset of deaf people where the 'deaf community' gets very angry at the prospect of someone curing deafness.

I've family and friends involved in this, it's never made sense to me personally.
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Maybe because some of them have been deaf since birth. I guess they don't know any different, and people generally are, at least initially anyway, sceptical and rather resentful of change.
 
arc@css said:
Maybe because some of them have been deaf since birth. I guess they don't know any different, and people generally are, at least initially anyway, sceptical and rather resentful of change.
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True enough.

The thought of 'hearing' is seen as treacherous by some. It's very hard to understand and very strange to someone like myself.
 
Gray2233 said:
It wasn't worth your responding to, although I did laugh at his response.

As a caveat there's a very odd subset of deaf people where the 'deaf community' gets very angry at the prospect of someone curing deafness.

I've family and friends involved in this, it's never made sense to me personally.
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You may have laughed, but you simply do not have the slightest clue what the initial rolleyes was about.
 
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