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In the asteriods demo (https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew?t=711) the only reason his fingers aren't moving a bunch is because the hand is flat on the table and the table is pushing back. You can see his fingers twitch while he's playing.

This is the biggest overselling point from them. The only people that can grow a "virtual hand" are amputees. Everyone else simply has a shadow hand that follows what their real hand does (or would do if there wasn't a restraint). All of their control interfaces are coupled to what the shadow hand does- i.e., if the shadow hand's index finger curls in, the spaceship spins to the right in the game. In reality it's not a shadow hand they are sensing, but the neurons that control the movement in your hand/arm.

It's a fact of biology that if you are reading nerve impulses from the arm, then to control the computer something must be happening in your arm. Every motor neuron is connected to a muscle. The best we can get is a very sensitive system where your arm doesn't move very much. You cannot (without a million years of evolution) send signals to your arm without it moving. If you were to cut the neurons off from the muscle, you could then send activations without your arm moving. However, you would also lose physical movement ability, and nobody is doing that (except for amputees).

⬐ m463

You're right. That said, surgery complicates things. It's a big commitment, it will take time to get approval and it doesn't scale as well for mass production.

⬐ Robotbeat

Neuralink has ambitions to address those issues, but I think it will take decades. And I don’t intend to be an early adopter.

⬐ colechristensen

I was under the impression that your fact of biology was false.

Specifically that the brain-muscle mapping isn't preprogrammed and the brain learns to control what is there.

For example people with fully formed extra digits can just have a fully functional extra finger.

This does get baked in pretty well but the adult brain can re-learn after a catastrophic injury so it's not hard to believe you could figure out how to add virtual appendages or entirely novel "extremities".

⬐ throw20102010

It's not false. You can't send an action potential down a motor neuron connected to a muscle without a reaction from the muscle. Do not confuse the neurons in your brain (which generate new connections all the time) with motor neurons, which is what the CTRL-labs kit is sensing.

The brain does learn to control what is there, and what is there is attached to your muscles. I'll say it again: the CTRL-labs kit works on electromyography, which only works with muscle activity. You will not magically grow new neurons in your arm that are dedicated sole to the control of a computer.

Here's that talk you mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z5aZK2C3ew (2018 O'Reilly AI Keynote, Thomas Reardon, CEO, CTRL-labs)

⬐ samlynnevans

Cheers!

CTRL-labs | many positions | NYC

Imagine the world where computers are natural extensions of thought and movement.

CTRL-labs dedicates itself to answering the biggest questions in computing, neuroscience, and design so creators can dream.

Our work to build a transformative neural interface spans research and challenges at the intersection of computational neuroscience, statistics, machine learning, biophysics, hardware, and human-computer interaction.

https://www.ctrl-labs.com/careers/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z5aZK2C3ew

Andrew Mao, research scientist at CTRL-labs.

Here's a video describing what we're doing (keynote from the O'Reilly AI conference): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z5aZK2C3ew