The example they gave of another company getting IDE Approval (Synchron) makes it seem possible, but I don't know how much of this is just general governmental inefficiencies and some level of systemic bias against Elon (stemming from big oil & auto). Or is the startup mentality of move fast and break things just not as applicable in this domain?
It is, but you need people who have made medical devices before, people who have done animal work before, surgeons, etc. You can still move fast and break things, just in an ethical and respectful manner that gives respect to the sacrifice that cadaver doners and animal sacrifices deserve. This is not that.
I’m having some trouble interpreting your comment, and I don’t know how much context you have for Neuralink, so I will share a small amount of context which you may already know.
The basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.
The improvements that Neuralink advertises aren’t there, scientists in the field don’t believe that they will materialize in the foreseeable future, and there are a ton of problems you need to solve first which you could probably solve by first working with organisms like worms or whatnot, instead of pigs and monkeys.
Adding a jet engine to your car won’t shave twenty minutes off your commute to the office, it will just kill you and spread your body across the pavement. Sticking one of those Neuralink interfaces in a monkey won’t give us insight into brain-computer interfaces, it will just make the monkey suffer and die.
Any advances that Neuralink is actually making could probably be made with less suffering.
It feels distinctly possible that Nueralink is fraudulent. What is the point of the demos, slideshows, and general hype that comes from the company? They aren't selling anything, and don't expect to for years. Even then, the first customers will find the product medically necessary, and this broad marketing approach will be unnecessary. It's just odd to have so much PR for this.
Is that a material difference? The basic elements of the formula are there—promise some kind of revolutionary advancement in medical technology, fail to deliver it, but keep going down the same path anyway. I think that the people at the center of these schemes are believers, or at least, they start out that way. You believe that this technology will provide great benefits in the future, and so you do whatever you feel you must do to keep the research going forward. You believe that with more time, more money, you can close the gap.
Fail to deliver? Wut? They never commited to any timeline and have just began. What do you expect, brain computer interfaces and robot brain surgeons in less than a decade of development? That's crazy. I expect at least 2 decades, if not more.
The technique Neuralink is using to fail to deliver is a bold one where they make outrageous claims about what kind of problems they can solve with brain-computer interfaces.
There are other companies doing similar BCIs and rather successfully. There is a pretty good understanding of what such interfaces can do because it has already been tried in humans - see what is being done with people who have severe epilepsy, for example.
The innovation of Neuralink is not the idea of BCI itself nor the benefits it can bring - that's old news. Neuralink is about the surgery procedure and bringing it to mass market.
Neuralink is right to want to improve BCIs and make the technology more available, but the stated goals include things like controlling computers, using AI assistants, and telepathy. As far as I can tell, Musk likes to make promises or prognostications with a casual disregard for whether they are possible, and then apply significant amounts of pressure to the employees at his companies to make those things happen. This is a bad recipe.
It's already tested in humans, we know it's possible. Currently we have a proof of concept of roughly 60 letters per minute. It was tried with people who needed BCI because of epilepsy. It's also tested that it's possible to transfer what the person is seeing as well as what they're imagining.
Neuralink is most importantly about the surgery procedure, not about BCI itself, that's really nothing new at this point. They're building their own BCI because of their specific idea about the surgery (they don't want to need to remove the upper half of your skull like it's done today), but the tech itself is already proven.
Do you even watch the news of this field? This was tried like 5-10 years ago already, and is now steadily improving. I don't understand how you can make claims about Neuralink or Musk when you don't know the basics about the state of this field.
> general governmental inefficiencies and some level of systemic bias against
Imagine trying to get government permission to drive a car, but you don’t want to talk to anyone who has ever driven a car, or engage with the “overly burocratic” process for getting a drivers license.
You might end up feeling like the system is biased against you, but it should be obvious that you are just being intentionally difficult at every step.
Musk should have brought on people with experience rather than try to sidestep the system. This isn’t like his self driving cars where he can just put it out I beta and blame end users for getting killed or killing others.
Professionels in the actual field of conducting animal trials and getting medical devices through FDA approval. No one who has ever worked even just as a week as an intern in the field would ever have the blatant disregard for proper procedures they had. It’s just as insane as if Elon had said “just put a dozen or so untested self driving cars in the city center and see if they crash”. Animal testing isn’t something where you go “Oh it’s only an animal so we don’t give a fuck how we treat it”, there are very high bars that you need to stick to. People know that if they work in the field, which is why you need professionals and not just biohackers who don’t care about any established processes and just want to skip them in the spirit of “the ends justify the many animals we carelessly brutalized without any care taken to avoid it”
I can’t speak to “truth”, only trust. If the reporting is ideological, the likelihood that the narrative is slanted is high. Is Neuralink doing something wrong, or are they being targeting by ideologues? We don’t know.
I don’t think animal testing is bad per se, and I’m very distrustful of news releases from organizations that are against all animal testing where their reporting is peppered with totally unrelated images of animal abuse, just to be inflammatory.
Animals die for humans to live better lives all the time. There are protocols to minimize, but not eliminate, suffering. Animal testing is a greater good that helps us understand the diseases that plague us and look for cures.
The goals of Neuralink are some of the most important being undertaken. It might seem abstract or wishful to some, but should they succeed we will have a plausible way to escape our mortality. It's a long shot, but we should absolutely take it.
Neuralink’s goals aren’t sufficient justification here, the question is about whether the actual research done by Neuralink can plausibly produce outcomes that benefit us, and whether the subjects are suffering needlessly.
If you try to rush research, you don’t necessarily get the same research but faster, you might just get bad research instead.
Why is eating steak a sufficient reason but developing such life-changing technology is not?
We already know that BCIs work and bring enormous benefits to people with epilepsy, ADHD, etc. There's no question about that. The only problem is, and that's what Neuralink aims to solve, that it's a very invasive procedure, so it's not being done often. But we know it works.
Eating a steak is not a good reason to cause unnecessary suffering. I don’t know what kind of argument you were hoping to make, but comparing one cruel thing with another is not insightful or useful. Industrial livestock production is inhumane and this is unnecessary; it can be fixed but there is not enough political will.
So you're expecting them not to do anything whatsoever with animals, because you define anything done with them as cruelty? I disagree completely. Of course there shouldn't be any unnecessary suffering and definitely zero cruelty, but animal testing - as well as animal eating - is fine with me and many more people.
It can be "fixed" but almost nobody wants that "fix". Politicians are here to enact the will of the people. That's democracy. I don't think it's nice to talk about your differing political opinions as a "fix". This is not something that's broken, we want it this way - we wouldn't have spend so much time making regulations about it if we didn't.
If you find developing technologies that could fix epilepsy and ADHD (and potentially many more neurological issues) as well as help locked-in people communicate as unnecessary, I really don't know what to tell you...
> So you're expecting them not to do anything whatsoever with animals, because you define anything done with them as cruelty?
No, it sounds like you completely misunderstand my position. I guess I haven’t explained my position very well, because that’s completely incorrect. (I’m honestly a bit baffled by this.)
When I say “unnecessary suffering” I am not talking in some kind of mathematical sense of necessity, but I’m using the term colloquially, as it works in ordinary conversation. It means something like this—the suffering could be avoided without undue burden.
> This is not something that's broken, we want it this way - we wouldn't have spend so much time making regulations about it if we didn't.
I’m not sure I understand the logic for why you say we want it this way—politicians are here to enact the will of the people is a nice theoretical foundation for understanding the political process, but the actual behavior of representative democracies diverges from the will of the people, and it’s also not a moralistic argument—part of the reason that we have a constitutional government in the US is exactly because we recognize that we shouldn’t do whatever the people will.
The idea that I’m not supposed to “fix” the will of the people is kind of absurd anyway—all I’m doing is making moral arguments about what should be done, and the “will of the people” itself is an end product of people making arguments about what should or should not be done.
> If you find developing technologies that could fix epilepsy and ADHD (and potentially many more neurological issues) as well as help locked-in people communicate as unnecessary, I really don't know what to tell you...
You seem to be arguing that the behavior of Neuralink is necessary to achieve its goals, but the testimony I’ve heard seems to contradict this—the experiments are being done hastily, which results in bad data, unnecessary suffering, and then you have to redo the experiments.
There’s a simple formula you can use to get people to do immoral unethical things, if you desire. Create pressure to get results, then create an organizational structure that shields people from seeing the consequences. This is how we have industrial farms the way we do, this is how clothing companies based in the US end up using child labor overseas, and this is how Neuralink appears to be working.
When a clothing company gets caught using child labor overseas, you find some contractor to blame. You terminate the contract and hire another contractor to manage the manufacturing for you. This creates the façade of moral behavior on the part of individuals, while preserving the economic and organizational systems which encouraged immoral behavior in the first place. Neuralink isn’t out there with the goal of causing suffering just like clothing companies aren’t—and the best way I know to counteract it is with regulations.
Nobody is saying that but the quality of your argument is certainly diminished if you present these articles as evidence when they are written by a non neutral party with an agenda and at best confusing if not purposefully misleading.
It's not my argument. I'm just a guy on the internet trying to help another guy on the internet who asked a question because they didn't know about this and weren't informed. Now your informed and can make your own prediction.
I guess tech's "move fast and break things" approach may not be ideal when it comes to devices that could cause permanent, irreversible brain damage...
Reversing the aging process looks to be much easier problem to solve than uploading the brain. I dont understand why Elon didnt put his money in that direction. Luckily some people are starting to understand how close we are at solving reversing aging (measured in decades).
He has 0.6% chance of dying at his age in 1 year, so it may be wise to put 0.6% of his net worth to use to combat it ($1B/year).
Of course Jeff Bezos is a bit closer, but Jeff investing only a few billion dollars in 1 company (even though it’s the most important company) is also not rational.
Remember that he’s not actually that smart. Rob Beschizza has the best description of Musk:
“I love how childish and petty it is. There is no depth or human complexity to Musk whatsoever: he's just a rich kid who got lucky and now we marvel at his exertions day in, day out. The New York Times still casts Musk as a public intellectual, even now, because its editors live in a floating world of narrative imagination and are impervious to the facts of the matter. In return, he calls it ‘diarrhea.’ They completely deserve one another.”
Well, that's alot of "luck" then. If only everyone could be as "lucky". I wonder how many CEOs have in-depth understanding of their products? My guess is it would be few.
You might get some mileage out of FoolEd By Randomness, by N. Taleb.
What brings it to mind here is there’s a thought experiment that considers a very large number of people playing a series of rounds of Russian roulette. At the end there are a handful of very lucky and very wealthy people (and a vast graveyard of th unlucky).
Taleb writes entertaining books, but fundamentally is a trader who made one good bet (against the housing bubble) and is going to milk it for the rest of his life (which is, amusingly, exactly what he accuses Elon of doing).
Erm showing a a bit bad faith here. Taleb got his big break in the 80s. I think it was Black Monday, when he held long and deeply out of the money puts and watched them bring him considerable return while other market actors went out of business. Maybe the commenter above you is kind of retrofitting Taleb's ideas, but fundamentally Taleb is a real thinker, and Elon is a real people manager/entrepreneur.
I don't understand why we think successful business people somehow have the same acumen, or equivalent inclinations as a philosopher or an artist. For sure there is some overlap, but at the end of the day I think it's more probable Elon's intelligence and aptitude are overrated by just about everyone while his people managing skills and luck are underrated by just about everyone.
He does not have in dept understanding of his product. He is massively charismatic, good at impressing people and very good at playing people. And most CEOs does not seem that bad compared to Musk.
He takes questions at Tesla earnings calls that other CEOs would delegate to lower level executives, and can talk about rocket science when prompted (see Tim Dodd's videos). That's not to say he's an expert on everything, one thing to note is he's also been working at those companies since the start. In my view, a big part of why his companies are successful is he actually does understand the product portfolio to a great depth that most CEOs who simply do management don't. I'm not talking to the level of "I can code this myself", I simply mean "I understand the software used to make this, how it talks with X and why we do Y instead of Z". It's easy to bash on people because you don't like them, but it doesn't make for a convincing argument with blanket statements like that.
Every single time he talked about something I understand, it was good sounding bs. He is good at pop science talk and at impressing people. But he is neither engineer nor scientist. Not even close.
> He takes questions at Tesla earnings calls that other CEOs would delegate to lower level executives
He can lie better and he is controlling micromanager.
> Reversing the aging process looks to be much easier problem to solve than uploading the brain. I dont understand why Elon didnt put his money in that direction.
Perhaps because it's much less prominent in science fiction.
Neuralink's premise is that unless humans undergo radical augmentation, we will become obsolete as contrasted to purely-mechanical thinking machines. Electronic / machine augmentation is a strategy for us to stay in-the-loop in order to maintain effective control.
Reversing aging does nothing to solve the same problem.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadThe basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.
The improvements that Neuralink advertises aren’t there, scientists in the field don’t believe that they will materialize in the foreseeable future, and there are a ton of problems you need to solve first which you could probably solve by first working with organisms like worms or whatnot, instead of pigs and monkeys.
Adding a jet engine to your car won’t shave twenty minutes off your commute to the office, it will just kill you and spread your body across the pavement. Sticking one of those Neuralink interfaces in a monkey won’t give us insight into brain-computer interfaces, it will just make the monkey suffer and die.
Any advances that Neuralink is actually making could probably be made with less suffering.
... and without the fraud? You can't get Neuralink installed at wallgreens, for example.
At least, at first.
The innovation of Neuralink is not the idea of BCI itself nor the benefits it can bring - that's old news. Neuralink is about the surgery procedure and bringing it to mass market.
Neuralink is most importantly about the surgery procedure, not about BCI itself, that's really nothing new at this point. They're building their own BCI because of their specific idea about the surgery (they don't want to need to remove the upper half of your skull like it's done today), but the tech itself is already proven.
Do you even watch the news of this field? This was tried like 5-10 years ago already, and is now steadily improving. I don't understand how you can make claims about Neuralink or Musk when you don't know the basics about the state of this field.
Imagine trying to get government permission to drive a car, but you don’t want to talk to anyone who has ever driven a car, or engage with the “overly burocratic” process for getting a drivers license. You might end up feeling like the system is biased against you, but it should be obvious that you are just being intentionally difficult at every step. Musk should have brought on people with experience rather than try to sidestep the system. This isn’t like his self driving cars where he can just put it out I beta and blame end users for getting killed or killing others.
I work in the industry, have designed and tested many similar devices, and the credible accounts I've read of the things they did are criminal.
This has some more details from the public info: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/future...
The Vox article for example was written by the partner of someone who worked at PCRM - the advocacy group that filed the complaint.
The article is also packed with pictures of animal abuse that has absolutely nothing to do with Neuralink - which they do mentioned in the fine print.
These images of course are entirely misleading and have no place in the article other than trying to draw a false equivalence.
I don’t think animal testing is bad per se, and I’m very distrustful of news releases from organizations that are against all animal testing where their reporting is peppered with totally unrelated images of animal abuse, just to be inflammatory.
The goals of Neuralink are some of the most important being undertaken. It might seem abstract or wishful to some, but should they succeed we will have a plausible way to escape our mortality. It's a long shot, but we should absolutely take it.
If you try to rush research, you don’t necessarily get the same research but faster, you might just get bad research instead.
We already know that BCIs work and bring enormous benefits to people with epilepsy, ADHD, etc. There's no question about that. The only problem is, and that's what Neuralink aims to solve, that it's a very invasive procedure, so it's not being done often. But we know it works.
It can be "fixed" but almost nobody wants that "fix". Politicians are here to enact the will of the people. That's democracy. I don't think it's nice to talk about your differing political opinions as a "fix". This is not something that's broken, we want it this way - we wouldn't have spend so much time making regulations about it if we didn't.
If you find developing technologies that could fix epilepsy and ADHD (and potentially many more neurological issues) as well as help locked-in people communicate as unnecessary, I really don't know what to tell you...
No, it sounds like you completely misunderstand my position. I guess I haven’t explained my position very well, because that’s completely incorrect. (I’m honestly a bit baffled by this.)
When I say “unnecessary suffering” I am not talking in some kind of mathematical sense of necessity, but I’m using the term colloquially, as it works in ordinary conversation. It means something like this—the suffering could be avoided without undue burden.
> This is not something that's broken, we want it this way - we wouldn't have spend so much time making regulations about it if we didn't.
I’m not sure I understand the logic for why you say we want it this way—politicians are here to enact the will of the people is a nice theoretical foundation for understanding the political process, but the actual behavior of representative democracies diverges from the will of the people, and it’s also not a moralistic argument—part of the reason that we have a constitutional government in the US is exactly because we recognize that we shouldn’t do whatever the people will.
The idea that I’m not supposed to “fix” the will of the people is kind of absurd anyway—all I’m doing is making moral arguments about what should be done, and the “will of the people” itself is an end product of people making arguments about what should or should not be done.
> If you find developing technologies that could fix epilepsy and ADHD (and potentially many more neurological issues) as well as help locked-in people communicate as unnecessary, I really don't know what to tell you...
You seem to be arguing that the behavior of Neuralink is necessary to achieve its goals, but the testimony I’ve heard seems to contradict this—the experiments are being done hastily, which results in bad data, unnecessary suffering, and then you have to redo the experiments.
There’s a simple formula you can use to get people to do immoral unethical things, if you desire. Create pressure to get results, then create an organizational structure that shields people from seeing the consequences. This is how we have industrial farms the way we do, this is how clothing companies based in the US end up using child labor overseas, and this is how Neuralink appears to be working.
When a clothing company gets caught using child labor overseas, you find some contractor to blame. You terminate the contract and hire another contractor to manage the manufacturing for you. This creates the façade of moral behavior on the part of individuals, while preserving the economic and organizational systems which encouraged immoral behavior in the first place. Neuralink isn’t out there with the goal of causing suffering just like clothing companies aren’t—and the best way I know to counteract it is with regulations.
https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/ahead-elon-musks-sho...
Of course Jeff Bezos is a bit closer, but Jeff investing only a few billion dollars in 1 company (even though it’s the most important company) is also not rational.
“I love how childish and petty it is. There is no depth or human complexity to Musk whatsoever: he's just a rich kid who got lucky and now we marvel at his exertions day in, day out. The New York Times still casts Musk as a public intellectual, even now, because its editors live in a floating world of narrative imagination and are impervious to the facts of the matter. In return, he calls it ‘diarrhea.’ They completely deserve one another.”
https://boingboing.net/2023/04/02/petulant-musk-rants-about-...
What brings it to mind here is there’s a thought experiment that considers a very large number of people playing a series of rounds of Russian roulette. At the end there are a handful of very lucky and very wealthy people (and a vast graveyard of th unlucky).
I don't understand why we think successful business people somehow have the same acumen, or equivalent inclinations as a philosopher or an artist. For sure there is some overlap, but at the end of the day I think it's more probable Elon's intelligence and aptitude are overrated by just about everyone while his people managing skills and luck are underrated by just about everyone.
> He takes questions at Tesla earnings calls that other CEOs would delegate to lower level executives
He can lie better and he is controlling micromanager.
(i’m very much not holding my breath for the vr/ar goggle thing, though)
Selection bias in action - we don't hear anything about the people who were less lucky than him.
One should never underestimate the importance of luck (and, if you are clever enough, you can even optimize for that).
It's also a huge pet issue for all his wealthy SV friends (Thiel et al), so he may not feel he needs to add anything to it personally.
He explicitly said that he doesn’t want to live forever. Very different from other Silicon Valley rich kids. Humble, actually.
Remember Kurzweil? Called Steve Jobs’ commencement speech about death being nature’s change agent a “deathist statement”.
https://youtu.be/2WX_mgnAFA0&t=26m58s
Perhaps because it's much less prominent in science fiction.
Reversing aging does nothing to solve the same problem.