>>12066029You can stop throwing cynical strawmans, they hamper a reasonable conversation.
I'm not saying any engineering problems they have solved are trivial: they're difficult problems and their solutions could potentially also be useful in scientific endeavors, eventually.
But I will contend that the progress thus far is exceedingly disjointed from the claims being made by Musk specifically (especially streaming music, playing video games, etc through a device like this). For example, the movement tracking may seem impressive but Shenoy & Donoghue did fairly similar stuff in the 90s, and Andy Schwarz is setting the standard, far exceeding what we've seen in the Neuralink demo. More importantly though, these kinds of implants ultimately failed to translate to humans. The main problem was consistency across individuals and stability of function over time. It worked for some subjects, but didn't for the majority of patients. Moreover, for those patients that did show anecdotal responsiveness, the electrodes would be encased by astrocytes after a few months and then fail to yield meaningful signals.
These kinds of things are the major problems that critically stand in the way of the translational potential of invasive devices, and they remain unsolved and even unaddressed altogether by Neuralink. If they do address these issues, then great, we'll lean a lot along the way too. But please don't think that what they have shown thus far already demonstrates that their device has therapeutic efficacy or as it stands can even be translated to use in humans.
