https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23899981/elon-musk-ai-neuralink-brain-computer-interface
The brain implant company Neuralink is pushing a needlessly risky approach, former employees say.
another smaller horror of this is: there will 1000% be ads. zero percent chance there will not be ads. even worse, people will be understandably reticent about ads at first, and services will be advertised without ads. then they'll become subscriptions with ads. just like everything else.
https://twitter.com/todayininfosec/status/1001834788037128193
advertising is cancer.
For your comfort and convenience, this update deactivates the part of your brain that makes you think you dislike advertisements, among other bug fixes and improvements.
then they'll become subscriptions with ads
The credit card on file has expired, please update your payment information within 72 hours or you will lose access to your brain function.
The function of an ad is to manipulate your behavior. If an implant can do this directly ads aren't needed anymore.
They got 'bid adieu' to the birds, though. Bird wasn't cool and edgy enough for Elron. He'd prefer a jet pack.
Unfortunately the damage has been on the animals. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
Funny that the very long vox article doesn't mention the wired investigation
Downvote Musk spam.
The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle. Don’t be a useful idiot.
Just try be clear, you're saying this article that suggests Elon musk will literally physically destroy people's actual real brains in search of profit after similarly murdering hundreds of monkeys is promoting him?
I'm all for promoting the shit out of this. The more idiots that kill themselves signing up, the better off we all are.
Downvote Elon Musk spam spam.
The billionaire doesn't need a PR team to downplay his outright foolishness. Don't be a useful idiot.
If you are allowing a company that Elon Musk of all people is involved in to operate on your head, maybe the damage has already been done.
I'm all for transhumanism, and I sincerely hope that the people who are hopeful for Neuralink to be therapeutic for their condition find some relief. But nobody should trust anything Elon Musk touches with their brain.
can literally only end in disaster, just like the monkeys that were tortured to death for Musk's neuralink bullshit (he wants to rush to human testing btw)
I'm all for it. Let any idiot that wants to allow that asshole to put a chip in their head get it. They can all speedrun themselves out of society.
I read it somewhere that these monkeys are bred for testing purpose just like chickens and cows are bred for human consumption but not sure how true it is.
Just as it still makes it not right for cows and chickens it makes it not right for monkeys. Or would you be OK if I was breeding humans for slavery purposes?
The biggest reason to never put anything like this in your brain is the idea that they could put ads in your brain.
I mean, the high likelihood of developing an infection in your brain seems maybe a bit more concerning, but to each their own I guess.
Of course, I just meant more in the hypothetical 'this technology is safe for human use and is being widely adopted' stage.
Even if it was medically safe that's still your least concern when it comes to IoT devices and network security.
You hereby give Daddy Musk the right to:
Anyone that would let that idiot near their brains already killed themselves putting light inside the body.
I notice Elon has never signed up to go up in one of his rockets. I wonder how quickly he'll sign up to get one of his brain implants?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.
Former Neuralink employees as well as experts in the field alleged that the company pushed for an unnecessarily invasive, potentially dangerous approach to the implants that can damage the brain (and apparently has done so in animal test subjects) to advance Musk’s goal of merging with AI.
The letter warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” and went on to ask: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?
If the intravascular approach can restore key functioning to paralyzed patients, and also avoids some of the safety risks that come with crossing the blood-brain barrier, such as inflammation and scar tissue buildup in the brain, why opt for something more invasive than necessary?
Which perhaps helps make sense of the company’s dual mission: to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.”
Watanabe believes Neuralink prioritized maximizing bandwidth because that serves Musk’s goal of creating a generalized BCI that lets us merge with AI and develop all sorts of new capacities.
The original article contains 3,109 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 93%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Personally I'm a fan of us further researching biological advancements for aiding people. Stuff like genetic engineering is amazing. Like to imagine there's a future were you could get a yearly shot of anti-cancer bio-bots that basically clean your system. Or a shot for anti-senescence that repairs DNA and resets the clock on your cells
Great! Most people feel the same way!
The problem is that most of us who go into scientific research involving human subjects have about a decade’s worth of increasingly specialized education on a specific subject, have worked in a junior capacity in study design, execution, and analysis, and were generally not billionaires trying to become the first trillionaire.
There’s a reason why academic research works the way it does - because we learned the hard way.
The Tuskegee experiment carried out by the US Public Health Service and the CDC was a program in which black American males were deliberately infected with syphilis and left untreated, so that researchers could watch the profession of the disease. The program didn’t officially end until 1972. Just yesterday I read a news story about a doctor successfully being sued for giving prisoners, without their consent, high doses of Ivermectin to treat Covid, going off of his intuition and the idea that he was qualified to do medical research.
When I was doing this kind of work, I had to go through something called a Human Studies Board. Every university has one. The HSB is a team of senior researchers which will review your proposal to make sure what you’re asking to do is both justified and does no harm to your subjects. If they say “no,” you’re going back to the drawing board. I have had PhD students whose thesis research had to go through multiple revisions because the HSB felt that they weren’t properly controlling for potential harm. Bit there were not billions of dollars on the line, and I didn’t have billions in personal wealth and the ability to influence the HSB.
Another example: About ten or so years ago, Facebook decided to run an experiment in which they promoted sad news stories to some people, and happy news stories to others. They then followed up on those individuals’ posts to see if the former group became noticeably depressed. They did. Facebook did this without the users’ consent, and didn’t make provisions for followup with any human subjects who did become depressed. Some of their subjects may have committed acts of violence or self-harm because of pre-existing psychological states. They have no idea. They just came up with the hypothesis that sad news might make people sad, and ran with it. It was unethical. I do not believe they faced any consequences other than the researchers and the company being universally berated in the academic community.
We are researching brain implants. That’s already underway in universities around the world. Elon wants to move fast and break things to make it go faster, but in this case the “things” are people.
So you have Elon, who is legendary in the industry for thinking he’s very much smarter than he is and pushing his experts into screwing things up. You have his vast wealth as well as a drive to create more wealth (academic researchers very rarely grow wealthy from their discoveries and rarely have wealth as a driving factor).
We are already doing what you’re asking for. I have a colleague at one of the top US university that’s specifically researching telomere repair and other aspects of DNA-focused methods to prevent some of the effects of aging, and I’ve personally done modeling on the molecular biology associated with deregulation and cancer in grad school.
We would be better off if the government would just take Elon’s money and use it to fund actual scientific research.
They will sell you biochips with expiration dates and the updates will be increasingly expensive. If you don't pay they'll dissolve and you'll end as a drooling idiot at 50.
Every time that this topic comes up, I realize that a lot of Musk lovers will take themselves out of the gene pool here.
It's already been done, and will soon be revealed...
In the middle of his cage match with Mark Zuckerberg, Musk will say "No, I am your father." After Zuck yells "Noooo!" he'll follow up with, "Well, just the AI parts."
We're all living in the times before consciousness can be preserved, but someone will figure out how to do it eventually.
I don't think it's going to be Elon Musk.
We're all living in the times before consciousness can be preserved
It makes no sense.
Nobody knows if that is going to happen at all. We only know that it has not happened yet.
In the same way you can say that we're all living in the times before our colony on Alpha Centauri takes us over.
Ok, maybe it's optimistic to expect that we'll definitely get there one day, but I hope that we do.
Or you're living in the times after it already was, with the tech later being used to replicate the earlier state of the world, and just aren't aware of it.
Time isn't necessarily linear.
Especially when we're discussing a local future involving merging human consciousness and AI.