• Concerns rise as Neuralink fails to provide evidence of brain implant success, raising safety and transparency questions.
• Controversy surrounds Neuralink’s lack of data on surgical capabilities and alarming treatment of monkeys with brain implants.
• While Neuralink touts achievements, experts question true innovation and highlight developments in other brain implant projects.
Imo Musk is going to struggle in this space. He’s no stranger to opening companies in highly regulated industries, but the medical device industry is a whole different level. The government can easily prevent him from selling anything if his company isn’t forthcoming with data, and if he starts mutilating people, civil courts aren’t going to care if they signed a waiver if that waiver was signed based on false expectations built on incomplete or false data by the company
Plus, he likes to pretend he’s an expert on the industries of the companies he runs. That’s already potentially dangerous with Tesla and Space X, but in this case his hubris is very directly dangerous to the people receiving his services.
The difference is with Tesla and Space X he has actual experts doing the work, with Neuralink he gets the worst of the crop - no successful or ethical medical professional is going to want to work with him on this.
That didn’t work out for Elizabeth Holmes either.
Teslas are already directly dangerous to his customers but our society is numb to traffic violence so people don’t care as much as they should. But “full self-driving” has already killed people.
Edit: removed “a lot” because while I suspect it is true, it remains unproven.
“full self-driving” has already killed a lot of people.
There’s only one death linked to FSD beta and even he was driving drunk.
In a recent interview, Rossiter said he believes that von Ohain was using Full Self-Driving, which — if true — would make his death the first known fatality involving Tesla’s most advanced driver-assistance technology
Von Ohain and Rossiter had been drinking, and an autopsy found that von Ohain died with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 — more than three times the legal limit
However there’s approximately 40 accidents that have led to serious injury or death due to the use of the less advanced driver assist system “autopilot”.
(Why would the human’s inebriation level matter if the vehicle is moving autonomously?)
This kind of thinking is why these accidents happen. The goal of autonomous driving is for it to one day be better driver than the best human driver, but this technology is still in its infancy and requires an attentive driver behind the wheel. Even Teslas tell you this when you engage these systems.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Neuralink founder Elon Musk claimed this week that the first human to receive one of his company’s heavily scrutinized brain implants was already able to control a mouse cursor with their mind.
“[Neuralink is] only sharing the bits that they want us to know about,” Sameer Sheth, a neurosurgeon who specializes in implanted neurotechnology at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Nature.
Leaked documents detailed how the implants resulted in a myriad of grotesque injuries, including rupturing a monkey’s brain and causing severe cerebral swelling.
A relevant detail that raises questions about Neuralink’s surgical capabilities is another report of a monkey with a botched brain implant.
“A human controlling a cursor is nothing new,” Bolu Ajiboye, a brain computer interface researcher at Case Western Reserve University, told Nature.
Meanwhile, other brain implant projects have allowed fully paralyzed patients to communicate through a digital avatar using only their mind, or to control life-changing robotic prosthetics.
The original article contains 480 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Is this gonna be like that Raelian clone baby?
I love seeing references to the Raelians in the wild! What a bonkers cult they are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raël.
I love how no one is ever going to start calling it “X” because it’s just dumb. It will forever be “X-formerly-Twitter”.
That was my thought when I started reading the piece. “Are we just going to call it XFT?”
I like “Elon’s Twitter”
You know you can just use twitter anyway, right?
Nobody wants to use Twitter.
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Damn, and no.
Does this remind anyone else of Theranos?
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Stupid article as it implies that doctors are concerned for a specific reason related to the subject’s health but it’s just background about this shitty experiment and how it can be dangerous. Regardless, I can’t believe someone volunteered for this and am unfortunately expecting documented issues in the future.
Remember how they couldn’t get the cyber truck to not rust? Or the bullet proof windows to work? Or how the milage for most Tesla’s was impossible, so people thought their cars were broken, and instead of either confessing or fixing the mileage they created an elaborate scheme to cancel appointment so people couldn’t get their batteries looked at? These are the people you trusted to put a chip in your brain…
I think it would be a lot more reasonable to expect undocumented issues. They have a lot to lose and it’s controlled by a billionaire. As if they’re not going to try to cover it up.
If my option was never move again and this would let me control a computer then I wouldn’t care about the risk
I’m over here concerned for all of Neuralink’s patients.
I still can’t forget the Monkeys.
JFC
Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate. Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”
So they fuckin shredded the poor girl’s brain.
That’s heartbreaking.
Yeah. Gut wrenching too.
To think humans cause such pain to other sentient beings due to hubris…
I’m wondering how this got IRB approval. I’ve had to get it before and it’s not easy. From the sounds of everything everyone involved needs to have a lifetime ban on animal or human testing.
“IRB? What’s that?”
-Elon Musk and researchers being told what to say
Wait til you find out about animal testing at large.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want monkeylink in my head if it was done by musk’s people. I’d rather have an expert neurosurgeon and the ones I know, who work in deep brain stimulation, they wrote off neuralink as bad tech a decade ago.
Writing off a huge research project you know nothing about before it’s even started is a clear sign that their opinion is worthless.
Musk has hired incredibly well educated people, I don’t blame you for hating him but that doesn’t tarnish the quality of anyone else
Educated does not mean skilled.
No but they’re also very skilled, look at who’s on the team they’re incredibly well respected in their fields.
You hate Elon that’s fine, it doesn’t mean everyone even tangentially related to anything with his name attached is bad.
You’re just making stuff up now
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There is no such thing as too quickly. People went from shitting in wooden outhouses with no electricity to man landing on the moon and harnessing the power of atoms in one life time, things have slowed down considerably since.
And you don’t have to get a brain implant, nor will such a thing realistically even be available for decades still.
Of course there’s such a thing as too quickly. Plenty of railroad workers died because people didn’t realize that there’s a huge difference between falling off a horse running ten miles an hour and a train going thirty. How many people got sick because someone thought putting lead in gas was a swell idea? What about Thalidomide? Heck, people thought heroin would cure opium addiction.
Just because people are reckless doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing.
I’m sure we’ll keep racing ahead, but don’t confuse activity with progress.
Falling from a horse at 10mph is dangers, falling from any height is dangerous.
We knew lead was poisonous before it was put into petrol, it was chosen because GM could patent it whereas they couldn’t the already known superior additive, ethanol.
We knew about man made climate change over a hundred years ago, it was buried and suppressed for profit.
Thalidomide wasn’t tested and sold freely.
Heroine was a good drug for many uses, lack of regulation and care about addiction was the problem. Even today many medications can have adverse effects or cause addiction if not properly used.
These things have nothing to do with the speed of advancement and all to do with deliberate failures. You can advance rapidly and still test and regulate, but obviously thats less likely in a capitalist system that values money over everything.
Sounds to me like we basically agree on the main point and are arguing terms.
People are going to discover/invent new tech; that’s a given. The question is how fast it gets out of the lab and into people’s hands.
The question is: why don’t our governments regulate effectively?
The answer is: money.
The question is why do we let it get out when we know its harmful or that we haven’t even looked into it despite being fully capable of.
