> But current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research. Through company discussions and documents spanning several years, along with employee interviews, Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors. The mistakes weakened the experiments’ research value and required the tests to be repeated, leading to more animals being killed, three of the current and former staffers said. The three people attributed the mistakes to a lack of preparation by a testing staff working in a pressure-cooker environment.
> Musk has pushed hard to accelerate Neuralink’s progress, which depends heavily on animal testing, current and former employees said. Earlier this year, the chief executive sent staffers a news article about Swiss researchers who developed an electrical implant that helped a paralyzed man to walk again. “We could enable people to use their hands and walk again in daily life!” he wrote to staff at 6:37 a.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 8. Ten minutes later, he followed up: “In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!”
> On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment. On one occasion a few years ago, Musk told employees he would trigger a “market failure” at Neuralink unless they made more progress, a comment perceived by some employees as a threat to shut down operations, according to a former staffer who heard his comment.
> The mistakes leading to unnecessary animal deaths included one instance in 2021, when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation, according to a person with knowledge of the situation and company documents and communications reviewed by Reuters.
> The mistake raised alarms among Neuralink’s researchers. In May 2021, Viktor Kharazia, a scientist, wrote to colleagues that the mistake could be a “red flag” to FDA reviewers of the study, which the company planned to submit as part of its application to begin human trials. His colleagues agreed, and the experiment was repeated with 36 sheep, according to the person with knowledge of the situation. All the animals, both the pigs and the sheep, were killed after the procedures, the person said.
> On another occasion, staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter and documents reviewed by Reuters. The incident frustrated several employees who said the mistakes – on two separate occasions – could have easily been avoided by carefully counting the vertebrae before inserting the device.
As somebody who routinely eats pork and lamb, and shares concern for animal welfare, I don't see any evidence that these animals experienced any undue pain and suffering (besides the death) which is routinely accepted by society for animals we eat.
> The first complaints about the company’s testing involved its initial partnership with University of California, Davis, to conduct the experiments. In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and ultimately dying, while other monkeys had different complications from the implants.
An allegation isn't evidence, and animals do die in testing for medical gain. The real question is whther it is undue, avoidable, unethical, causing unnecessary suffering. As somebody that believes that animals are quite concious and we don't particularly have the right to "use" their lives for our medical gain, this is far from the common societal consensus. I also hypocritically eat these animals which I justify as just nature - so its hard to draw a distinct line that my belly has more justifaction to their life than much more valuable scientific progress.
Federal regulators judging which medical research is valuable to society, then evaluate their policies based on that? Or are you asking whether it's worth it for the company to engage in moon-shot research without rock solid proof ahead of time?
All that should matter here is that they follow the rules and act ethically
In the long term there could potentially be a lot of benefit in restoring motor function or communication in people with catastrophic brain or spinal damage, as well as any number of other helpful neural surgeries. The device itself is one part of that, but developing surgical techniques is another large part of the research.
However like all things, it needs to be developed ethically, the counter point of course being that some of our best medical techniques have been developed over the years in unethical ways (by modern standards).
My question has to do with is the intended applications of Neuralink worth it, to needlessly kill animals in testing and push research through carelessly?
> As somebody that believes that animals are quite concious and we don't particularly have the right to "use" their lives for our medical gain, this is far from the common societal consensus.
The mammalian anatomy has been conserved for 65 million years. Function follows structure. We are essentially the same, the only difference is we grew out the neocortex to be more capable of language, vision and abstract thought. All of those animals feel the same fear, pain, and love that we are capable of- we are just able to associate them with ideas better. It is shocking that some people still don't recognize this, but I suppose it is understandable they would reject something that would get between them and their cheeseburgers.
> its hard to draw a distinct line that my belly has more justifaction to their life than much more valuable scientific progress.
Ironically enough, I'm vegetarian and keep a snake. He is a Ball Python, and not a particularly good eater, so I feed him live rats. Doing this can truly makes me sad as Rat's death is sometimes... prolonged, and sometimes Rat is friendly and smart. But Snake needs to eat whole animals, while conversely I can get by just fine on beans and rice. Keeping and feeding Snake is very–philosophically enlightening(?)–I can't quite grasp the words for it–but it acts as a reminder of the natural order of life, and a reinforcer of why I think of animals the way I do. Snake is a simple, reptilian killing machine[1] juxtaposed by rats who often are smart, curious, capable critters, yet Snake must eat rats or he will starve.
It seems you understand this, but you can't realistically develop new products for human use on any type of a time scale that most people would be happy with, and the amount of human happiness those products enable, especially through longer, healthier lives to share with family, and the literally billions of lives affected, makes testing on animals a worthwhile evil, at least to me.
I've been party to this(your) view before, typically when I defend animal testing and someone points out that I'm vegetarian with confusion and outrage, both mild, and proceeds to remind me that I often cite animal welfare as a significantly motivating factor in my diet. So I guess my comment is to say that I think it comes at least partially from a place of not being close enough to death. We hide away slaughter houses and even import immigrants to work at them, meat comes to us in plastic packages often with specific names that further us from the animal that much more. Indeed, I know that if I had met the cow that produced the cheese that I so love and keeps me from becoming a vegan, I would refrain much more than I do.
But that is just me, I've met plenty of people who raise pigs named porkchop, bacon, and babyback, or a cow named Angus, and while they don't slaughter the animal themselves, I have no doubt they would. They just really love meat and don't have the same reverence for animals that I do, but most of them feel the same way about my (lack of) religion. Different strokes, live and live, it takes all kinds~
[1] I must admit Snake gets curious sometimes wishing to escape and explore, and it makes me sad that I can't let him act upon those wants because it wouldn't be in the best interest of his welfare.
How would "the wrong surgical glue" lead to the monkeys dying? If it was surgical glue, but the wrong kind, it was surely sterile for biological use. There are just too few specific details in these accusations. It's not clear why this justifies a Federal prosecutor actively requesting the U.S. Agricultural IG to open an investigation. If this involves a lab partnership with Univ. of California, why not go through CA state channels for this? How many lab animals die each year? Is this a case of malicious prosecution?
From their description of the complaint[1], it appears the glue used is known to be toxic to nerve tissue and should not have been used on an animal's brain. The description of the consequences for the monkeys is quite hard to read (especially given what we know about their mental and social capabilities) and it certainly seems to me to warrant investigation to determine whether it was caused unnecessarily.
>The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
...
>The “lead surgeon” who was performing craniotomies and electrode implantation on a monkey, “had concerns about the void in between the two implants and applied Bioglue to fill the dead space.” Later, a necropsy revealed that the monkey had BioGlue on the surface of his brain. There was no mention of BioGlue being applied in the surgical record for this procedure, indicating poor and possibly noncompliant recordkeeping by lab personnel. BioGlue was never an approved substance for use in surgery in the approved protocol.
Thanks, but after a brief read of the 716 page complaint it appears that all of the allegations come from self reported compliance documents for the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science and contracts in attempts to comply with the ethical treatment of animals.
The expectation with animal experimentation isn't that everything goes smoothly, or even that all suffering is avoided in exchange for the information that will result in scientific advancement and safety for humans. The expectation is that there isn't undue suffering caused, and an ethics review board deems that the exchange and suffering paid by the animals is "worth it".
It's an uncomfortable reality for sure, and I would not want to be one of those monkeys, even without suffering, meeting an untimely death in service of human knowledge, but I recognise the trade off and it seems like the complainant doesn't have any extra evidence that there are systematic abuses of ethic review procedures and animal welfare standards.
That said, transparency is good and if there is substance to the claim that they Neuralink or UC Davis) are causing undue suffering then I wish them the best of luck fixing it.
Thanks for the details. In this case, if the allegations are actually true, and they accidentally used Bioglue on brain tissue, it seems like a fine is in order for the UC Davis lab. But does it really warrant an investigation of this magnitude? Why couldn't this be handled at the California state level?
I mean, this is like saying 'how could the wrong antibiotic lead to someone dying'. Obviously I'm not a medical expert but it would not surprise me if there were different classes of surgical glue for injuries vs surgery, human vs animal and general toxicity depending on location applied.
Even if you think animal suffering doesn't matter, consider: If they're this sloppy now during early research, are they suddenly going to clean up their act once they're selling product to humans?
How many consent decrees have Musk and his companies violated? I think the chance of Neuralink following FDA rules is low, even after any hypothetical lawsuit ordering them to follow the rules. To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs, and Musk has giant huevos.
The article literally continues from the last quote with an example of unnecessary pain and suffering:
>Company veterinarian Sam Baker advised his colleagues to immediately kill one of the pigs to end her suffering.
>“Based on low chance of full recovery … and her current poor psychological well-being, it was decided that euthanasia was the only appropriate course of action,” Baker wrote colleagues about one of the pigs a day after the surgery, adding a broken heart emoji.
This is fucked. If true, the entire company needs to be shut down and investigated for animal cruelty. What’s the value proposition here? Who even needs their supposed products?
Musk is clearly a sociopath with complete disregard for human or animal wellbeing.
In no way am I advocating for the way they have treated animals, in fact I am a vegetarian myself and I hate killing or harming animals.
"Who even needs their supposed products"? If they deliver the technology they are supposedly building, they'll cure blindness, quadriplegia, and shepherd in the genesis of cyborgs.
Based on Elon's track record, they'll probably never deliver anything, but to pretend that nobody wants their products is ridiculous.
> Based on Elon's track record, they'll probably never deliver anything
How is this at all based on his track record? Are we just going to ignore Tesla and SpaceX? They're both the most valuable car and space companies in the world.
Neuralink is not the first BCI nor is it the last, and it's not even focused on solving blindness or paralysis. The actual goal which Musk has stated multiple times has nothing to do with either of those things; it's merely a means to an end to try and push forward with shoddy research.
> What’s the value proposition here? Who even needs their supposed products?
Are you joking? Have you spent literally any amount of time reading about Neuralink and what they're aiming to do in their first phase of work? Literally millions of people with a wide variety of physical disabilities could have their lives radically changed with this technology.
More than anything else, the rushed quality of this research combined with how Musk treats such a sensitive implant ensures I will never volunteer to be a human test subject for Neuralink. Assuming it even gets to that point.
Do you refuse any sort of medical treatment or drug that was tested on an animal without sensitivity? Do you refuse to use or consume anything tested on lab mice, which are subjected to horrific experiments (by human standards) by the millions every year?
No, you seem to misunderstand. Animal treatment is awful, but one of the big reasons to do these treatments ethically and with care is to ensure the quality of research while reducing the risk of cruel side effects.
Musk is in the 'move fast and break things' camp, which is the last thing I would ever want when considering an implant that's going into my brain. If you want to trust Musk with your brain and assume he won't treat quality control the same way he's treated everything else then that's your prerogative, not mine. As I've mentioned and continue to mention, Musk is not the single one pushing forward on these sort of things. He is not some hero doing this out of the goodness of his heart.
I would much rather use an implant that has had the absolute most amount of research and development work done on it as possible, which means quick iterations and hard deadlines to move forward.
You can make the claim that he isn't doing it for humanitarian reasons, even though there's no foundation to make that claim unless you're Elon himself. However with the anticipated price point (a few thousand dollars) for a Neuralink surgery and implant compared to the cost of R&D over the next decade or more makes it pretty clear that Elon isn't doing this to make his next fortune. He's stated his reasons for Neuralink a million times over and if you don't choose to believe him then all I can do is disregard your comment alongside all the others that claim to psychically know for certain his intentions when you've literally never met, worked with, or spoken to the guy before.
I want to know if I'm getting an implant that I'm not part of that testing group and that the maximum amount of diligence has been done to reduce the risk of side effects in that implant. Careless animal testing and rapid iteration make me less confident about that.
If Musk is willing to cut corners and do sloppy research during animal testing, he is not suddenly going to become enormously careful as soon as humans are involved. He's actively proving that he doesn't have the patience to wait until he's sure about the process before implanting these things in a living brain.
Quick iterations and hard deadlines very often lead to things breaking in production. Once something is implanted in my brain, I do not want quick iterations on it. I don't want it to have been recently changed. And given that Musk appears to be seriously pushing for human testing within the next 6 months, I don't see any reason to believe he's going to want to conduct human testing with significantly more care or that he won't be applying a "move fast and break things" philosophy to that testing as well.
When someone is putting a device in my body, I want to know that the scientists made sure that device would be safe even if doing so meant missing some deadlines.
I believe the OP of the comment above is talking about the fact that before his twitter ban, the last picture posted by Kanye depicted Musk in an unflattering pose. The statement by OP is mostly incorrect, Kanye did post the picture, however that was apparently after a private conversation with Elon regarding an earlier post of Kanye depicting a swastika, where Elon said to either delete the photo or be banned. Kanye doubled down, attacked Elon personally and got banned.
Note: I do not really care about either Elon or Kanye, both seem to suck, just supplying the context for the comment.
plenty of accurate ways to critique elon, no need to make yourself look foolish by suggesting tesla and spacex and other ventures are just ponzi schemes.
It won't be Musk, but I would not be at all shocked if one of the people there gets an implant with no official or public record of it very early on in this process.
SpaceX launches more payload to orbit than the rest of the world combined. They're the only ones who have managed to land orbital boosters.
Tesla has manufactured over 3 million cars. They are so successful that the majority of electric vehicles in developed countries are Teslas. Since Tesla is a publicly traded company, you can look at their SEC filings and see that less than 2% of their revenue comes from subsidies.[1] 86% of their revenue is from selling and leasing cars. 8% is from services related to those cars, and 5% is from energy generation and storage. In Tesla's accounting, regulatory credits are a rounding error.
I have a hard time figuring out how either of these businesses are a confidence trick.
NASA could of also taken on those contracts and launched more rockets than they are currently are doing.
Elon isn't launching them on is lonesome as some great misunderstood innovator. He's the public face to a lot of investment, which could easily go elsewhere and be more or less successful, who knows.
Feel free to have whatever opinion you want of Elon Musk, but SpaceX has been wildly successful by just about every metric. In terms of cost, they are launching payloads at 1/44th the cost per kg of the Space Shuttle and at a fraction of the cost of their private sector competitors. Also, there's the fact that we were bumming rides off the Russians for a decade because of NASA's issues...
Agreed, SpaceX is successful. Disagree that this excludes an alternative where public funds were spent elsewhere with similar success. More or less success, who knows.
Feel free to maintain your bias, but it's a fact that smart engineers can achieve success under more than just one single showman.
He used an early Tesla Roadster as a daily commuter for years. Then he launched it into space on the first flight of the Falcon Heavy. He uses prerelease versions of the FSD software in his Model S.
Musk wouldn't get a Neuralink early on because the current implants are designed to help people with disabilities. Even if everything goes according to plan, it'll be quite some time before there are implants that enhance healthy adults.
To me that just makes his claims about wanting to move humanity forward as a whole (rather than just doing stuff out of personal ambition) ring more true.
Social media has turned the internet into a consensus enforcing, group signaling machine that overwhelms reasoned opinion and moves against dissent like an immune system. Nowhere on the internet is safe from this monster.
The older I get, the harder it gets to stomach animal testing or even animal consumption. I don't mean that this is overly cruel to animals, because nature itself is cruel. However, I could not be someone who did this work because I cannot knowingly cause suffering, and I'm wary of anyone who can.
After learning about milk production, I'm leaning on being more ok with meat production then dairy. I still consume both though and I'm holding out hope that artificial production of dairy proteins will some day destroy factory style dairy
> Our animal-free milk from flora is the first of its kind, using whey protein made by microflora, not cows, to make dairy that’s identical to traditional milk. Yes, we said identical.
“Whys” are hard but arguably —- and not a direct answer to your question of course — the why of cows producing (most of their) milk is analogous to the why of dogs acting cute: it’s for humans.
Basically. Every part of the animal livestock system at scale is a horror. If you can get from small, local producers then that’s great. But the factory farm system for anything meat, dairy poultry is hard to stomach.
I think "rape" is a bit of a hyperbole here. Yes, the cow is penetrated without consent, but the same is done all the time for rectal exams on all sorts of animals, including cows. Cows don't face trauma and PTSD and emotional harm from this penetration the same way humans do and to compare it to rape is ridiculous.
Conveniently left out the qualifier immediately following: "the same way humans do"
We absolutely know for a fact that animals don't experience trauma the same way and to the same severity as humans. They're literally incapable of human level emotional harm.
I am not denying that. I am saying it's not comparable to human trauma. This whole discussion is ridiculous because it hinges on the idea that artificial insemination is traumatic for animals when I would be really hard pressed to believe that when it's done correctly.
And yes I feel the same way about artificial insemination on dogs as I do on cows. It is a quick, instantaneous, and painless process that I cannot imagine any animal would think about twice when done properly.
Frankly, small scale dairy is worse than factory dairy in many ways. The amount of excess calving required is almost none when bST hormones and sex selected semen are combined. Have you noticed that veal is practically gone from grocery store shelves?
New Zealand is obviously an exception. This is like saying “I’ve experienced prison in Finland. It’s a pretty good life for the average person.” But when compared to a dairy farm/prison in America it is anything but a good life.
Consuming a steak is quite easy because there is a mental disconnect between this abstract red shape called a new york strip and the thinking, feeling animal it came from. When I was younger, the disassociation was so great it didn't occur to me except in an abstract sense. Also, while these environments can be cruel to animals, it's hard to be more cruel than nature.
Now that I'm older, though, disassociating is harder. It's hard for me to look at meat without thinking about the animal it came from. If I were forced to kill and butcher animals myself in order to eat meat, I know I could not do it in good conscience.
Ergo, if I cannot do it in good conscience, I find it difficult to see how anyone else can.
Obviously “nature” is a difficult concept to pin down, but I disagree with this sentiment. I think probably most factory farming (especially of chickens and pigs) is waaaay more cruel than nature (whatever that means)
One of two competing definitions of “Nature” in this context is a phantasy of how it would be without humans around. Other one is that we’re part of it. Likely it’s somewhere in between.
You are missing the point. The point is that we have a system that yes, harvests those animals for food. But we have an agreement in society that our goal is to harvest those animals without unnecessary cruelty. If some rancher were torchering their animals while ranching they would go to jail.
Its not that neuralink did monkey experiments, every medical device company does those all day, there are entire facilities dedicated to doing so with populations of hundreds or thousands of animals. The issue of that neuralink tortured those animals, did shoddy half baked work and therefore caused undue suffering to them.
It's like cadaver work, it's a necessity for our modern medicine. It's one thing for a student to do cadaver work to learn how to be a surgeon, respecting the sacrifice of the cadaver. It's another thing entirely to disrespect that cadaver, disrespect that sacrifice, that's illegal. That's what neuralink did, disrespected the sacrifice.
"But we have an agreement in society that our goal is to harvest those animals without unnecessary cruelty."
This is not true. The agreement American society seems to have is "do whatever you need to do to keep the bacon on the shelves and make it cheap".
What actually happens behind the walls of a slaughterhouse is an atrocity, the cruelty is unimaginable. I've watched it. Do a search for "factory farming undercover videos" and learn the truth behind mass factory farming. It is right there on the internet now and has been for nearly 20 years now. Multiple source, multiple films. So much. It is very traumatic to watch.
But the net suffering is probably less with scientific advancement. A few monkeys get an operation under anesthesia and seem pretty fine after and as a result you have potentially hundreds of thousands of people that have serious conditions restored.
I agree. In a utilitarian sense, we are in a better world with less suffering and higher mortality (at least for humans). The problem with utilitarian justifications is that they are usually raised by people for whom it costs nothing and gains everything from the outcome. It's "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Put another way, a more twisted person could use your same justification for, say, an undesirable subset of the human population. It wasn't long ago parts of humanity were regularly thought of and treated no better than monkeys.
All I'm saying is that in spite of knowing it'd advance humanity, I wouldn't volunteer to be the monkey, and I don't think you would, either.
> I don't mean that this is overly cruel to animals, because nature itself is cruel
I don't quite get why if nature is cruel then some level of cruelty is okay. If I have a button that when pressed, will cause all cruelty in animals to be gone, I would be wrong not to press it. Suffering is suffering regardless if its "natural" or not.
Easy, nanobots that will create a projection preys and once their predator captures them, the projections will turn into their respective food source. The predator still have the illusion that its capturing something, but no consciousness actually suffers.
Or even better, the button will move every conscious being into their own universe where they are the only conscious being. The process is perfect and the being cannot observe any difference. Each of these world progress in parallel (does not diverge) and therefore all beings existed in a world where they would have existed. Except no being is suffering.
Edit: Also, just because they need to eat the way they do does not mean that it is still not suffering and is therefore a moral bad. Why can't animals be "wrong"?
It is important to eliminate cruelty when we can. The difficulty comes from the notion of "necessary cruelty." If animal testing will save lives, we can probably agree it's a worthy sacrifice, but I somehow don't suspect the monkey volunteered.
I like to avoid cruel experiences for animals where possible but I think there are times that we can justify it. Medical science is one of the few times. I'm not a fan of cosmetic testing on animals but medical testing is worth it IMO.
If this device can help someone that is otherwise paralyzed interact with the world that is life changing.
It does expose that I value human experience way above animal experience but I've yet to find a reason not to. We use them for food, as many of them do to other animals. It's an odd part of life that suffering is part of the circle of life.
I have some familiarity with people who work with animals. From what I've seen, for most, the nature of what they're doing never really ceases to haunt them to some extent, however justified or comfortable they feel about it at an abstract level. They just carry on. Something praiseworthy about human nature there I'd say, apart from all the rest of the stuff of course.
Odd thing: Many humans have pets of a certain species and then kill another species to feed that preferred species. This is called speciesism (it's a thing, one can search it). One matters more than the other. Because the one is used for a different form of human pleasure.
"Othering" is probably one of the basest of cognitive biases. Even animals have it. At some point we need to be able to selectively empathize in order to remain sane.
> The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
The huge red flag isn't the internal backlash to the animal testing.
The red flag is the capricious and utter disregard for any sort of experimental, procedural, or safety policies in carrying out this research. Putting in several dozen of the wrong size of implants? Using toxic substances? Failure to record surgical details and experimental results?
This company, and its current crop of employees have absolutely no business being anywhere near the inside of someone's head.
I hope Neuralink makes reasonable efforts to minimise the impact of testing on animals. But state hindrance of Neuralink's research could delay or stop blind people from gaining sight and quadriplegics from walking and gaining independence.
These are themselves forms of harm whose negative effects could outweigh the impacts of testing imperfections by orders of magnitude.
Wait are you saying Musk isn't a genius but more of a master marketer !?!
When people will wake up it's going to be brutal. In 50 years we'll still talk about mars colonies and autonomous vehicles being "just around the corner"
Most people don't want to have their hands on the wheel if they are paying big money for a system like this. It's definitely nowhere close to good enough for having the hands off the wheel. I would argue that FSD requires more attention than normal driving because the software can do something rash unexpectedly.
If you want to help disabled people there are a couple dozen movements that are very clear about the support and policy changes they need. We could tremendously improve hundreds of thousands of lives in a very short time frame with relatively very little money. If that were the goal.
Ah, but that's not a cool implant he promised you see. He was given a plan to potentially end world hunger with as little as 6 billion dollars, but instead paid 44 billion so he could post on Twitter.
It's not actually about helping people, unfortunately.
> But state hindrance of Neuralink's research could delay or stop blind people from gaining sight and quadriplegics from walking and gaining independence.
That's not even what neuralink's most optimistic PR is talking about
This is what their website currently states:
> With a Bluetooth connection, you would be able to potentially control any mouse or keyboard with your thoughts.
Nobody's going to regain sight or movement, at best they'll gain mouse and keyboard control. And that's the positive side, god knows how it'll be weaponised by capitalism in the future
"The problems with Neuralink’s testing have raised questions internally about the quality of the resulting data, three current or former employees said. Such problems could potentially delay the company’s bid to start human trials, which Musk has said the company wants to do within the next six months."
This sounds very much like the kind of logic that's been roundly criticized from the Effective Altruism people in recent weeks.
"This company has a goal to some day in the far future do massive amounts of unquestionable good! Therefore, you must allow them free rein to do whatever they want now, or you're keeping people disabled."
We have ethical rules for scientific research for a reason. We have, as a society, decided that we value the lives, comfort, and dignity of both humans and (to a lesser degree) animals now more than potential future good. If we can get to that future good, we will be able to do so without resorting to destructive and unethical means...or it's not worth getting to.
This reeks of hypocrisy. The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down? When one of the key uses cases will be to help the infirm and disabled?
The number of animals being discussed here is less than 200 all up. Mostly pigs. Do you know how many pigs are grown for slaughter each year in the USA? 130 MILLION! 90000 are killed every day!
I'm a meat eater but even for me those numbers make me feel slightly ill.
The number of chickens will blow your mind. There was a world clock I saw once counting like population and a bunch of random statistics including chickens in approximated real time.
Smaller fishes reproduce faster and in greater numbers so most of deaths are probably fish like anchovies and minnows that go mostly to a variety of processed fish products and cat food
Have you seen what primarily seafood eating cultures consume? There’s a lot instances of a large fish like a tuna being shared amongst many, or even something like a salmon that can feed one. When my in laws would prepare a meal it would usually be 50+ smaller fish or crabs for 4 people
In South India, The Indian oil Sardine fish is something people eat like 5+ fish/meal.
People under estimate how much fish is sold and eaten. There are also other kinds of fish available in Bangalore they come like $1.5/kg. They are basically the 'Chinese Pomfret', they are mostly found in lakes formed around water bodies downstream to dam spillways. These are almost algae to protein conversion organism. Their only cost is cost of transportation. You need to see just how much people eat this. The fact they are also by many a definition way more cheaper than even vegetables.
I once ordered a sampler plate at a Korean place and ate a bunch of what I thought were little noodles, but quickly realized were tiny fish. So I probably ate 20 or 30 fish that day and brought the average up a bit.
The state also spends tax payer money on things like this:
According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, and subsequent media coverage, from October 2018 until February 2019, NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-l...
How else would we test an experimental drug and what makes that bad or cruel?
And the phrase "injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them" is beyond sensationalizing. You could describe plenty of high school science experiments and Medical Doctor training the same way lol.
Partially agree, but I think a lot of the public outrage is over the use / killing / botched experiments on monkeys, which are widely acknowledged to be among the most intelligent and human-like of non human animals.
Regardless of the degree to which it can be philosophically justified, intelligence and human-likeness (in terms of social abilities, emotional capacity, self-awareness, etc) are often seen as making mistreatment more ethically questionable than it would otherwise be.
In terms of scale, factory farming is obviously far more messed up. But humans don't always react purely to the scale of suffering, we also react to its severity and what it reveals about the person who is causing the suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not prepared to see animals who undergo factory farming as enduring "pointless" suffering, while a monkey killed as the result of a failed experiment does, etc.
The saddest reality of human nature that I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with is the aggressive, unrelenting desire to hold the most competent and boundary pushing people to intentionally impossible standards.
A million people could torture a thousand chickens each over the course of a lifetime and throw away the meat, overeat and make themselves a diabetic, and do all kinds of things that actively make the sacrifice of that chicken meaningless, and one scientist who tries to maximize the gain of that sacrifice and better humanity by studying it’s brain is hounded and harassed not because he’s worse than the average person, but because he’s better.
Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?
Speciesm is when we care more for one animal species over another. For example people in the west will generally have more of a moral issue over eating dogs compared to pigs.
It would be, at least to an extent. Even vegans (which I am) still recognise that some animals are smarter than others, which can result in different moral weights given to them. And it doesn't normally include humans.
I see, so vegans recognize that speciesism is "true" in the sense that some animals do have more valuable lives than others, and harms to some animals are worse than harms to others? Makes it a bit hard to know what the term is designed to achieve. Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?
> Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?
Yes it's more just this. It might but I don't think it has a particularly large philosophical underpinning, it's more just used as activism
elwooddogmeat.com is a good example of its use in my opinion.
The thing is that intelligence is kinda orthogonal to the ability to feel pain. Bacteria don't seem to have a nervous system, so that would be a place to draw a first line.
Pork might have been a better food to make this comparison with, and in this particular example I get that monkeys being closer to humans is a lot of what makes this controversial, but the phenomenon I’m describing is still pertinent. There are undoubtably other experiments using monkeys in far less scrupulous ways for far less beneficial purposes, but of course Neuralink gets the spotlight due to Musk.
I used to think a lot of ostensibly moral decision making which had a net detrimental effect was something that would change if people better understood the full picture and where moral outrage would be most impactful, but I’ve seen envy dominate decision making over and over enough to learn that a lot of people are in fact quite content to harm everyone on net if it means the outliers are harmed more.
What beneficial purpose are you exactly talking about here? From what I've read, the science to make the products Neuralink is working on feasible is still decades away, according to most neuroscientists. Attainability of those goals should be a primary factor when deciding whether experimenting on animals, especially highly developed animals such as monkeys, is reasonable.
The beneficial purposes are improving prosthetics.
And the only thing that makes those goals attainable and products better is experimentation.
If they are needlessly experimenting and making no progress, that’d be tragic, and comparable to existing tragedies that happen in labs all over the world.
The timing, intended audience, and flavor of the criticism suggests this is much less about any ethical breaches and much more about reigning in someone who is perceived to be breaking out of bureaucratic control.
My understanding is that Elon isn’t under fire for being smart, he’s under fire because he’s continued to make statements which are politically disadvantageous to the ruling class in Washington.
Its critical soemeone like Elon posit alternative theories as to the motives of Paul Pelosi’s crazed attacker. Or engage in racist and the now failed Trumpism. /s
Good thing you trust the competent scientists he's hired, because they're the ones blowing the whistle on Musk's operating practices. The lede: "Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid INTERNAL STAFF complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths." (emphasis mine)
Whether or not those quoted are actually representative or cherry picked, and whether they’re as opposed to internal practices as is suggested or simply think there’s room for improvement requires a trusted investigator to determine.
Quite frankly, the vast majority of the journalistic enterprise has been so heavily discredited and so abused for hit pieces and marketing that I don’t trust that the reporting reflects the internal reality they’re depicting.
The timing, the citation of multiple federal boards, citation of a competitor, and the group think Eye of Sauron that used to be aligned against Trump seemingly gearing up to go against Musk makes me highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the complaints.
This is a tragic situation, because it is now very difficult to distinguish between the types of people opposed to high pressure pursuits of excellence in general, regardless of how effective and voluntarily pursued and in good faith they are, and people who are legitimately waving a red flag about a serious problem.
This does not strike me as a serious problem, this strikes me as a hit piece.
I'm aware that we don't have all the evidence yet - this is why there's a federal probe. So far, the quotes we see from employees (those competent scientists that you said you trust) suggest extreme malfeasance.
Regardless of your opinion of the current state of journalism or the "Eye of Sauron" or Trump or whatever else you're trying to drag into this conversation, Elon Musk's company is being investigated by the federal government after his employees have alleged widespread ethical abuses in his company.
As a counterpoint to your lament of geniuses being persecuted, I don't think Musk is particularly "excellent" in any way except being rich, which affords him opportunities and platforms far beyond the reach of the average person, including being able to hire the smartest people in the world who do the actual work in his companies.
Maybe you don't think it's a serious problem, but enough employees do and so does the federal government. It's not "tragic" in any way that Musk's companies are regulated the same way other companies in those domains are regulated. I find that Elon Musk doing something unethical/illegal is far more plausible than what you suggest - a conspiracy by journalists and the employees of Neuralink (again, the competent scientists which you claim to trust) to defame him.
this all comes down to Elon's perceived alignment with power in the us government.
When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation.
when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals.
I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government.
All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries.
I think it's less about government alignment and more about vested interest alignment. There are a lot of people who want Elon to fail in everything he does and a lot of them have a lot of power and influence to help make it happen.
you're right there, both aspects certainly play a role. similar attacks we're launched by conservatives on fauci because he was a high profile target perceived to be on the opposite side:
>One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy.
judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.
This article is a repost from RT, as mentioned in the tiny italic footer.
Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture.
That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all.
I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans.
The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison.
Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom.
Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.
Don’t forget that the horses are basically a living breathing pharmaceutical factories for the specific anti-venom they are used for, they are incentivised to look after the horses very well in order to avoid not only replacement cost, but wasted hours of specialised labour, and future lost revenue from the sale of harvested anti-venom products.
The “harvest” is basically a horse sized version of the sort of blood donation we do routinely for humans.
So why don’t the same people want Tim Cook to fail? Maybe if Elon was not tweeting obscenities at US Senators about their penises and ejaculation, perhaps like, maybe, people would not be having knives out for him? Just a thought.
Tim Cook doesn't have the entirety of the oil industry, the automotive industry, the power industry, the aerospace industry, (formerly) the payment processing and banking industry, and now the medical industry standing to lose trillions of dollars from stuff that he's doing. Tom Cook's scope and influence is also massively smaller than Elon's and tremendously lower stakes.
I don't understand how anyone can say this when Musk has been granted preferential treatment by the government across multiple cases. He's received very lucrative contracts that fund and subsidize his company, Neuralink has received expedited treatment by the FDA for their research. This has held true across multiple administrations.
preferential treatment over whom? he had to sue for the right to even compete for launch contracts. he's gone through hell getting Boca chica through an environmental review, and he was only recently considered to be right of center. at best it could be argued that he received preferential treatment until he publicly politicized himself.
edit:
He's also been shut out of the Biden administrations public initiatives on electric cars. an industry Tesla single-handedly created. ostensibly due to being non-union.
Most of that is BS of course but I get your point. His companies have received billions in tax breaks and NASA contracts, then supports Trumpism, Kanye and segregation.
he doesn't support any of those things and never did. but even if he did, it is still worth supporting him because of the actual positive change in the world he has manifested by having the balls to try. results are what matter, not his political beliefs or personal associations.
Preferential treatment over who? He's the only game in town for half the things he's working on and still has to fight tooth and claw for support. The guy is funding Starlink for Ukraine out his own pocket (or at least was last I heard).
People are so envious that Elon is a genius and one of the greatest men of our time (and not them) that they can't think straight about him.
Name one entrepreneur who has close to the track record of success he has had? He was even a major key funder of OPENAI that is all the rage these days.
Politicans hate him because people can see he actually cares and is competent in a way they aren't and so is respected and applauded for it. While they are more often than not mediocre men who can barely fix a kitchen sink.
what, really? not even spacex turns profit with it's gvmt contracts...Tesla turned a profit by his manipulation of initially the market, then latterly the crypto market, but despite making the cars dirt cheap (and it shows), he still couldn't make any money for over a decade.
He consistently misses but he knows where to make his money: conning vc, and getting his fans to dance on crypto.
He's a two-bit conman whose success is not in being an innovator but sometimes being ftm, he's going to be pushed out of every industry he's playing in eventually.
His one original idea: TBC...hahahahaha.
A clown who gets high off his own hype and the worship of smooth-brained fanboys.
I don't have sources handy just at the moment, but I've seen it reported by (what appeared to be) some fairly reputable outlets. It's possible it's untrue, but it all seemed to check out.
But those animals are not unnecessarily cruely treated. It's one thing to farm animals, it's another to deliberately treat them more poorly than is strictly needed to get the value out of them. That's what neuralink is accused of - unnecessary cruelty.
> The state actively subsidises factory farming which is at least 100 times more morally messed up than this but this could be shut down?
Yes, it could, and rightly so. Note that I’m not saying it should. I don’t know the details, and certainly can’t judge whether the (potential) benefits of this research warrant the suffering to animals.
Also note that animal welfare laws typically aren’t about the killing of animals, but about their suffering. Society at large isn’t ready for forbidding the killing of animals for food or for medical research.
I think the point here is that the people performing the actual experiments think that the amount of animal testing is inappropriate. If you do an experiment and it ends up killing the animal, that is one result. One data point. If you do the experiment 100 times and it kills 100 animals, that may be a signal that you need to work out some theory and not a signal that you need to go ahead and kill another 100 animals. If this were just PETA or something, it would be pretty easy to ignore, but when the employees performing the experiments are complaining, I think it's pretty reasonable to pay attention. These are people that signed up to work for the company. They knew that animal testing would be involved. Many of them had probably already worked on experiments that utilized animal test subjects. And these are the people saying that the level of animal testing is not appropriate.
Not to sound harsh but I want advancement to cure horrible diseases and disabilities, not government red tape halting us from moving forward because some monkeys woke up with a headache.
Okay, let’s strap you into a chair and drill into your head against your will and then subject you to hours of tests only to realize it’s the wrong implant so we just have to kill you. Sound good?
Bud, these animals go to war with each other and tear each others faces off and get eaten alive by predators every day. This is hardly the worst thing to happen and its the only way to make progress in this area. They're also not trying to be cruel, its not some torture chamber.
It’s not? They’re recklessly messing up implants, forcing them to be killed. There’s no benefit to that, only needless suffering and death.
Humans go to war with each other and use nuclear weapons, does that mean murder, torture or human testing (in the form of implants against your will) are okay? You argument falls entirely apart on that one simple premise.
yes the human ubermench must rule over the savages as is his right as the greatest wielder of violence. Not familiar to ideology that we experience to bunch of in the 30s and 40s at all....
That makes the "look, the monkey likes doing this" a bit funnier than it already was. It was clear that it was a (pathetic) response to the cruelty allegations.
That said humans are cruel to animals at a scale far, far, far larger than this.
Ignoring it is typically the wisest response if you can't effectively explain yourself. If you can, responding can work, but it's going to add to the fire.
They did neither here: Mentioning the controversy, but not saying anything redeeming, more like demonstrating that they don't take them seriously.
I have a family member trying to produce some novel materials. To prove it is safe for human skin contact he is required by federal regulations to perform testing on beagles.
Something on the order of 60,000 beagles are bred per year for animal testing. Most of the testing isn’t actually helpful or valuable. But it’s the only way to get through the regulatory approvals.
As times passes I am less supportive of how companies use ideology to weaponize regulations in order to slow down competition. How fast the COVID vaccine was created is a bit of uncovering how fast it could go when people are willing to compromise for the greater good (also talent and hard work).
It feels like the machine was created to slow down progress and now it cannot be stopped. As other comments said already, factory farming is worst than what Neurallink is doing, and vegan activists are trying to save animals for ages. On the other hand, Musk is also known for pushing hard employees, and animals is just the extension of pushing hard for breakthrough.
If not done in the US, maybe it will go elsewhere, and to what purpose? This feels to me like a very worthy cause. A huge number of other animals are used for other types of health research. I guess just because people dislike rodents they give it a pass. But what Neurallink is doing is in far fewer number than rat use for drugs, etc, and far less than animal farming. It is just the engine of regulation, competition, lobbying and patents working as it is supposed to.
The COVID vaccine is perhaps a poor example as mRNA vaccines have been something in development for quite some time before COVID. It was a technology there at precisely the right time
Literally millions of animals die every day as a byproduct of animal processing industries. As in, death in a way that doesn't result in any sort of useful consumption.
True, but it's a cost of doing the business. In general, if there was a way where we could do that processing with less animal suffering we would. In Neuralinks case they could have done their business with less animal suffering, and chose not to.
They are not by far the least worst offender. Medtronic, J&J, all the big med tech and pharma companies do this work day in out, for decades, and none of them do it this way. Neuralink is by the far the worst, and that is why there are articles and former employees saying so.
Over a hundred comments and I haven't seen one suggestion yet that this is retaliation for what Elon is doing with Twitter right now. Wouldn't you think that's a distinct possibility?
When internal employees complain, the regulators are compelled to investigate regardless of whether the person in charge has a beef politically with the executive body. Otherwise, it would be an incentive to revile the government if you know you are not in compliance with any regulating body.
Not suggesting that the allegations are untrue, just that the timing is politically expedient. Neuralink has been in the news before about animal treatment (Feb '22).. and it was not as big a deal in the media then. For the issue to resurface now is...interesting
I would argue that this might also have been due to Neuralink recently announcing their updates where a monkey was shown to be operating a Neuralink device. Remember, Elon Musk has been politically controversial wayy before he got hold of Twitter. Since 2020 when he flouted Covid policy, he has been controversial politically. So since that time, there is a possibility that any regulatory action against him would have been considered politically expedient. Hence, one can argue instead that it is politically expedient to claim any action against him to be policially motivated.
For sheep and pigs surely you can just run a farm and do experiments on them just before they're due to be slaughtered. Then only vegetarians can complain!
Actually, you can’t do this. Negligence is one thing. Deliberately torturing animals, even if they are used for food, is illegal.
Scientific animal research has guidelines to minimize suffering as much as possible. The government treats this as a necessary evil. If you’re attempting to do this in good faith, it’s only morally wrong.
Many companies make illegal activity a corporate policy, but that doesn’t make them immune from prosecution if someone decides they have stepped too far over the line.
Where in the article did it say NeuroLink was deliberately torturing the animals? In fact, the article said that the animals are killed after research in order to do post mortem examinations. This is standard across many animal testing labs.
This is how we could describe any procedures in this area of medicine, so the intentions seem to meet the criteria for calling it a test and not torture, but the sloppiness is the extra cruelty on top.
There are other articles describing horrific incidents:
"In two separate incidents, experimenters used an unapproved adhesive called BioGlue to fill holes in the animals’ skulls, which seeped through to the monkeys’ brains. In one monkey, the use of BioGlue caused bleeding in her brain, and she vomited so much from the resulting side effects that she developed open sores in her esophagus."
It's not two mistakes. It's two cases of torture. Just because it's only two doesn't mean it wasn't torture. It's not like they discovered the mistake and then immediately euthanized the animals, they chose to continue the experiments and torture them after the mistakes were evident.
You have to put the critters to sleep with anestethic drugs in order to "experiment" on them, since the experiments involve surgery. I very much doubt that such animals can safely enter the human food supply.
Not sure why you were down voted. This is a valid question. The challenge is that anesthesia gas and analgesia drugs may contaminate the meat, and most research orgs are understandably terrified of further liability given the already intense pressure on them. (As seen by the Reuters piece, which is clearly a hit job.)
In this context there is no meat. No one sells these animals as meat, it's illegal.
These animals are being sacrificed to test new medical devices, drugs and procedures. We use anesthesia gas and drugs on people when we use these devices, so we need to use it for the animal tests also. Every single animal case I've been a part of utilized human quality anesthesia, including having a real anesthesiologist present doing it. This comment is way off, shows a deep lack of understanding of the process.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that no one, AFAIK, has actually attempted to outgas the meat or evaluate whether buprenorphine survives cooking. And it is wasteful, in the sense that if they don't need to do cardiac perfusion of formaldehyde, the meat part of the pig might well still be edible once the brain has been removed.
(edit) And I should point out that when I started in the field, we used to donate euthanized rodents to the zoo for snake food, but somehow that now became not-a-thing, despite the fact that there are humane/approved ways of doing euthanasia that minimize distress while still not requiring anesthesia. (This is how the reptile food industry operates!)
Not really. They really work to get the most out of each animals sacrifice. So one day it may be used for a cardiac procedure, the next day some kind of skin drug test, the next day some kind of cardiac drug, etc. So it's not like they use one tiny part of an animal then throw it away. They use the whole animal to get clinical benefit.
It's the same with cadavers. They cut them up and use only the part they need to do the work. It's far less wasteful that way.
> So one day it may be used for a cardiac procedure, the next day some kind of skin drug
Our IACUC will not allow this. The general policy from the Guide to Animal Care (NIH document which governs PHS funded research in the US) is in fact that an individual animal should not be exposed to multiple distressful procedures unless scientifically necessary. My understanding is that European animal committees have more of a minimize-the total-number-of-animals attitude, but that doesn't fly in the States anymore, at least on the research side.
Exactly, snd it seems a lot of Musks endevours play it fast and loose with regulation. Well, even when it comes to morales, which are an important part of animal testing.
"Principle of reducing the number of animals used in research, refining scientific procedures to minimize pain, and replacing animal experiments with in vitro models when possible."
I better waste a truckload of eggs and make that omelette in my lifetime. I think we had enough "potential treatments" for humans that take 50 years to pass(if ever) the "potential" stage. We eat enough steaks anyway so using 0.00000001% for research doesn't sound that bad to me.
I don't understand how that's relevant to the neuralink story. Yes there are people who will benefit from being able to communicate via brain activity instead of their meat. But I'm not sure how that's curing a deadly disease?
Of course moving recklessly fast in a way to produces inferior results also kills things (animals directly and people indirectly) because of the delay introduced.
The most chilling statement out of the article to me is "Musk’s impatience with Neuralink has grown as the company, which launched in 2016, has missed his deadlines on several occasions to win regulatory approval to start clinical trials in humans, according to company documents and interviews with eight current and former employees."
To think a company that is apparently being forced to cut corners and move faster, resorting to "hack jobs" on animals in order to show progress, wants to test on people turns my stomach. How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? What happens when the human trials take too long to show progress?
I personally know plenty, that's my evidence. I also personally knowing morally bankrupt people. I know morally bankrupt people who aren't CEOs, I know good people who are. These are separate adjectives.
>> Unless you don’t wanna see it, that he’s a sociopathic personality with too much capital fueling his god complex and a brittle long-termism agenda?
> So, he’s your standard CEO, then. Got it.
He's definitely not "your standard CEO." How could you even say something like that with a straight face? Those aren't binary qualities and he seems to have them to a far larger degree than other CEOs. Alternatively, for someone in his position, he is unusually lacking the social skills or self-control needed to mask them.
So Musk, who has done and is doing a lot to reduce air pollution(which is causing 6.5 million deaths per year) and climate change is sociopathic, but all the oil executives get a free pass, got it.
This is the same pope of climate change who wanted to build concrete tunnels underneath cities to transmit a single brand of car and wants to build gigantic rockets to go to Mars in a billionaire pissing contest?
The likelihood of EVs and Tesla in particular impacting climate change is minuscule and much overhyped and oversold.
I was responding to the idea that he is supposedly a savior for climate change.
Regarding sociopathy, I’m not a psychologist, but he seems clearly a narcissist. He almost feels too sensitive and needy to be a sociopath, but who knows.
While fairly true, it isn't really relevant to climate change. If anything, the EV movement has reignited the love of the car, which is harmful to curbing climate change. Building one mile of a one lane road emits 400 times the emissions of building an EV, and building EVs actually emits more emissions than an ICE car. EVs only cross over to be more emissions friendly about 6-24 months into driving ownership, ignoring battery disposal and recycling. EVs are the most overblown response to climate change that will ultimately do nothing.
Rockets are absolutely terrible for climate change. They dump huge amounts of pollutants directly into the atmosphere, including the upper atmosphere.
The fact that people see Musk as actually caring about climate change is disheartening. In fact, it may even be the case that Musk and his companies are a net negative in terms of mitigating climate change.
(1) Reducing localized air pollution by offsetting it somewhere else. The creation and use of cars is one of the most inefficient ways of transporting people to date. And this doesn't take into account all the environmental damage causes by mining practices to get the metals used for his battery and the car.
(2) Musk actively hampers government investment in one of the best pieces of infrastructure for reducing transportation related climate change and pollution. See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
(3) as for the sociopathic tendencies. The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of. Dude doesn't even have a physics degree but doesn't correct people. He is actively promoting the great man of history theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory] which is complete bullshit. It takes a group of people to accomplish most great things of history. Hannibal crossing the Alps by himself wouldnt even be a foot note in history of Rome... But with his officers helping him push his military through and into Italy... Well one of the greatest enemies of Rome in her history. Same thing with spaceX, Elon musk didnt design and make his companies rockets... He hired great leaders to dedicate to who made it happen. He is just a 21st century salesman.
>The creation and use of cars is one of the most inefficient ways of transporting people to date. And this doesn't take into account all the environmental damage causes by mining practices to get the metals used for his battery and the car
EVs replacing gas guzzling cars and SUVs is a win for the environment. You're just regurgitating the oil lobby's misinformation.
>See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
Do you have a source for "how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California"?
>The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of.
Trivially debunked, he gives Karpathy the limelight on AI Day, and lets the battery engineers talk on stage on Battery day.
Wait! Wasn't that the point of these credits in the first place?
Penalizing ICE auto manufacturers who weren't doing enough switching to clean energy alternatives, while also rewarding the competition that were trying embrace these alternatives?
Effectively having those that weren't doing anything subsidize those that were.
But if he'd not sold them, then the other manufacturers would have been forced to reduce emissions even more - otherwise it's just a cost of business (passed on to consumers).
It's not some altruistic move - it propped up Tesla's balance sheet when it was needed, and makes a mockery of his green credentials.
He seems pretty down-to-ground to me, personally, especially compared to other people of similar wealth. What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
> too much capital
I personally agree, but this is still a subjective opinion, not a real criticism. The more general implication of this is that there is such a thing as "too much capital", in which case we need to draw the line - at which point exactly capital becomes too much? A million dollars? A billion?
> brittle long-termism agenda
Brittle or not, arguing that Elon cares only about long term is factually false - he already delivered many things, including Tesla electric cars and Starlink internet service, which are useful here and now.
> What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
Just look at the way he's been treating Twitter employees.
For example, making a joke by bringing a "sink in" [1] the company right before making pre-announced firings. That episode right there tells you he's more concerned with making a joke for the lolz than about the emotions of his new employees, which is a pretty clear sociopathic action.
For the specific example I mentioned, it clearly could have been handled much more sensitively.
Don't make bombastic jokes when entering a company you're about to eviscerate. It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
> It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
Sure, but is it enough to call a person a sociopath? By that definition, every rich person sheltered from ordinary working man's reality is a sociopath.
There are other reasons why I think he's likely to be a sociopath, from his bullying behaviour to his increasingly out-of-control impulsive tendencies.
I'm not a doctor so I can't make a diagnosis, but if you really are interested in whether he's a sociopath or not there's plenty of material online with indications on that. Here's a list of signs of sociopathy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/signs-of-a-sociopath/
There are dozens of stories that show Musk is at least a narcissist with very little empathy, not necessarily a sociopath, but it's the same for the rest of the world.
Elon's callousness is legendary -- read what his first wife had to say about him, people close to him and the way they were fired, the way he named his son with Grimes, the way he baselesly insulted a hero diver as pedophile, the fact he has so many children he barely sees them.
So the world in which this incident shows sociopathic behavior is the exact world that Musk (and I, for that matter) disagree with.
My impression of prestige tech is that large parts of the industry are children because the money tree kept everyone in cold brew hop teas and catered lunches regardless the usefulness of your product or your monetization strategy.
Please don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us.
Please don't post like this to HN. No one is saying you owe billionaire CEOs better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. It's about what poisoning the ecosystem does to us.
> How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people?
Presumably as easily as people turn from casually eating beef to raising their children without suffocating them at the slightest inconvenience? People have very different standards of care for humans and animals.
So do the parents of children but it hasn't stopped flaws in Tesla's FSD. Not entirely directly comparable, sure, but it's the same attitude of "get it to market before it's ready".
If there's one thing we've learned from Elon's acquisition of Twitter, it's that his default response to "you'll get sued" is a confident belief he can beat the rap.
These animals are intended to simulate humans for purposes of research, though. A disregard for doing the experimentation properly has the potential to carry over into production usage, just like coding newbies who write code with SQL injection holes saying "eh I'll fix it later" are practicing writing insecure code.
"Oops wrong glue/vertebra/implant" folks are not people I want anywhere near my brain surgery.
It can work rather poorly in software from a quality perspective too, but in software the game is often to test a business hypothesis very quickly or ship features fast enough to win feature bingo with competitors and quality often goes on the back burner.
It's just that in health care the bar for MVP is way way higher.
I have a whole rant about how consumer software and software for serious things (ie: people can die) need to be treated differently just like civil engineering and building a shed in your back yard should be treated differently. There is no room for agile code in a finished product where lives are on the line. Its fine for non life or death things and its a great way to prototype ideas. But the control system on your car should be developed with more rigor than that.
It actually does, but in a measured way. You have to have a hybrid approach. Agile for stuff like little software features and bug fixes, waterfall for big important (often safety and effectively tied) milestones they often precede an animal or human study. Iterate the smaller less safety critical features (which are often software based) and then align the exit of one of those phases with a hardware freeze that captures key safety and effectivity in the hardware and then do a cadaver, animal or human study to prove it. You don't want to apply agile to the hardware usually.
Moving fast and break things actually seems like a decent idea in healthcare BEFORE you get to the human trials, then you should slow down. Not sure how hard a change in culture that will be.
We kill hundreds of millions of animals a year after incredible suffering for much worse reasons than making the blind see. And healthcare moves very slowly atm, leading to a lot of suffering.
I agree with the idea in general but some of the errors are just bad science that doesn’t discover anything. Putting the wrong sized chip in a brain? Using a mistaken vertebrae? Not euthanizing as soon as it’s apparent the trial is too flawed to continue? These are just sloppy mistakes.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 481 ms ] thread> But current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research. Through company discussions and documents spanning several years, along with employee interviews, Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors. The mistakes weakened the experiments’ research value and required the tests to be repeated, leading to more animals being killed, three of the current and former staffers said. The three people attributed the mistakes to a lack of preparation by a testing staff working in a pressure-cooker environment.
> Musk has pushed hard to accelerate Neuralink’s progress, which depends heavily on animal testing, current and former employees said. Earlier this year, the chief executive sent staffers a news article about Swiss researchers who developed an electrical implant that helped a paralyzed man to walk again. “We could enable people to use their hands and walk again in daily life!” he wrote to staff at 6:37 a.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 8. Ten minutes later, he followed up: “In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!”
> On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment. On one occasion a few years ago, Musk told employees he would trigger a “market failure” at Neuralink unless they made more progress, a comment perceived by some employees as a threat to shut down operations, according to a former staffer who heard his comment.
> The mistakes leading to unnecessary animal deaths included one instance in 2021, when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation, according to a person with knowledge of the situation and company documents and communications reviewed by Reuters.
> The mistake raised alarms among Neuralink’s researchers. In May 2021, Viktor Kharazia, a scientist, wrote to colleagues that the mistake could be a “red flag” to FDA reviewers of the study, which the company planned to submit as part of its application to begin human trials. His colleagues agreed, and the experiment was repeated with 36 sheep, according to the person with knowledge of the situation. All the animals, both the pigs and the sheep, were killed after the procedures, the person said.
> On another occasion, staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter and documents reviewed by Reuters. The incident frustrated several employees who said the mistakes – on two separate occasions – could have easily been avoided by carefully counting the vertebrae before inserting the device.
> The first complaints about the company’s testing involved its initial partnership with University of California, Davis, to conduct the experiments. In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and ultimately dying, while other monkeys had different complications from the implants.
Federal regulators judging which medical research is valuable to society, then evaluate their policies based on that? Or are you asking whether it's worth it for the company to engage in moon-shot research without rock solid proof ahead of time?
All that should matter here is that they follow the rules and act ethically
However like all things, it needs to be developed ethically, the counter point of course being that some of our best medical techniques have been developed over the years in unethical ways (by modern standards).
The mammalian anatomy has been conserved for 65 million years. Function follows structure. We are essentially the same, the only difference is we grew out the neocortex to be more capable of language, vision and abstract thought. All of those animals feel the same fear, pain, and love that we are capable of- we are just able to associate them with ideas better. It is shocking that some people still don't recognize this, but I suppose it is understandable they would reject something that would get between them and their cheeseburgers.
Ironically enough, I'm vegetarian and keep a snake. He is a Ball Python, and not a particularly good eater, so I feed him live rats. Doing this can truly makes me sad as Rat's death is sometimes... prolonged, and sometimes Rat is friendly and smart. But Snake needs to eat whole animals, while conversely I can get by just fine on beans and rice. Keeping and feeding Snake is very–philosophically enlightening(?)–I can't quite grasp the words for it–but it acts as a reminder of the natural order of life, and a reinforcer of why I think of animals the way I do. Snake is a simple, reptilian killing machine[1] juxtaposed by rats who often are smart, curious, capable critters, yet Snake must eat rats or he will starve.
It seems you understand this, but you can't realistically develop new products for human use on any type of a time scale that most people would be happy with, and the amount of human happiness those products enable, especially through longer, healthier lives to share with family, and the literally billions of lives affected, makes testing on animals a worthwhile evil, at least to me.
I've been party to this(your) view before, typically when I defend animal testing and someone points out that I'm vegetarian with confusion and outrage, both mild, and proceeds to remind me that I often cite animal welfare as a significantly motivating factor in my diet. So I guess my comment is to say that I think it comes at least partially from a place of not being close enough to death. We hide away slaughter houses and even import immigrants to work at them, meat comes to us in plastic packages often with specific names that further us from the animal that much more. Indeed, I know that if I had met the cow that produced the cheese that I so love and keeps me from becoming a vegan, I would refrain much more than I do.
But that is just me, I've met plenty of people who raise pigs named porkchop, bacon, and babyback, or a cow named Angus, and while they don't slaughter the animal themselves, I have no doubt they would. They just really love meat and don't have the same reverence for animals that I do, but most of them feel the same way about my (lack of) religion. Different strokes, live and live, it takes all kinds~
[1] I must admit Snake gets curious sometimes wishing to escape and explore, and it makes me sad that I can't let him act upon those wants because it wouldn't be in the best interest of his welfare.
>The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
...
>The “lead surgeon” who was performing craniotomies and electrode implantation on a monkey, “had concerns about the void in between the two implants and applied Bioglue to fill the dead space.” Later, a necropsy revealed that the monkey had BioGlue on the surface of his brain. There was no mention of BioGlue being applied in the surgical record for this procedure, indicating poor and possibly noncompliant recordkeeping by lab personnel. BioGlue was never an approved substance for use in surgery in the approved protocol.
1: https://www.pcrm.org/ethical-science/animals-in-medical-rese...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kbwap1dj4e51mfe/2022-02-10%20PCRM%...
The expectation with animal experimentation isn't that everything goes smoothly, or even that all suffering is avoided in exchange for the information that will result in scientific advancement and safety for humans. The expectation is that there isn't undue suffering caused, and an ethics review board deems that the exchange and suffering paid by the animals is "worth it".
It's an uncomfortable reality for sure, and I would not want to be one of those monkeys, even without suffering, meeting an untimely death in service of human knowledge, but I recognise the trade off and it seems like the complainant doesn't have any extra evidence that there are systematic abuses of ethic review procedures and animal welfare standards.
That said, transparency is good and if there is substance to the claim that they Neuralink or UC Davis) are causing undue suffering then I wish them the best of luck fixing it.
[2] https://www.pcrm.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/publi...
>Company veterinarian Sam Baker advised his colleagues to immediately kill one of the pigs to end her suffering.
>“Based on low chance of full recovery … and her current poor psychological well-being, it was decided that euthanasia was the only appropriate course of action,” Baker wrote colleagues about one of the pigs a day after the surgery, adding a broken heart emoji.
Musk is clearly a sociopath with complete disregard for human or animal wellbeing.
"Who even needs their supposed products"? If they deliver the technology they are supposedly building, they'll cure blindness, quadriplegia, and shepherd in the genesis of cyborgs.
Based on Elon's track record, they'll probably never deliver anything, but to pretend that nobody wants their products is ridiculous.
How is this at all based on his track record? Are we just going to ignore Tesla and SpaceX? They're both the most valuable car and space companies in the world.
Which is a pretty good track record.
Are you joking? Have you spent literally any amount of time reading about Neuralink and what they're aiming to do in their first phase of work? Literally millions of people with a wide variety of physical disabilities could have their lives radically changed with this technology.
Musk is in the 'move fast and break things' camp, which is the last thing I would ever want when considering an implant that's going into my brain. If you want to trust Musk with your brain and assume he won't treat quality control the same way he's treated everything else then that's your prerogative, not mine. As I've mentioned and continue to mention, Musk is not the single one pushing forward on these sort of things. He is not some hero doing this out of the goodness of his heart.
You can make the claim that he isn't doing it for humanitarian reasons, even though there's no foundation to make that claim unless you're Elon himself. However with the anticipated price point (a few thousand dollars) for a Neuralink surgery and implant compared to the cost of R&D over the next decade or more makes it pretty clear that Elon isn't doing this to make his next fortune. He's stated his reasons for Neuralink a million times over and if you don't choose to believe him then all I can do is disregard your comment alongside all the others that claim to psychically know for certain his intentions when you've literally never met, worked with, or spoken to the guy before.
If Musk is willing to cut corners and do sloppy research during animal testing, he is not suddenly going to become enormously careful as soon as humans are involved. He's actively proving that he doesn't have the patience to wait until he's sure about the process before implanting these things in a living brain.
Quick iterations and hard deadlines very often lead to things breaking in production. Once something is implanted in my brain, I do not want quick iterations on it. I don't want it to have been recently changed. And given that Musk appears to be seriously pushing for human testing within the next 6 months, I don't see any reason to believe he's going to want to conduct human testing with significantly more care or that he won't be applying a "move fast and break things" philosophy to that testing as well.
When someone is putting a device in my body, I want to know that the scientists made sure that device would be safe even if doing so meant missing some deadlines.
Note: I do not really care about either Elon or Kanye, both seem to suck, just supplying the context for the comment.
That would be a poetic test of his sincerity.
In any case, I think we all know he shoots his mouth off (/ to the moon) to suck up money for his various ponzis.
Tesla has manufactured over 3 million cars. They are so successful that the majority of electric vehicles in developed countries are Teslas. Since Tesla is a publicly traded company, you can look at their SEC filings and see that less than 2% of their revenue comes from subsidies.[1] 86% of their revenue is from selling and leasing cars. 8% is from services related to those cars, and 5% is from energy generation and storage. In Tesla's accounting, regulatory credits are a rounding error.
I have a hard time figuring out how either of these businesses are a confidence trick.
1. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/0000...
NASA could of also taken on those contracts and launched more rockets than they are currently are doing.
Elon isn't launching them on is lonesome as some great misunderstood innovator. He's the public face to a lot of investment, which could easily go elsewhere and be more or less successful, who knows.
https://medium.com/geekculture/spacex-vs-nasa-cost-4fae45482...
Feel free to maintain your bias, but it's a fact that smart engineers can achieve success under more than just one single showman.
Musk wouldn't get a Neuralink early on because the current implants are designed to help people with disabilities. Even if everything goes according to plan, it'll be quite some time before there are implants that enhance healthy adults.
https://perfectday.com/animal-free-milk-protein/
> Lactose-free
They don't know what identical means.
>Cows don't face trauma and PTSD and emotional harm
There is no way we can know this
We absolutely know for a fact that animals don't experience trauma the same way and to the same severity as humans. They're literally incapable of human level emotional harm.
Some short reading: https://forthesciences21003.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2020/05/04/a...
How do you know this? And would you feel the same if we did it to a pet female dog?
because they aren't humans.
And yes I feel the same way about artificial insemination on dogs as I do on cows. It is a quick, instantaneous, and painless process that I cannot imagine any animal would think about twice when done properly.
It's not either or. Both are terrible for the animals. Just in different ways.
Now that I'm older, though, disassociating is harder. It's hard for me to look at meat without thinking about the animal it came from. If I were forced to kill and butcher animals myself in order to eat meat, I know I could not do it in good conscience.
Ergo, if I cannot do it in good conscience, I find it difficult to see how anyone else can.
Obviously “nature” is a difficult concept to pin down, but I disagree with this sentiment. I think probably most factory farming (especially of chickens and pigs) is waaaay more cruel than nature (whatever that means)
Its not that neuralink did monkey experiments, every medical device company does those all day, there are entire facilities dedicated to doing so with populations of hundreds or thousands of animals. The issue of that neuralink tortured those animals, did shoddy half baked work and therefore caused undue suffering to them.
It's like cadaver work, it's a necessity for our modern medicine. It's one thing for a student to do cadaver work to learn how to be a surgeon, respecting the sacrifice of the cadaver. It's another thing entirely to disrespect that cadaver, disrespect that sacrifice, that's illegal. That's what neuralink did, disrespected the sacrifice.
This is not true. The agreement American society seems to have is "do whatever you need to do to keep the bacon on the shelves and make it cheap".
What actually happens behind the walls of a slaughterhouse is an atrocity, the cruelty is unimaginable. I've watched it. Do a search for "factory farming undercover videos" and learn the truth behind mass factory farming. It is right there on the internet now and has been for nearly 20 years now. Multiple source, multiple films. So much. It is very traumatic to watch.
All I'm saying is that in spite of knowing it'd advance humanity, I wouldn't volunteer to be the monkey, and I don't think you would, either.
I don't quite get why if nature is cruel then some level of cruelty is okay. If I have a button that when pressed, will cause all cruelty in animals to be gone, I would be wrong not to press it. Suffering is suffering regardless if its "natural" or not.
how would carnivores and parasites eat?
is there not some possibility there might be some small question of whether or not pressing the button is moral?
Or even better, the button will move every conscious being into their own universe where they are the only conscious being. The process is perfect and the being cannot observe any difference. Each of these world progress in parallel (does not diverge) and therefore all beings existed in a world where they would have existed. Except no being is suffering.
Edit: Also, just because they need to eat the way they do does not mean that it is still not suffering and is therefore a moral bad. Why can't animals be "wrong"?
If this device can help someone that is otherwise paralyzed interact with the world that is life changing.
It does expose that I value human experience way above animal experience but I've yet to find a reason not to. We use them for food, as many of them do to other animals. It's an odd part of life that suffering is part of the circle of life.
I’m saying I could not be that person who performed these surgeries and look at myself in the mirror when the day is over.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28506017/
> The company’s statement does not change the fact that monkeys used by Neuralink at UC Davis had portions of their skulls removed and devices screwed to their heads, nor that Neuralink used a substance called “BioGlue,” which was not approved for use in these experiments and has been widely known to be toxic to nerve tissue since at least 2001. BioGlue came into contact with the surface of at least two monkeys' brains, causing damage and hemorrhaging; one monkey suffered for days after this damage.
Monkey Holding Device [2]
[1] https://www.pcrm.org/ethical-science/animals-in-medical-rese...
[2] https://www.pcrm.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/publi...
The red flag is the capricious and utter disregard for any sort of experimental, procedural, or safety policies in carrying out this research. Putting in several dozen of the wrong size of implants? Using toxic substances? Failure to record surgical details and experimental results?
This company, and its current crop of employees have absolutely no business being anywhere near the inside of someone's head.
This is true if you ignore the comprehensive information Neuralink provides on these very topics: https://neuralink.com/blog/animal-welfare/
These are themselves forms of harm whose negative effects could outweigh the impacts of testing imperfections by orders of magnitude.
https://twitter.com/miguelnicolelis/status/15983642585129041...
https://twitter.com/miguelnicolelis/status/13889485264162078...
https://twitter.com/miguelnicolelis/status/13809831628813312...
When people will wake up it's going to be brutal. In 50 years we'll still talk about mars colonies and autonomous vehicles being "just around the corner"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaWjndujjzc
It's not actually about helping people, unfortunately.
That's not even what neuralink's most optimistic PR is talking about
This is what their website currently states:
> With a Bluetooth connection, you would be able to potentially control any mouse or keyboard with your thoughts.
Nobody's going to regain sight or movement, at best they'll gain mouse and keyboard control. And that's the positive side, god knows how it'll be weaponised by capitalism in the future
"This company has a goal to some day in the far future do massive amounts of unquestionable good! Therefore, you must allow them free rein to do whatever they want now, or you're keeping people disabled."
We have ethical rules for scientific research for a reason. We have, as a society, decided that we value the lives, comfort, and dignity of both humans and (to a lesser degree) animals now more than potential future good. If we can get to that future good, we will be able to do so without resorting to destructive and unethical means...or it's not worth getting to.
The number of animals being discussed here is less than 200 all up. Mostly pigs. Do you know how many pigs are grown for slaughter each year in the USA? 130 MILLION! 90000 are killed every day!
I'm a meat eater but even for me those numbers make me feel slightly ill.
https://considerveganism.com/counter/
People under estimate how much fish is sold and eaten. There are also other kinds of fish available in Bangalore they come like $1.5/kg. They are basically the 'Chinese Pomfret', they are mostly found in lakes formed around water bodies downstream to dam spillways. These are almost algae to protein conversion organism. Their only cost is cost of transportation. You need to see just how much people eat this. The fact they are also by many a definition way more cheaper than even vegetables.
According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, and subsequent media coverage, from October 2018 until February 2019, NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies. The dogs were all between six and eight months old. The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. https://mace.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-mace-leads-l...
And the phrase "injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them" is beyond sensationalizing. You could describe plenty of high school science experiments and Medical Doctor training the same way lol.
Regardless of the degree to which it can be philosophically justified, intelligence and human-likeness (in terms of social abilities, emotional capacity, self-awareness, etc) are often seen as making mistreatment more ethically questionable than it would otherwise be.
In terms of scale, factory farming is obviously far more messed up. But humans don't always react purely to the scale of suffering, we also react to its severity and what it reveals about the person who is causing the suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not prepared to see animals who undergo factory farming as enduring "pointless" suffering, while a monkey killed as the result of a failed experiment does, etc.
A million people could torture a thousand chickens each over the course of a lifetime and throw away the meat, overeat and make themselves a diabetic, and do all kinds of things that actively make the sacrifice of that chicken meaningless, and one scientist who tries to maximize the gain of that sacrifice and better humanity by studying it’s brain is hounded and harassed not because he’s worse than the average person, but because he’s better.
Yes it's more just this. It might but I don't think it has a particularly large philosophical underpinning, it's more just used as activism
elwooddogmeat.com is a good example of its use in my opinion.
I used to think a lot of ostensibly moral decision making which had a net detrimental effect was something that would change if people better understood the full picture and where moral outrage would be most impactful, but I’ve seen envy dominate decision making over and over enough to learn that a lot of people are in fact quite content to harm everyone on net if it means the outliers are harmed more.
And the only thing that makes those goals attainable and products better is experimentation.
If they are needlessly experimenting and making no progress, that’d be tragic, and comparable to existing tragedies that happen in labs all over the world.
The timing, intended audience, and flavor of the criticism suggests this is much less about any ethical breaches and much more about reigning in someone who is perceived to be breaking out of bureaucratic control.
I do agree with you overall point though.
Quite frankly, the vast majority of the journalistic enterprise has been so heavily discredited and so abused for hit pieces and marketing that I don’t trust that the reporting reflects the internal reality they’re depicting.
The timing, the citation of multiple federal boards, citation of a competitor, and the group think Eye of Sauron that used to be aligned against Trump seemingly gearing up to go against Musk makes me highly skeptical of the legitimacy of the complaints.
This is a tragic situation, because it is now very difficult to distinguish between the types of people opposed to high pressure pursuits of excellence in general, regardless of how effective and voluntarily pursued and in good faith they are, and people who are legitimately waving a red flag about a serious problem.
This does not strike me as a serious problem, this strikes me as a hit piece.
Regardless of your opinion of the current state of journalism or the "Eye of Sauron" or Trump or whatever else you're trying to drag into this conversation, Elon Musk's company is being investigated by the federal government after his employees have alleged widespread ethical abuses in his company.
As a counterpoint to your lament of geniuses being persecuted, I don't think Musk is particularly "excellent" in any way except being rich, which affords him opportunities and platforms far beyond the reach of the average person, including being able to hire the smartest people in the world who do the actual work in his companies.
Maybe you don't think it's a serious problem, but enough employees do and so does the federal government. It's not "tragic" in any way that Musk's companies are regulated the same way other companies in those domains are regulated. I find that Elon Musk doing something unethical/illegal is far more plausible than what you suggest - a conspiracy by journalists and the employees of Neuralink (again, the competent scientists which you claim to trust) to defame him.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When you are aligned with the political power, you will sail through policy reviews, milestones and never see an audit or investigation.
when you are not, you will face never ending snaggles and red tape, threats of jail time, OIG investigations, endless proposal rejections and an unwavering ability for procedural outcomes to break in ways more painful to your goals.
I've experienced it from both sides and when the tide turns it is a very ugly and sobering realization of endemic dysfunction in our government.
All because people believe the big boss will reward the bureaucrats who torment their perceived ideological adversaries.
/cynical rant from someone going through it.
https://bfp.org/fauci-hammered-by-beagle-freedom-project-thr...
>One particularly horrific experiment Fauci’s NIAID apparently paid for involved locking beagle puppies’ heads in boxes with sand flies, which were given hour-long intervals to feast on the poor dogs’ faces. Weary of the suffering dogs’ helpless cries, the experimenters arranged to have them “de-barked” – a barbaric procedure known as a cordectomy.
judge for yourself whether this is better or worse than neuralink but it was allowed to proceed until there was a political reason to start digging for dirt.
Even with that in mind, the authors themselves state these are "alleged" accusations lacking any sources or evidence. They mostly just claim over and over Fauci himself "bankrolled" these experiments and was the mastermind behind this supposed9 torture.
That's specifically NOT the way bureaucratic agencies, including the NIH, work at all.
I don't support animal cruelty whatsoever. And animal well being genuinely matters to me at all times. However.. vaccines, medical techniques, and pharmaceuticals that have transformed human existence in the last century and a half by saving billions of lives have often required animal testing during development. In the end, the only other option is doing the same things on humans.
The perfect example is the history of snake venom treatments. Rabbits were used to test the hypothesis of building an immune response via low dose titration of the poison overtime. Then you can take the plasma from their blood and harvest the antibodies to use as an antidote to a specific poison.
Fast Forward, we currently use horses to create the antibodies by dosing them with low levels of whatever venom youre trying to treat over the course of a year. Then, harvest their blood plasma and you have yourself antivenom.
Sounds terrible right? I'd disagree if one of my loved ones had just been bitten by an incredibly poisonous, rare snake requiring these seemingly cruel medicines to save their life in the matter of an hour. Plus the process is actually painless and harmless to the horses thanks to modern science.
The “harvest” is basically a horse sized version of the sort of blood donation we do routinely for humans.
This is just not at all in touch with reality.
edit: He's also been shut out of the Biden administrations public initiatives on electric cars. an industry Tesla single-handedly created. ostensibly due to being non-union.
People are so envious that Elon is a genius and one of the greatest men of our time (and not them) that they can't think straight about him.
Name one entrepreneur who has close to the track record of success he has had? He was even a major key funder of OPENAI that is all the rage these days.
Politicans hate him because people can see he actually cares and is competent in a way they aren't and so is respected and applauded for it. While they are more often than not mediocre men who can barely fix a kitchen sink.
You hard kinda wrong, it's a bit of a wash, but USAID paid a significant amount of the cost for starlink.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...
He consistently misses but he knows where to make his money: conning vc, and getting his fans to dance on crypto.
He's a two-bit conman whose success is not in being an innovator but sometimes being ftm, he's going to be pushed out of every industry he's playing in eventually.
His one original idea: TBC...hahahahaha.
A clown who gets high off his own hype and the worship of smooth-brained fanboys.
Assuming you mean The Boring Company, this has been revealed to be explicitly a ploy to torpedo support for high-speed rail in California.
Not a fan of nuerolink and Elon, but it seems political.
Yes, it could, and rightly so. Note that I’m not saying it should. I don’t know the details, and certainly can’t judge whether the (potential) benefits of this research warrant the suffering to animals.
What you should be angry about is not the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_Act_of_1966, but the, as far as I can tell, nonexistence of federal laws regulating the treatment of farm animals (they are excluded from that law, and https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/farm-animal-protecti... says there aren’t similar federal laws regulating their welfare. The list of state laws at https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS_... also is very short)
Also note that animal welfare laws typically aren’t about the killing of animals, but about their suffering. Society at large isn’t ready for forbidding the killing of animals for food or for medical research.
Film recommendation: Okja
If it ever works.
Humans go to war with each other and use nuclear weapons, does that mean murder, torture or human testing (in the form of implants against your will) are okay? You argument falls entirely apart on that one simple premise.
You’re making a statement of morality as a statement of fact, it’s absurd.
That said humans are cruel to animals at a scale far, far, far larger than this.
If they ignored the allegations I’m guessing you’d criticize that too?
They did neither here: Mentioning the controversy, but not saying anything redeeming, more like demonstrating that they don't take them seriously.
Something on the order of 60,000 beagles are bred per year for animal testing. Most of the testing isn’t actually helpful or valuable. But it’s the only way to get through the regulatory approvals.
It’s all super gross.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xo8oj2BHhU
It feels like the machine was created to slow down progress and now it cannot be stopped. As other comments said already, factory farming is worst than what Neurallink is doing, and vegan activists are trying to save animals for ages. On the other hand, Musk is also known for pushing hard employees, and animals is just the extension of pushing hard for breakthrough.
If not done in the US, maybe it will go elsewhere, and to what purpose? This feels to me like a very worthy cause. A huge number of other animals are used for other types of health research. I guess just because people dislike rodents they give it a pass. But what Neurallink is doing is in far fewer number than rat use for drugs, etc, and far less than animal farming. It is just the engine of regulation, competition, lobbying and patents working as it is supposed to.
This is true of literally any animal impacting business and Neuralink is by far the least worst offender if these allegations even wind up being true.
- Some pig in Animal Farm
* FSD is being tested on public roads instead of a closed course.
* His “funding secured” tweet
Shame about the monkeys though.
Scientific animal research has guidelines to minimize suffering as much as possible. The government treats this as a necessary evil. If you’re attempting to do this in good faith, it’s only morally wrong.
Many companies make illegal activity a corporate policy, but that doesn’t make them immune from prosecution if someone decides they have stepped too far over the line.
Seems deliberate enough?
"In two separate incidents, experimenters used an unapproved adhesive called BioGlue to fill holes in the animals’ skulls, which seeped through to the monkeys’ brains. In one monkey, the use of BioGlue caused bleeding in her brain, and she vomited so much from the resulting side effects that she developed open sores in her esophagus."
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220926005606/en/Phy...
In this context there is no meat. No one sells these animals as meat, it's illegal.
These animals are being sacrificed to test new medical devices, drugs and procedures. We use anesthesia gas and drugs on people when we use these devices, so we need to use it for the animal tests also. Every single animal case I've been a part of utilized human quality anesthesia, including having a real anesthesiologist present doing it. This comment is way off, shows a deep lack of understanding of the process.
(edit) And I should point out that when I started in the field, we used to donate euthanized rodents to the zoo for snake food, but somehow that now became not-a-thing, despite the fact that there are humane/approved ways of doing euthanasia that minimize distress while still not requiring anesthesia. (This is how the reptile food industry operates!)
It's the same with cadavers. They cut them up and use only the part they need to do the work. It's far less wasteful that way.
Our IACUC will not allow this. The general policy from the Guide to Animal Care (NIH document which governs PHS funded research in the US) is in fact that an individual animal should not be exposed to multiple distressful procedures unless scientifically necessary. My understanding is that European animal committees have more of a minimize-the total-number-of-animals attitude, but that doesn't fly in the States anymore, at least on the research side.
Nothing wrong with animal testing in and of itself, as long as it follows established rules and regulations.
Not that I am surprised the least bit.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK24650/
To think a company that is apparently being forced to cut corners and move faster, resorting to "hack jobs" on animals in order to show progress, wants to test on people turns my stomach. How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people? What happens when the human trials take too long to show progress?
Care to share with "us" what is it that "we" know about Elon Musk?
> So, he’s your standard CEO, then. Got it.
He's definitely not "your standard CEO." How could you even say something like that with a straight face? Those aren't binary qualities and he seems to have them to a far larger degree than other CEOs. Alternatively, for someone in his position, he is unusually lacking the social skills or self-control needed to mask them.
Care to expand how he's sociopathic?
The likelihood of EVs and Tesla in particular impacting climate change is minuscule and much overhyped and oversold.
Regarding sociopathy, I’m not a psychologist, but he seems clearly a narcissist. He almost feels too sensitive and needy to be a sociopath, but who knows.
While fairly true, it isn't really relevant to climate change. If anything, the EV movement has reignited the love of the car, which is harmful to curbing climate change. Building one mile of a one lane road emits 400 times the emissions of building an EV, and building EVs actually emits more emissions than an ICE car. EVs only cross over to be more emissions friendly about 6-24 months into driving ownership, ignoring battery disposal and recycling. EVs are the most overblown response to climate change that will ultimately do nothing.
Rockets are absolutely terrible for climate change. They dump huge amounts of pollutants directly into the atmosphere, including the upper atmosphere.
https://transdef.org/media/Sightline-GHG-analysis.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220713-how-to-make-rock...
The fact that people see Musk as actually caring about climate change is disheartening. In fact, it may even be the case that Musk and his companies are a net negative in terms of mitigating climate change.
Rockets have a negligible impact on climate change relative to ICE vehicles.
(2) Musk actively hampers government investment in one of the best pieces of infrastructure for reducing transportation related climate change and pollution. See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
(3) as for the sociopathic tendencies. The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of. Dude doesn't even have a physics degree but doesn't correct people. He is actively promoting the great man of history theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory] which is complete bullshit. It takes a group of people to accomplish most great things of history. Hannibal crossing the Alps by himself wouldnt even be a foot note in history of Rome... But with his officers helping him push his military through and into Italy... Well one of the greatest enemies of Rome in her history. Same thing with spaceX, Elon musk didnt design and make his companies rockets... He hired great leaders to dedicate to who made it happen. He is just a 21st century salesman.
EVs replacing gas guzzling cars and SUVs is a win for the environment. You're just regurgitating the oil lobby's misinformation.
>See his rebranded vacuum tube train aka the Hyperloop [circa 1799 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain] and how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California
Do you have a source for "how it stopped government investment in high speed rail in California"?
>The dude claims all the credit for every company he has ever been apart of.
Trivially debunked, he gives Karpathy the limelight on AI Day, and lets the battery engineers talk on stage on Battery day.
>He is actively promoting the great man of history theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory] which is complete bullshit
Source?
The rest aren't even sociopathic tendencies. Being a good salesman, which any CEO should be, isn't sociopathic.
Penalizing ICE auto manufacturers who weren't doing enough switching to clean energy alternatives, while also rewarding the competition that were trying embrace these alternatives?
Effectively having those that weren't doing anything subsidize those that were.
It's not some altruistic move - it propped up Tesla's balance sheet when it was needed, and makes a mockery of his green credentials.
He seems pretty down-to-ground to me, personally, especially compared to other people of similar wealth. What actions/behavior of his make you think he's sociopathic?
> too much capital
I personally agree, but this is still a subjective opinion, not a real criticism. The more general implication of this is that there is such a thing as "too much capital", in which case we need to draw the line - at which point exactly capital becomes too much? A million dollars? A billion?
> brittle long-termism agenda
Brittle or not, arguing that Elon cares only about long term is factually false - he already delivered many things, including Tesla electric cars and Starlink internet service, which are useful here and now.
Just look at the way he's been treating Twitter employees.
For example, making a joke by bringing a "sink in" [1] the company right before making pre-announced firings. That episode right there tells you he's more concerned with making a joke for the lolz than about the emotions of his new employees, which is a pretty clear sociopathic action.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-purchase-sink...
Don't make bombastic jokes when entering a company you're about to eviscerate. It looks tacky, insensitive, and leaves a bad first impression on the people working there.
Sure, but is it enough to call a person a sociopath? By that definition, every rich person sheltered from ordinary working man's reality is a sociopath.
There are other reasons why I think he's likely to be a sociopath, from his bullying behaviour to his increasingly out-of-control impulsive tendencies.
I'm not a doctor so I can't make a diagnosis, but if you really are interested in whether he's a sociopath or not there's plenty of material online with indications on that. Here's a list of signs of sociopathy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/signs-of-a-sociopath/
Elon's callousness is legendary -- read what his first wife had to say about him, people close to him and the way they were fired, the way he named his son with Grimes, the way he baselesly insulted a hero diver as pedophile, the fact he has so many children he barely sees them.
My impression of prestige tech is that large parts of the industry are children because the money tree kept everyone in cold brew hop teas and catered lunches regardless the usefulness of your product or your monetization strategy.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Presumably as easily as people turn from casually eating beef to raising their children without suffocating them at the slightest inconvenience? People have very different standards of care for humans and animals.
Humans sue.
"Oops wrong glue/vertebra/implant" folks are not people I want anywhere near my brain surgery.
It's just that in health care the bar for MVP is way way higher.
We kill hundreds of millions of animals a year after incredible suffering for much worse reasons than making the blind see. And healthcare moves very slowly atm, leading to a lot of suffering.