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360 points danielmorozoff | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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ckemere ◴[] No.45035120[source]
I think that the negativity here is unfortunate. The reality is that it’s very hard to see a normal VC level return on the $100M+ Elon and friends have invested here. And don’t let anyone fool you - this is the fundamental reason the BCI field has moved slowly.

If Neuralink proceeds to a scenario where quadriplegic patients can get reliable (ie lifelong) control of their computers for less than $100k that will be a huge win for them for a cost that no one else was willing to pay.

To be clear, at that order of magnitude they might make back their investment, but it won’t be 10x or 100x, and the potential healthy-brain-connected-to-the-AI play is much less rooted in reality than Teslas all becoming taxis.

Worst case scenario is that Elon loses interest and pulls the plug and Mr Arbaugh loses continued tech support a la a google product. I think that’s the one question I wish the author had asked…

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positron26 ◴[] No.45035718[source]
Probably a decent reason that all such augmentations need to be built on open technologies. If no provider can guarantee future support, only open strategies are even viable for users.
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lynx97 ◴[] No.45036049[source]
Open Source Accessibility isn't sustainable right now. How on earth do you imagine open medical hardware to ever reach a level where it is generally useful to people with disabilities?

In general, I find the negativity in this whole thread very sad. If I were in the situation were I was looking forward for technology like this, and I'd read the comments here, they would make me very sad. Because in essence, I would learn that politics is more important to some SV people than actual progress.

Frankly, if Elon ended up creating a technology that helps people, I wouldn't care about his politics at all. I'd be damn grateful for someone investing in something that ended up helping me. But obviously, politics trumps empathy here, which is very very sad.

I am still a magnitude off regarding 100k for assistive technologies, but sufficiently large braille displays cost 10k$ to 15k$ in Europe. That is a plain display of 80!!! characters in a single line. No 1080p, mind you. This has been the case since I am alive. The costs are mostly driven by redistriibutors, who usually add around 70% when importing from the US. Do I feel exploited? No, I am glad the technology exists. And frankly, if you have any empathy left, you should as well.

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1. positron26 ◴[] No.45036155[source]
By commercializing open source technology development so that the paying non-programmer and the ecosystem dependent SME's and Fortune 500's can meaningfully drive development of what they need.

You can see my gloriously broken prototype at PrizeForge. Currently between iterations and still not quite viable enough to properly operate.

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2. lynx97 ◴[] No.45036244[source]
Well, Sun Accessibility Office already did great work from roughly 2003 to 2008. Then came 2008. And Sun AND IBM terminated their Accessibility work. From then on, Orca was basically kept alive by a single developer for roughly a decade. I am not 100% sure if she has given up by now, but I'd be surprised if she didn'.t

So, giving this job to Fortune500 companies is demonstratably not sustainable. A single higher up can terminate such projects with the wink of an eye.

I was more hopeful 20 years ago. Then I watched how all the good work on GNOME2 was basically trashed because of DBus transition, GTK3, and now Wayland. Fact is, hoping for the corporate world to do the work is no guarantee they will continue. And for "scratch your own itch"-philosophy to work, there are not enough disabled OSS devs. Maybe after WWIII there will be a surge in Open Source Accessibility.

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3. positron26 ◴[] No.45036514[source]
You read my comment, but you are missing that I'm building to tools to bundle the work together, which is the way to make a strong enough open foundation that things like open accessibility technologies can have more ground to stand on.

Scratching our own itch works better when coordination means we can bundle together a whole lot of itch. There is no such thing as individual incentive to cooperate without a means of coordination. Anything else is just the volunteer's dilemma, and so only small itches get scratched.

Not everything can be handled using death by a thousand cuts. In the Rust in 2021 blog [1], the importance of depth versus breadth was pointed out. Depth comes from dedicated, full-time, paid work.

[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/12/rust-in-2021.html]