Maybe this indicates that the FDA’s investigations have shown that Neuralink isn’t quite as awful at this as random internet commentators believe.
Still a questionable decision. Brain interface tech isn’t even that new or novel, but the real bottleneck is that flesh is temporary, eventually the attachment place will die and be replaced. That’s exactly what we saw with their first brain chip and other attempts going back at least 50 years.
No! Elon bad so everything connected to him bad!
Unironically yes, he’s just throwing money at scifi concepts and hoping it pays off.
Well there are EVs everywhere now, Starlink is breaking ISP regional monopolies and providing rule areas/countries with internet, and SpaceX is the leading frontier of human exploration technology. The ol’Muskrat is a real piece of work, but it sounds kinda ridiculous when you downplay obvious successes.
Tesla is 19.9% of EV market share, Starlink isn’t “breaking monopolies” it is one, and SpaceX has accomplished some great things by underpaying engineers.
In most of these cases, Elon Musk hasn’t been taking an active role in the companies, part of the reason he was denied his 56Bn Bonus that he is currently desperately trying to pay himself out of Tesla’s finances.
Yeah Tesla is down to 20% because of the massive EV boom THEY started. Saying Starlink is one of the ISP monopolies people can choose from, is an oxymoronic statement. Agreed about SpaceX. Pay your amazing eng team!
I’m not saying Elon is a great leader. But the odds 3 things he owns happened to take off isn’t likely a total coincidence. Maybe he’s just better than average at predictions. But to act like it isn’t what it is because you don’t like the guy, kinda undercuts legitimate criticism.
This one paid off. Read the interviews given by mr Arbaugh. Musk is an ego-driven maniac, you won’t get any argument from me. But as a result a bunch of scientists got more funding than they normally would for this project that gave great joy and some measure of independence to a young quadriplegic, maybe with more to follow.
You want to hate on Musk? I’ll happily join you. But if you’re one of those assholes rooting against these doctors and scientists doing ground breaking work with Musk’s money, that’s a pretty terrible take.
The chips are attached to impermanent brain flesh. That has been the brick wall in our way for fifty years. Any benefit is short term, and the long term implications are harrowing. This field would have advanced at roughly the same rate without subjecting people and animals to undue risks.
Nope, I hate musk so everything he is associated with has to be the worst thing ever and pure evil.
Is that Elon, he looks 20 years older.
He’s looked pretty creepy for the past 10 years imo.
You can find out how different news outlets feel about a person by the type of pictures they use of them. Once you see it, it can’t be ignored.
Cocaine will do that to you.
I guess they figure anyone who volunteers is already braindead so what’s the harm. 🤷🏻♂️
I look forward to the day when they try to mass market this and find out it has a unique problem when put in the heads of humans who aren’t complete morons. And they never caught it during testing because all of their test subjects were volunteers.
We call that selection bias.
I’d imagine they’re mostly physically disabled people trying to get control of their limbs or access to the freedom this type of tech is promising. As abhorrent as all of the testing behind this tech is, if I were a quadrapalegic or something similar, I would volunteer because wtf else have I got going for me?
You would have a life and people who care about you, regardless of use of your legs.
I’m pretty sure not everyone has a life and people who cares about them.
Then you are wrong.
That is very true. It doesn’t mean it is ethical. It is quite common for people who are disabled, have a disease, or what not to be overly optimistic about success. Which caused them to be more willing to make poorly informed decisions.
Experiments like these are not inherently bad, but it is very easy to receive informed consent from the participant when they are not fully informed. That is why studies like this in academia require an ethics panel to review them.
To give an Elon musk’s track record with his various companies. I think it is completely reasonable to question the ethics of this study.
It’s not the tech itself that worries me. It’s who in this case is supplying it along with the fact the previous patient had 85% of the functionality just stop and they haven’t done a damn thing to address that before they want to try it on another patient.
There are other companies working on the same or similar tech that are far less fucked up.
Arbaugh says that updates to the chip’s software have allowed him to regain many of the abilities that he previously had and that he is still very supportive of Neuralink and what it’s done for him.
They did try to fix the problem the best they could. Its also a very intense procedure so I doubt it’s smart to go back after so little time. It’s probably better to wait until they fix all the kinks anyways. The man did enough, he doesn’t need to be a debug guinea pig with his head open every month imo.
I’d actually be mad if they used the same guy tbh.
I also think it’s important to seperate the tech from the persona. There’s a lot of smart people behind this and I think it’s sci-fi as fuck.
Look we all hate Elon and how neuralink is developing their tech that’s not in question here.
People are taking issue with your referring to desperate people with very very poor quality of life due to injuries or medical conditions as “brain dead”
They aren’t “brain dead”, dumb or stupid, they are reaching for what looks like the only potential light in their life. A life that is probably impossibly difficult for any of us typically healthy people to imagine.
They’re only testing on people that are on their death bed right now.
It’s shocking, but not at all surprising, that one of the top comments here is calling desperate sick suffering people “brain dead” for taking a risk to try and get better, or help advance a technology to help people similarly suffering in the future.
I guess our hatred of musk exceeds our compassion for the sick.
Even you think something must be wrong with them if they’re agreeing to this. Just because you lean more toward an ailment that would make someone desperate rather than someone being deficient in congestive function doesn’t mean you’re any better. Like. I get it. It’s hard to imagine a regular person just thinking one day it’s a good idea to sign up to let a company run by Elon Musk implant anything into their body (especially their brain). But this is a bit of a high horse riding comment, isn’t it?
The first implant was in a paraplegic man. The FDA is not approving this experimental procedure for otherwise healthy people.
It’s not hard for me to believe some healthy person would be a dope and want to experiment with this, but it’s not what is being considered.
The top level comment is shitty on severely ill people for being willing to take a risk to improve their life and the lives of others.
It’s either pure trash, or the poster is so blinded by their hatred for musk that they aren’t thinking rationally. I suspect the latter.
Perhaps you should read the other comments where I explain that the company’s track record of ethics and success sucks ass, and isn’t the only one doing this kind of research. They’re just the only ones willing to go through human trials with garbage that falls apart.
Them using desperate people doesn’t help with the ethics here. It actually is much worse, taking advantage of people.
My point has nothing to do with the company, but you calling sick people who want to make their own life better, and hopefully better the world at the same time, “braindead.”
I won’t let you gaslight us and try to pretend your original point was solely about the company. Sorry.
Move fast and break things should never apply towards human trials.
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I don’t know that the top comment assumed the people signing up for this trial were sick or medically unwell.
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I am not arguing the why or who of clinical trials. My comment had nothing to do with the why or who. It had to do with the judgements made by both comments about the who.
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I can understand why you’d feel that comment was insensitive if you have the context you provided. But an assumption about the motives without necessary context does not equal guilt on the original commenter. This person may not have considered the health of someone willing to join such a trial at all. It may never have occurred to them that unhealthy people were signing up.
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His hatred for Musk is kind of justifiable in the way Musk has accrued his wealth and the actions of his companies under his direction. And given that track record the logic of not wanting to become the next Hyperloop that is now just an underground tunnel.
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This is the internet. People gonna people.
Pretty much all of the misconceptions you listed could have been solved by simply reading the article, or even being slightly informed about the process of approval of experimental evidence.
Judging from a place of ignorance isn’t really any better.
See number 5. People really are going to people, but compounding that is also not any better.
And when people are mindlessly and unfairly judging people, we shouldn’t call them out? If I see someone being racist should I just throw up my hands and say “well people are going to people”?
And why aren’t you following your own advice and allowing me to people without being challenged?
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Unless it’s Elmo, it should be shut down.
So I go get a brain chip, and now I’ve got a second person in my head??
Can we just … not keep going down the brain rot rabbit hole we are going down as a society? 24 hours in a day doesn’t allow enough screen time? We need to just… funnel this shit straight in somehow?
I used to be excited for this kind of stuff, then I saw what we’ve done with the technology we have. People are “auto” driving their cars while they wear their apple vision pros, that’s what we do with it… Pretty soon tiktoc titties will be streamed straight to our frontal cortex.
Maybe I am just old, or maybe it would just be better if it was a different company doing it. But maybe a giant meteor should take us out ASAP.
The ultimate goal of this technology is to enable the blind to see, deaf to hear and the paralyzed to walk. Not that you can watch netflix in your mind.
I’m down, if I even remotely believed anything that comes out of Elon Musks mouth. I promise you, that is not where this will go.
In my 20’s I was all for it. I understand where the techbros are coming from. Now with over a decade more experience, I see clearly we need to spend so much more of our energy healing from traumas on the societal level: To dispel imperial-colonialist mindsets. Im thinkin of Bo Burningham speaking about how the empires exhausted all physical territory, and then discovered Data, going on to colonize every waking moment of our attention.
We need to shed the subconcious conquistador, with all it’s machismo, all it’s tribalism (most agregiously white supremacist nationalism) and covetous paranoia. It is a poison which will prevent us from making the societal leap from which all tides would rise.
Until we do that, all we’ll get for this tech will be:
- dystopic labor camp colonies on Mars
- advertisements when we are trying to dream
- Military tech developed under the guise of “medical 🌈 disabilities 🌈 quality 🌈 of 🌈 life 🌈 improvement 🌈 research” [1]
And we collectively deserve better
Wake the fuck up
Luckily the value of SpaceX is not determined by their success, but more by what bullshit Musk can come up with. So if Musk can bullshit his way around this too, there is no harm to the stock.
What does this have to do with SpaceX?
Nothing, I posted in the wrong place. The 2 stories were together, and after reading it, I must have clicked the wrong one, and posted it here, instead of the story about the SpaceX engine blowing up.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Neuralink, the Elon Musk-funded neuroscience startup, has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant its next patient with its experimental brain chip.
Neuralink previously implanted its experimental brain-computer interface chip in a paraplegic man, Noland Arbaugh, in an operation that was publicly announced this past January.
Arbaugh’s identity was revealed during a livestream interview in March, during which the patient demonstrated some of the abilities the chip had given him, including the chance to play computer chess with his mind.
However, Arbaugh says that updates to the chip’s software have allowed him to regain many of the abilities that he previously had and that he is still very supportive of Neuralink and what it’s done for him.
This hardware then rests in the portion of the patient’s skull that was removed, right below the scalp, while its tiny wires carry data back and forth between the brain and the startup’s servers.
A large number of the company’s animal test subjects had to be euthanized and some died quite horribly, according to a lawsuit from a physicians group.
The original article contains 419 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Elon is still deterioting
He’s not withering away fast enough.
WHAT THE FUCK
I mean it’s not your brain dude, why do you care?
Because it will encroach into everything if we let it be.
There’s always a dumdum like you saying “it doesn’t affect you, so why do you care?”.
Because the company implanting the chip killed a good amount of monkeys for their tests. They’re an unethical company.
Because Elon Musk is a fucking piece of shit and he is clearly disregarding the laws if it makes him money.
Because private, for-profit companies cannot be trusted to not fuck over everyone if it makes them a cent more.
And that’s why all those paralyzed people should just sit in their chairs and wait for eventual death, I guess.
Seriously, just don’t get one if you think they’re so awful.
The issue is not the tech, it’s how it is developed and tested, and the terrible track record of the mega corpos.
Just like AI, the tech itself is great, but corpos turn it into a pile of shit for the money.
It won’t be different this time around with daddy Musk.
Yeah, things would be going so much better if garage hobbyists were developing these brain implants instead.
Yeah because it’s either a socipath billionaire or a dusty garage hobbyist. Nothing in between.
At the very least, the garage hobbyist has more chance to be a more ethical person.
One of the common arguments I hear against technological advancement is “but what if some sociopath brews up a pandemic virus in their garage!”
The FDA is monitoring the corporations that are working on this sort of thing. As is mentioned in the title of this thread.
You know what else killed a good amount of monkeys for their tests? Pretty much every single Class 3 medical device out there. Neuralink didn’t do anything far outside the ordinary with their tests, they just got a lot of media attention because “Elon bad”.
Medical device testing goes through animal trials before human ones. Those trials use monkeys. Those monkeys often die. The only unusual thing about Neuralink’s tests is a lot of people pretending like they suddenly give a shit.
Here’s an idea, maybe stop killing animal for medical testing?
Other companies doing the same shit isn’t any better. But with Neuralink, they said that no monkey were killed during their trials, which is false. So it makes it even worst.
Because it kills everything you put it in? I don’t know how to tell you that you’re supposed to care about other people.
