Video Shows First Neuralink Patient Playing Mario Kart With His Mind

Maybe I'm cynical, but this seems like something that would be incredibly easy to fake
- Like all that fake data on Tesla's self-driving cars
  
  And that robot they were gonna release.
  Not the human in a suit, the animatronic one.
- What, Elon Musk publishing a doctored video making extraordinary claims as a marketing tool? I can't imagine it.
  
  The fact it's a video game smells of Musk's touch. Anyone else remember all the tweets he made about Tesla running games on the main monitor?
  
  He'd then have to go all the way to the Internet just to lie. Seems like a lot of work to me.
  
  TBH you could replace "elon musk" with "company" just as well. Unfortunately this is general behaviour that has been demonstrated more than once by companies wanting to create hype about their product.

This is gonna end up like those people who got an implant to be able to see, and when the company went under, they lost support and their eyesight
- That's the first thing I said when this was first posted, all those people who had the implants that enabled sight are left with no parts and no support since the company went under.
  There should be laws in place stating these companies will provide support and parts for the entire life of the users. Anything less is criminal.
  
  Better to mandate open hardware and software standards, so if the company goes under others can make parts or even upgrade the devices.
  
  I would add open plans and open source so that if anything happens with the company another company can come in and pick up support easily.
  
  How do you go about enforcing this when the company goes under? (Almost like healthcare shouldn't be private lol)
  
  Be careful what you ask for and how any laws are written. I knew a guy who became a paraplegic after a helicopter accident. He actually walked away from the accident but months/years later damage to his lower spine caused a blood clot that rendered him largely unable to use his legs.
  He was wheelchair-bound when I met him, but one day a few years down the line I walked into a room to find him standing & walking. He told me he had even been able to climb a ladder to replace a light bulb. He’d been on a medical trial that was clearly promising. Unfortunately side effects piled up, he had to stop the trial, and he again ended up in a wheelchair.
  Granted this wasn’t the same as a medical implant trial, but if strict laws are enacted that required companies to support medical devices, drugs, etc. then I’d be very afraid of the impact it would have on research and trials like these. No company is going to want to risk lawsuits, etc. so they’ll just stop innovating, or at least cut back a huge amount.
- Is this perhaps a different thing than the one that had 2 patients with basically VR glasses similar to Geordi from Star Trek and the doctor running the research died? IIRC, the company is still around and the patients only lost major support in the fact that the lead researcher, who knew all the ins and outs of the project, died.

This is fantastic, but I am extremely worried about it being in the control of Elon Musk.
- You should be much more worried about the propensity for in-brain devices to cause life threatening infections no matter whose hands it's in.
  
  How would it be any different than a knee or a hip replacement when it comes to infections?

And now we wait. Quick reminder about the Monkeys, which still haunt me.
- Yeah, all of this news sounds cool, but I'm skeptical when all we hear is good things, especially after such tumultuous monkey trials.
  I'm just waiting for a whistle blower to dump a bunch of evidence a decade from now showing all the horrific Unit 731- esque shit they're currently covering up in the name of science. But by that point we'll be receiving all our news directly into our cerebral cortex using "Musk-X" brand implants, so it will never be seen or reported on. And yes, even the poors have them; their units are subsidized by the unavoidable ads being drilled directly into their subconscious.
  All you folks with kids have such a bright future for them to look forward to!
  
  "Musk-X", dying monkeys... this is all sounding a little familiar...
- I genuinely hope this works out for this guy, and everyone else who could benefit from it. This dude volunteered because basically he might as well risk dying in return for a meaningful quality of life. That's an awful situation to be in.
  But the fact is, Musk is a self absorbed narcissistic conman, and he has never taken his customers safety seriously in any of his businesses. You don't beta test self driving cars on public roads if you care about people's lives.
  That's probably not going to work out well.
  
  This is CERTAINLY not going to work well. There's NO benefit to having a chip inside people's brains when we already have the tech to read brain patterns from outside the skull. They could've spent their time and money making the algorithms for that type of sensor better. Instead, they've developed a way to kill disobedient slaves.
- That sounds chillingly similar to that episode in Fall of the House of Usher.
- D:
- Another quick reminder that what happened to those monkeys is actually pretty common for medical trials and not really out of the ordinary.

What they shown so far does not sound impressive. There is a twitch streamer that uses EEG device ans translates signals to button presses. She has beaten elden ring with that. From "achievement" point of view what they have shown here is not that special
- It’s still very impressive. The EEG she uses only reads general thoughts: e.g. thinking about pushing a boulder. She can only really do specific actions with that: there’s no level of analog control (how much should this move), it’s just a single action (fire a fireball). The brain chip is likely much higher fidelity and therefore can read much finer signals. All the credit goes to the researchers, of course, who’ve spent the last decade researching and fine tuning this technology.
  
  The brain chip is likely much higher fidelity and therefore can read much finer signals
  Then they should be doing a demonstration that shows that. I don't think Mario Kart generally requires fine tuned signals.
  
  Except it isn't.

There is no way I am putting proprietary hardware and especially proprietary software into my brain.
- I agree, but years ago most of us would have said something similar when asked to carry around a device that will track your position everywhere you go. Now we all do that, because smartphones are just so convenient.
  
  I use custom degoogled rom and custom DNS server on my phone, so I minimized the tracking to minimum.
  Either way brain chip and phone are a lot different. One you can easily discard, other one you cant. I don't want to dream coca cola ads at night. What happens when they stop supporting / updating it. There is probably something in their contract, where they can force you back on the operating table to take the chip back, if they don't like something that you did, or they are running out of money etc.
  
  Yep I agree with your agreement, I can totally see the next generations being amazed by viewing short videos without even having the fatigue of holding a phone.
  
  If I have a shitty phone the worst case scenario is I throw it away...
- A blind/paralyzed person might feel a bit differently about that. Healthy people getting brain implants for fun is quite far in the future. That is not the intended usecase for Neuralink at this time.
  
  blind/paralyzed person might feel a bit differently about that.
  Yeah, because they're forced into that position due to circumstance.
  Which is exactly why able-bodied people should be free to criticise this model and call for open source alternatives.
  To protect people that have been rendered incapable of protecting themselves.
  
  Sure but experimental technology is still pretty risky, especially with Musk's companies tendency to cover up any issues. Ending up brain damaged on top of blind and paralyzed would be a nightmare.
  
  A blind person? Sure - there are ways to "cure" blindness by inserting chips into the brain, so I'll give them a pass. Paralyzed people, on the other hand, won't regain control of their own limbs, only have external actuators respond to their thoughts - we already had that technology. We've had it for decades, without the need of a brain implant.
- What if it was open source, like Threads? (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
  
  No comment about the topic, im just stealing the emoji. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞

We've all been playing Mario Kart with our minds already, using our mind to manipulate those fleshy sticks attached to our shoulders. It's fuckin amazing.
The only usefulness this has is to help someone who can't do that. And the fact that it's attached to Elon and that all previous test subjects died and that it's still been put in a human is pretty dystopian.
- All previous animal test subjects died, including the majority that were euthanized at the end of the test period for dissection and study. There was a super high failure rate but let's not misrepresent what actually happened.
  
  I mean, it's at the very edge of what science can do and realistically there's not that much else you could do except test on relatively highly developed animals. You'd kind of expect that to happen, but I don't see a viable alternative.
- Lol this is funny.
  "Uh, why didn't he just use his arms???? DUH"
  
  Kid #1: "You mean you have to use your hands?" Kid #2: "That's like a baby's toy!" — Cafe 80's in Back to the Future Part II
- The only usefulness this has is to help someone who can't do that.
  I can’t tell if you know that the patient is quadriplegic?
  
  I can't tell if you know Musk wants everyone to buy his dangerous deadly crap.

How much is the subscription for ad-free thinking? Or is it free for non-commercial use?
- Don't worry you will only get ads in your sleep, no productivity from yourself will be affected 👍🏻
  
  Imagine being an early adopter and every time you close your eyes it’s the same fucking ad where Kanye chants: “Elon macht frei” for hours.

I didn’t know about people, but there is no way I am getting a fucking electronic chip installed in my brain, no matter how cool it might be
It should only ever be imo used to help the disabled and that too without any involvement of someone like elon
- Non invasive BCI capable of the exact stuff neuralink has demonstrated has existed for a while and its probably a much more viable way to help the disabled than cramming chips into their head.
- What if it's a suppository.
  
  🤔 How girthy we talkin' here?
  
  Can it vibrate?
  
  Now this is what I signed up for.
- This technology is evolving so fast it wont be long and a non invasive wearable will be able to do exactly the same.
  
  2010
- Then what is your plan to learn about upcoming things like the new pampers absorption technology 4.0.1?!

Wait until Nintendo's lawyers hear about this. Pretty sure brain chip compatible Nintendo controllers count as illegal homebrew.
- Honestly it wouldn't surprise me, Nintendo barely like allowing people to play their games. Looking at them constitutes copyright violation.

Heads-up, there appears to be some astroturfing going around. This is not an impressive demo, I've seen better without brain implants. If anything, I'm more impressed that the test subject hasn't died yet.
- I've seen better without brain implants.
  Yeah, I've heard that they have technology that allows you to play Mario Kart with your hands.
  
  That's a baby's toy!
  
  Holy shit did Lord Musk invent hand implants? I remember the Over-The-Arm Manipulators patent but I didn't think that OTAM technology would go anywhere.
  
  I'm using tilt controls !
- I agree, this is not ground breaking in terms of BCIs (in general, maybe in how intrusive it was compared to standard projects using an EEG). Plenty[1] of YouTube videos on mapping certain brain waves to buttons.
  [1]: Playing Video Games With Mind Control
  
  Commenting to remind myself later because I'd love to check into this. My hands are achy from years of overuse, so an alternative to physical controls would be amazing.
- I've seen better without brain implants.
  Yes but I can drive a car without brain implants. Doing it with brain implants is the impressive bit.
  Really not quite sure what your point is
  
  We've been able to stick an electrode to the outside of your head and pull electrical activity data from your brain without invasive open-skull surgery for a couple decades now. Neuralink hasn't actually accomplished anything new except making this same thing way, way more expensive and way, way more likely to end in death of the patient.
  
  Reading comprehension? It's obviously implied that I've seen better with OTHER neural sensors, not someone just playing normaly.

Neuralink hasn't address the security complications, hopefully their engineers know what are they doing
- Spoiler: they don't.

I hate Elon but love the idea of this. The utopian version, not the dystopian version obviously.
We are really going to have to make sure that regulation is solid if we want to go towards the positive utopian version.
- There is no utopian version of this.
- No amount of regulation will ever make this safe or reasonable. You're literally installing a suicide bomb in your brain which can be hacked at any point, or abused by any state. Regulation serves to discourage and punish undesired behavior - doesn't stop it.
  
  Bring back ~~audio~~ brain jacks!
- Same, being able to do things with your mind would be wonderful but if it comes with cost of potentially handing your own killswitch to ketaminecrazed billionaire.. (or anyone). If the device isnt 100% opensource so anyone can see how it works, there is no way to know what it can do. And even if we assume it wont be used in overtly malicious way, being able to physically affects someone's brain( be it reading or writing) means being able to absolutely control of someone.
  
  They're not being manipulated, though. You can tell because 100% of Neuralink users feel they're not being manipulated at all and that their absolutely fanatical devotion to the company is because it, and its founder Galactic President Musk, are just that great!
- There is no utopian version as long as we maintain the capitalist system. How long do you think “regulations” can stand against the profit incentive of every conceivable greedy ghoul out there?
  
  Ok, the solution is to abolish capitalism then, and I'm more than fine with that.
- even if it were completely F/OSS including the hardware I'm as afraid of a brain accident as I am of someone purposely doing awful shit to my brain. I want what you want too, it's just that there's no world in which that happens.

Something similar existed in 2013 already:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/now-you-can-control-video-games-with-your-thoughts-alone-2005031/
- I keep reminding people that this technology was already in development, that Elon and is Neuralink isn't a unique invention...
  
  Literally every business he's ever touched. He's not an inventor he's an exploiter.
  
  Sure absolutely but also it's a bad idea to be disingenuous just because Elon needs a dick. This technology is impressive because it's fully internal. You don't have to wear some massive hat, it's a compact internal design. Does actually show some significant advancement
- Bruh, are you really comparing a digital two input wearable device to an implant with fine analog control? This is the biggest leap in brain to computer interface technology, probably ever.
  I hate that Neuralink is associated with Elon and the testing they did on animals as absolutely abhorrent, but this is crazy. The guy has been playing Civ 6 ffs.
  
  Can you read?
  Wearing a cap designed to measure brain activity players nod their head or blink their eyes, training the equipment to translate brain patterns associated with those motions into movement on-screen.
  They only have a two input system because the experiment was made with two inputs in mind. I've seen a comercial wearable neural sensor in action ~9 years ago, being used in experiments by my colleagues. It can do a lot more than that.
  
  I didn't say there's no difference in the technology used. But the results are quite comparable at the moment. Maybe that can be changed and further developed in future. But is much much more dangerous to implant than to put a cap on your head. So I say don't be fooled by the marketing of Neuralink.

This is cool but they burned through a bunch of monkeys to get here.
Also, fuck Elon.
- This shit has the potential to kill millions of humans, maybe even billions. I think it's about time to burn them to the ground.
  
  Jesus. I hate this dystopian present and everything, but c'mon, you're exaggerating. Other things will "kill billions" before this neuro-stuff does.
  
  Yeah and water has that potential too.
- They say, on their mobile phone made by impoverished children they'll never see the faces of...
  I mean, fuck the entire Musk family. First in line to the woodchipper when the prols finally rise up.
  But, perspective, ya know?

I've seen this kind of thing as well as people given an entirely new sense (a sense of direction similar to how birds can sense magnetic north) with just an EEG cap. Why would you need to implant something directly in the brain to do this?
- This is how he intends to get full self drive teslas
  
  there was a tv show with this in it. Captain Laserhawk.
  Prisoners were locked in VR tubes and forced to play this taxi game endlessly.
  
  By having someone locked inside the trunk that drives in your stead? Sounds very Musk.
- Yeah, the only way they'll put a Musk chip in my brain is by force.
  EDIT: on second thought, maybe they play Mario kart cause that's the only thing they can do now..
- The purpose of Neuralink is not to enable you to play mario kart. It's obviously just a demo.
  
  Then they should demo what it can do that a simple EEG cap can't.

The same can be achieved with non-implanted BCI. Why get invasive surgery?

Bullshit until proven otherwise. Dangerous and stupid regardless. And a depressing harbinger of the corpo cyberpunk dystopia whether this is real or totally faked.
- I agree with your take on the corpo dystopia issue and would prefer other solutions instead of this but the sort of patients being served definitely need some significant support.
  Mutahar made a video about this that gives us a rough outline of where we are at with this technology, and I agree with his opinion about using eye trackers instead of brain implants for the sort of feature they seem to provide.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  video
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  thanks for the linked video, it is worth a watch
  
  It's not even an either-or, there are WEARABLE neural sensors which don't need to be installed inside your skull and can still read your brain patterns. This is clearly a kill button for the rich fucks to install in ~~workers'~~ slaves' heads.
- genuinely worried this is the next medbeds bullshit parade

It hopefully won't be an Elon company, but someone is gonna mangle a TON of pigs and monkeys to make this tech ready work.
Humanity needs to understand what it will take. Even the highest standards of specimen care are still horrific.
- The price of being apex and moraliy responsible.
  
  Yeah, I don't know this, but did we very gently slay a ton of animals learning how to do surgery and heart transplants?
  I'm not a huge fan either, but how do people feel when the procedure saves their mom or kid?

I wonder if they still lean in to the turns. I can't not do that.
- IIRC they’re paralyzed from the shoulders down, so probably not.
  
  Someone should design a tilting seat to hook up the neuralink so that he can.

Not supertuxcart ? I'm dissapointed and my day is ruined.

I see where this is going. FSD 2.0 will use human in the loop, saving money on cameras and LIDAR.
- The current version of FSD Beta is 12 and it's fully AI powered with no human intervention in the loop. It studies videos of good human drivers and tries to mimic that and currently seems to be doing so with great success. Much better than competition despite not having lidar.
  
  Current AI art studies good human art and tries to mimic that. It's good with broad ideas but terrible at fine details or understanding specifics. "A painting of five apples" will understand "painting" and "multiple apples" but not the number 5.
  These specific fine details are very important for safe driving.

How many years of software updates? 😆

I can't believe this seems to be going so well. Cool to see!
- It's not going well - they could've done the same demo (assuming it's not fraudulent) with an EEG cap and no brain implant.
  
  EEG can’t accomplish the same thing, it doesn’t have analog control, mario cart has analog steering and in the video you can see it working.
  It’s an entirely different tech meant to do something else, so no an eeg chop cannot ever accomplish the same thing.
  You’re spreading misinformation all over this thread.

Far right oligarch can install hardware into the brains of people. It's amazing the right isn't freaking out about this. If someone who voted against them made this, they would set record times regulating it.

ITT: People really hate elon musk but kind of don't know why, specifically. This tech is outpaced by EEG. This tech is the greatest technological development of all time, but I wish it was under someone else. This guy will die like the monkeys, all the monkeys and pigs died also did you guys hear about this? Did you guys hear?
I think it's a pretty bad demo. As said, EEG is capable of the same thing, intercranial EEG is capable of the same thing, and I'm pretty sure microelectrodes have also already been capable of this for a while. I think generally we've been capable of this sort of stuff since like the 60's or 70's if I'm not mistaken, but nothing ever really comes of it in terms of the commercial market. I think the biggest thing I can think of is probably cochlear implants. I hope somebody corrects me if there's a larger thing that I'm missing there. In any case, this doesn't really show us anything, or provide any real reason for why this is better than your other less invasive alternatives, or even why this is a novel form of BCI. Supposedly this is supposed to be automated, smaller, and cheaper than your alternatives, but it also maybe struggles with differentiating signals, and hasn't shown any major progress towards solving the more major technical hurdles facing the technology as it currently exists. You can't really do a demo based on a solution to both a problem nobody asked for, and you can't do a demo for something which is basically purely for economic and convenience gains. If that's the use-case, it seems like kind of a misunderstanding as to where this technology currently is. BCI, broadly has the potential to do some really cool stuff, but nobody's really solving any of the major bio-compatibility issues. I think you would find more interesting similar work done with wetware and organoids, but those are all in lab settings in highly regulated and normalized environments, so they're still a ways off from consumer use.
Everyone's concerned about computer viruses on these things. I think the main concern is actually regular viruses, no?

Direct link to the video: https://x.com/ModdedQuad/status/1771298116719002100
Mario Kart section happens a little after 1/3 of the way through.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The first patient with a Neuralink brain-computer implant played Nintendo's Mario Kart video game with his mind in an impressive new demo video, calling it "lifechanging" at a company-wide meeting that was posted Friday on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter.
"This is going to change the world," added Arbaugh, who's quadriplegic, meaning he's paralyzed below his neck from a swimming accident, and requires the use of a wheelchair.
During the company meeting with Arbaugh as honorary guest, Neuralink posted the gameplay video showing a split screen of two characters, Donkey Kong and Bowser, racing in Mario Kart.
Other impressive feats that Arbaugh has achieved with the Neuralink implant include being able to play the strategy video game Civilization VI.
It was in January that Neuralink founder Elon Musk announced that the company had inserted its implant into its first human subject, who was at the time unnamed.
The company has been experiencing a spate of negative press with news about monkeys dying from nightmarish-sounding lab experiments and lawmakers asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Musk misled investors on how the implanted monkeys died.
The original article contains 383 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

So, at some point a single soldier will be able to pilot, aim and reload a tank by themselves like in Halo?
- Except in the neurolinked soldier will still be playing Mario Cart in their mind tossing banana peels into refugee camps.
  
  Instead of nukes, it'll be blue shells lol
  
  I guess it'll be a long road until we have thingies like in Halo
- A think tank.
  
  A two-track mind.

Watching the video seems better than reading an article since you get to hear from the patient. It's in the article, but they posted a Twitter video link.
https://youtu.be/79VvxBStbWY
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/79VvxBStbWY
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I thought all the monkeys that got neuralinked died of gangreen to the brain

Slave labor force here we come! Whips are so last millennium, the whip is a chip now.

Of course it's Mario Kart!

Okay, now we need a spider legged chair with wheels in it so he can go solve crimes! With me! I'm going to stop being sick and turn into a crime fighting vixen in Spandex. At least for today. I gotta go back to work tomorrow.

It's funny how upset people are that disabled people are getting new tech to help them simply because bad Twitter man owns the company.
- Musk has a history of cutting important safety and regulatory jobs to reduce costs. He runs extremely lean businesses.
  Maybe it will be different with a biomedical business but I think people are right to be skeptical.
- I think mainly people are upset about the animal abuse occurring because of the research at the company.
  
  You mean the animal abuse that occurs during research and development of practically every Type III medical device? I don't hear a lot of people demonizing pacemakers though.
  
  I've never eaten meat in my life or worn fur, I've had the conversstions a lot snd know how people react to animal cruelty, sadly it's normally indifference.
  If it was just the animal cruelty then it would be more then just nuralink people are mad at. The only reason it was a news story and none of the other things peta rage about are news stories is because people hate Elon, I hate Elon and I think they should all he news stories but I also try to live in reality.
  If we're going to torture animals for food and medical experiments then giving control back to people with one of the most debilitating and distressing medical conditions is probably the best examples of justification to be made.
  
  Let's be honest here; it has very little to do with that and everything to do with the anti-Elon sentiment. People absolutely despise the man and actively look for reasons to shit on everything he does. The response is purely emotional.
- I mean he's not a bad twitter man, he's literally spreading white supremacy and transphobia to millions on his rigged platform, I absolutely want him to fail the same way I'd want Henry Ford to fail in his time, I'd want a horrible fate to fall on them both regardless of what engineers at their companies end up accomplishing.

Got a neuralink? One word you never wanna hear: 'Oops!'

What a depressingly cynical comment section.
- Any news about Musk ventures should inspire cynicism.
- "Let's use the disabled as guinea pigs!" Is not as uplifting as you think.
  
  To my knowledge these people are volunteers. Nobody is forcing them into it. If they're paralyzed from neck down but can now control computer using their mind I'd imagine they're probably quite happy about it don't you think?