someone else might get there first

https://futurism.com/neoscope/neuralink-competitor-blind-vision

spike?

https://x.com/neuralink/status/1836118060308271306?s=46&t=w8K1ymlMU0cSwtGlbRCU6Q

Define ability to see. Allowing a person to make out edges and movement, or recognizing someone smiling require different levels of spatial resolution and the required density of electrodes to evoke phosphenes is dramatically impacted by this. Stimulating in earlier stage of visual processing such as thalamus may circumvent this problem. There is already technology that allows evoking phosphenes in visual cortex to make out edges, but we are quite a ways off from allowing a blind person see someone smile. Please provide some more specificity to allow better prediction.

See my comment from 5 months ago in the comments

https://spectrum-ieee-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/spectrum.ieee.org/amp/neuralink-blindsight-2669273043

I feel like this market vastly overestimates the probability that making a blind person see again using a brain implant is even possible, let alone if Neuralink will achieve it.

@sbares Why believe it impossible?

@GarrettBaker Neuralink's brain implants are to the optic nerve as a caveman banging rocks together is to the Large Hadron Collider. If you're being (very!) generous, you could say that they do vaguely similar things, but the former obviously has no hope of emulating the latter.

@sbares Sounds like an argument for a different position than the one you claimed.

@GarrettBaker Then let me make it more clear: I do not believe you can make someone "see" by haphazardly sticking a chip on their their brain and hoping it does something. It seems to me just as unlikely to work as it is for a rock-banging caveman to discover the Higgs particle.

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@weissz if there's ambiguity I'm sure gabe will be fine with the resolution chosen by unbiased and uninvolved moderators. but I'd bet good money this won't end up being ambiguous

@Bayesian @weissz I addressed the resolution criteria in a comment below. I believe this will be pretty objective one way or the other but if not I’ll leave it up to uninvolved moderators as Bayesian suggests

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Does it have to be the exact same subjective experience as for a non-blind person? Would it be enough if they can move around and interact in real life like non-blind people can, just using their Neuralink?

@12c498e Needs to be simulate the sensation of sight. Neuralink has talked about how they're working on this

@GabeGarboden How strict is the criteria around the sensation going to be? If a person who was not born blind but later went blind used the Neuralink to restore "vision", and described the experience as, for example, "similar but slightly less natural", would that satisfy for YES?

@12c498e If they achieve anything similar to what they discuss in this vid, i'll resolve yes: https://youtu.be/B2RFPKIHC7k?si=RsPI5j4fT9pI51sP

Will something like being able to see shapes in the mind count?

@kaiemon No, has to see real things in the world

I don't see Neuralink even being implantable in humans by 2030.

@roughlyhewn Interestingly enough, it happened just ~10 days after your comment: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227850900/elon-musk-neuralink-implant-clinical-trial

From birth or later lost?

@ftkurt Either's fine. Resolves based on credible news coverage that a patient has gained the ability to see when previously could not