I'm a Neuralink skeptic, at least in the short term, but this article is ridiculous.<p>Apparently the first three things "Neuralink is missing" are the highly technical problems that are core to their business: how to implant a device without the brain rejecting it and covering it in scar tissue, how to digitize and transmit brain signals, and finally the machine learning to decode those signals and convert them into the actions the patient really wishes to perform.<p>And the fourth problem is that Medicare might not pay for the devices.<p>Who could possibly think Neuralink don't have teams dedicated to solving and improving the first three? Everything out of the company says they're working hard on all of these, they don't consider any of them solved problems or things they can handwave away.<p>As for the fourth, if the product is good enough, someone will pay for it. Perhaps it will be healthy wealthy private individuals first. I'd be more worried if Neuralink was devoting all its efforts to lobbying the FDA or wining and dining insurance executives, rather than focusing on the technological issues that need to be solved first.
Neuralink is not the first to implant a multirlectrode for mind control. More than 20 years ago, cyberkinetics was using Utah arrays for that<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Nagle" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Nagle</a>
Seeing the demo did make me wonder why they chose cursor movement as a first achievement even though that's also possible using eye tracking. Still, seems like something that could greatly benefit people so I hope it will.