Comment on Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip
mhague@lemmy.world 7 months agoWhen a computer reads some signal, the 0s and 1s in it’s memory is the data. The data must be processed so that the computer can understand it.
This computer is using threads to read neuron activity. It must necessarily receive data because if it didn’t it wouldn’t be reading neuron activity. They’re the same thing.
This data is processed so that the computer can make sense of the brain. Once it understands some activity it generates signals that can control external devices.
Here’s another example. Imagine a device that monitors the heart and does something to fix a problem. The device would get data on the heart and process the data so that it can perform it’s function.
Wouldn’t monitoring health concerns and mitigating data loss be extremely important in these scenarios?
Maven@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
The point is that this is the opening paragraph about something going wrong in human brain surgery, and the first thing they tell us is “don’t worry, the data’s fine”, rather than anything about the human.
ech@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I do agree it would have been more considerate to mention that the person is ok, but I feel like you’re confusing data storage (ie something they’re collecting) with data processing (ie how the device operates). The data in question is the latter. In other words, they are explaining that the problems are being accounted for so that the device can still function in the human it’s attached to.
Maven@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
No, I understood that, I did read the article. I’m lambasting the fact that in an article about “brain chip gone wrong”, burying the “but human seems to be unharmed” at the end of an article is indicative of a set of priorities wildly different from my own.