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Good luck, Max & Co!

Sounds like if anyone can do it, they can.

As a former brain injury patient (things worked out well, in the end, but it was touch-and-go, for a while), I support efforts to improve the technology and practicum, here.

His definition of science vs. engineering is piercing. If you have a tangible result at the end of everyday, like a machine or some executable, you're engineering. If you have nothing to show for your work after days or years but a hunch, you're a scientist.
Is that why Tesla autopilot works so well and hit all its milestones on time?
Perhaps not surprisingly, all stereotypes about the differences between scientists and engineers vanish if you've worked with both.

Disclosure: Scientist

Or been both (disclosure: scientist and engineer)
> “Track 1” at Science is Neural Engineering

Any plans for other tracks?

“As for Neuralink, I was being genuine when I said that I learned a ton there and remain significantly invested in their success. The truth is that it wasn’t my choice to leave, and there was a lot left there I still wanted to do. But as usual, Elon was right: it was time for me to go. The background is complex and, in some sense, doesn’t really matter. In what should be a surprise to no one, Elon is by far the most effective operator I’ve ever met, and the four years I had there were, in retrospect, the best education on how to turn difficult technical problems into businesses I could have possibly found. Going forward, though we both work with the brain, our goals are different: Science is not working on products that will likely be very useful for merging with AI, though that is a mission in which I hope Neuralink is successful. From a technology standpoint, what we are pursuing at Science is quite different.”

Interesting that he was asked to leave. It was speculated earlier that Max left because he was annoyed at Elon revealing the implant in the monkey a bit sooner than he wanted to.

I still don’t understand why he was sacked. He was/is brilliant. All the best in Science! If you open offices in Europe let us know! ;)
The recently published book Power Play by Tim Higgins is a very nice history of Tesla. It describes the Elon playbook in great detail:

1) Formulate goals that are guaranteed to fail.

2) Hire a pliable dude to do your bidding.

3) When the moment of truth comes, scapegoat your dude and swoop in to save the day.

This is what happened to Martin Eberhard (the actual founder of Tesla), to Doug Field, and pretty much to all other Elon lieutenants over the years.

> Multi-beam FIB-SEMs basically enable direct digitization of blocks of matter at single-digit nanometer resolution

I work with motors that are accurate up to 5nm imaging things far smaller than 1nm, so it’s pretty mind blowing to hear that folks are actually (well, aiming to) operating on tissue at this level of accuracy.

This is one of those posts that really hits me as a "maybe we can do this, but should we do this?"

I suppose that if/when the ability to jack yourself in to a completely virtual environment comes, humanity will split between those who embrace it and those who shun it. There's been a lot of sci-fi written about this and I've enjoyed it all. :)

At the end of the day, what is done in the real world will be what matters...right?

I feel that way about naming the company "Science" too. Like why would you do that?
Got you and countless others talking about it and giving them free publicity didn't it?
Naming the company "Science" really grates my gears. It strikes me as an opportunistic grab of a huge swath of cognitive and linguistic commons. Sure it's clever but if this company's branding gets popular with the general public it will irreversibly change how young people think about actual science, and that really bothers me.

Nothing is sacred enough for some people I guess. Not science, not even the human mind.

> Nothing is sacred enough for some people I guess. Not science, not even the human mind.

Certainly not when the aims seem to be to corner the market in ruling over those minds.