Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip
I was sceptical a few months ago when the story of Oolong’s first Neuralink chip started circulating, but I suppose if they’re admitting something’s wrong with it then it actually did happen after all…
The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant’s brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.
It’s unclear what caused the threads to become “retracted” from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.
If I’m reading the story correctly, they seem to be mostly worried that the chip isns’t transferring data fast enough to actually be useful in moving cursors on a screen and that sort of thing. I suppose the thinking is “the guy was already a paraplegic so it’s not like we could fuck him up any further”… I mean, it wasn’t a CybertrucKKK they were putting in his brain…
