I have to say I'm startled and perturbed that the FDA gave the go-ahead for Neuralink use in humans. Even though stories about the device and implementation injuries in the monkey experiments...
I have to say I'm startled and perturbed that the FDA gave the go-ahead for Neuralink use in humans.
Even though stories about the device and implementation injuries in the monkey experiments (archive link) are somewhat sensationalized, there are so many fundamental questions of biocompatibility and structure involved that this isn't a good opportunity to "move fast and break things". Not to mention Musk's tendency to spout egregious nonsense ("terminal monkeys were used", sheesh) when he's pushing a product. With the number of basic problems to be solved, Neuralink is just slightly more believable than Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos blood tests, given Musk's ability to drive others to invent and deliver for him.
I'm sure more details will be forthcoming, but thought there'd be general interest and opportunity for commentary here.
The idea of my physical body literally depending on continually maintaining a product made by a person who saw healing my personal condition mostly as a means to achieve their personal goals, is...
The idea of my physical body literally depending on continually maintaining a product made by a person who saw healing my personal condition mostly as a means to achieve their personal goals, is one of my greatest nightmares.
That, and like....I want NASA-levels of publicly-auditable QA testing and fully disclosed source code and schematics for anything that is going to be hooking directly to my brain. Given Musk's...
That, and like....I want NASA-levels of publicly-auditable QA testing and fully disclosed source code and schematics for anything that is going to be hooking directly to my brain.
Given Musk's history, especially the whole Twitter thing, nobody with more than 2 functioning brain cells should remotely consider being his test subject. Are you gonna trust the guy whose first order of business after buying Twitter was to utterly destroy it and welcome back the Nazis?
I honestly think it might be my line in the sand. I'll stick with screens, keyboards, and mice. I'm OK being left out of the brainchip world.
"I honestly think it might be my line in the sand. I'll stick with screens, keyboards, and mice. I'm OK being left out of the brainchip world." I agree 100%, but I have a choice to say no. However...
"I honestly think it might be my line in the sand. I'll stick with screens, keyboards, and mice. I'm OK being left out of the brainchip world."
I agree 100%, but I have a choice to say no.
However I can imagine people who lost the ability to move their legs don't feel they have a choice.
Maybe now they'll be skeptical/wont take it. But what about ten years from now, when the news about these kind of products might have become more ... "normal"?
You’re really hitting on the sorts of things I was trying to evoke with my comment. Something else that’s important to mention, as this kind of technology does begin to change people’s lives, it...
You’re really hitting on the sorts of things I was trying to evoke with my comment. Something else that’s important to mention, as this kind of technology does begin to change people’s lives, it will almost certainly be used as an excuse to put the kibosh on the Universal Design movement, and people who are uneasy about the technology but who would become more “compatible” with existing design because of it, will start to become actively resented by society for their hesitancy.
I am deeply concerned about how this technology will change us.
Yeah if you can "fix" disabled people why design for them. I feel similarly about wegovy and other weight loss "miracle drugs" - it feels like some people are just waiting for a chance to more...
Yeah if you can "fix" disabled people why design for them.
I feel similarly about wegovy and other weight loss "miracle drugs" - it feels like some people are just waiting for a chance to more actively blame and discriminate against people for being fat
To me it seems the opposite might be true with that example. We're weirdly moralistic about weight. We want to see it as a personal failing. But really what it comes down to is that each...
Exemplary
it feels like some people are just waiting for a chance to more actively blame and discriminate against people for being fat
To me it seems the opposite might be true with that example. We're weirdly moralistic about weight. We want to see it as a personal failing. But really what it comes down to is that each individual has a certain "full" meter, and most peoples' meters are broken. Maybe it's just because we're not evolved to live in food abundance, or because of plastics in the environment, or because of highly processed foods. For whatever reason, most people's internal "full meters" are horribly miscalibrated, and they seem to be pretty fixed, not something that can change with therapy. So people who have functional full meters have an easy time staying thin, and then they see those without properly working full meters as immoral or lazy. People of course can lose weight through shear force of will, but the reality is they'll have to constantly starve themselves to maintain that low weight, while someone with a working full meter can do it with little thought or effort.
But what if a pill exists that can effectively fix peoples' broken full meters? Suddenly, all the claims based on morality just fly out the window. They become as antiquated as believing leprosy to be a moral failing. People once believed that leprosy was due to somehow angering God. It was pretty hard to keep believing that once it could be easily cured. If we can fix people's broken appetites with a simple pill, it proves that weight is largely not a function of willpower, but simply having a properly working body. You can't give someone willpower with a pill; it's clearly just correcting a medical condition.
We shouldn't view obese people as morally lacking. We should view obesity as a medical issue where people's appetite regulation system becomes damaged for one reason or another. And having a pill that can fix the issue really goes a long way to showing that it is a medical issue, rather than a moral one.
People just really don't understand these conditions in the depth that they need to before passing a moral judgement. It's not just a 'full meter' that can be out of whack when it comes to...
People just really don't understand these conditions in the depth that they need to before passing a moral judgement. It's not just a 'full meter' that can be out of whack when it comes to obesity. Processing food itself is an extraordinarily complicated process involving all kinds of organs and a ton of different chemical processes. Hormones regulate what your body decides to do with this. The processes that your body undertakes to simply live - to generate heat, to move, to think, to digest, to breathe, to fight infection, to perceive the world, and so much more are all variable from human to human. Each step along every process of living can be different in so many different ways between humans. We often recognize the obvious disease states - diabetes or having troubles with insulin can lead to obesity because the bodies are told to store more of the energy that it consumes than to spend it, turning down processes like thermoregulation, slowing digestion, and causing lethargy to just name a few. But to understand that these processes are all interlinked and each person's weight is the sum of how well these all functions is lost on most people, because they just don't have that kind of familiarity. People are often completely unaware that you can have dysfunctions of metabolism, meaning that the way you break down certain kinds of fats or other sources of energies are abnormal and might result in your body deciding to upregulate or downregulate energetics or lead to issues with platelet formation, inflammation or other factors which can influence weight.
And none of that touches on other medical issues we often attribute morality to, such as drug use and dependence (with an interesting cultural influence on which drugs are "okay" to use and which are not), ability or disability (it's less of a moral failing if you lost your arm in an accident than if you were born with a dysfunctional brain), and how upbringing can influence mental health and behavior. But ultimately humans like to discriminate for a variety of reasons and moral judgements often come from a place of insecurity and need to feel like they are doing something right or make themselves feel better in an often cold and cruel world.
I agree that there can be a pivot to a medical perception of fatness which could reduce the moralizing around it. I also think there'd be the exact same moralizing for anyone who didn't take the...
I agree that there can be a pivot to a medical perception of fatness which could reduce the moralizing around it. I also think there'd be the exact same moralizing for anyone who didn't take the "magic pill" or who remained fat (or even slightly overweight). I don't see it addressing body-shaming, accessibility for fat bodies, access to clothing, transportation, etc. There's a reason that some surgeons will refuse to operate on fat people due to "risk" until the proposed surgery is weight loss surgery. And why it's something of a running joke that you could carrying your detached arm in with you to the doctor's office and still be asked about losing weight.
we have a long history of "magic pills" that solve diet problems, and maybe this one is the real one, but mostly they have rough side effects and require you to remain on them or the benefits reverse, often with a yo-yo effect leading to even greater weight gain. Same with most IWL (intentional weight loss) diets.
I'm pretty passionate about Intuitive Eating - and just the idea of being thoughtful and intentional about food, when your life allows for it because often it doesn't - and joyful movement rather than any sort of weight loss diet and prescribed exercise. But I think the issues lie more in affordability of food, time, access to adequate stores, etc. and that isn't solvable with any magic pill. I also just don't trust people to stop being moralistic about medical issues, as evidenced by vaccines, HPV, HIV, diabetes, any number of STIs, lice, etc.
I suppose some people could be desperate, but for me, even if I really wanted one I would expect it to be at least demonstrated to a very high reliability in animal testing, and not just a...
I suppose some people could be desperate, but for me, even if I really wanted one I would expect it to be at least demonstrated to a very high reliability in animal testing, and not just a prototype. They really couldn't wait five more years until the technology is more developed? Do we need brainchips right this instant, to the point where we're willing to allow someone who has proven himself to be an egomaniac frantically push tech forwards?
Musk has repeatedly shown that he cares more about being a famous inventor and, if I had to guess, really wants to brag about making brainchips. Not for a second do I believe that he is doing anything with disabled people in mind, if anything he is offering them false hope by sensationalizing this technology before it's even close to maturity.
More recently this has become more true, but in the case of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla (aside from self-driving stuff) it was somewhat a case of the technology being there but held back...
More recently this has become more true, but in the case of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla (aside from self-driving stuff) it was somewhat a case of the technology being there but held back by powerful political and incumbent corporate interests. I wish he’d go back to focusing on things like that.
And this is one of the problems with morality being wholly dependent upon "consent": when each of us is subjected to varying amounts and kinds of pressure, our ability to make good decisions can...
And this is one of the problems with morality being wholly dependent upon "consent": when each of us is subjected to varying amounts and kinds of pressure, our ability to make good decisions can be taken away or be clouded.
The rich can always find enough poor / lonely / depressed / sick / desperate people to sign on a dotted line, especially if their activities are creating more and more people who are left destitute.
The reason I say “a product made by a person who saw healing my personal condition mostly as a means to achieve their personal goals” is to suggest that a business that is controlled by the...
The reason I say “a product made by a person who saw healing my personal condition mostly as a means to achieve their personal goals” is to suggest that a business that is controlled by the consumers and workers (stakeholders) would be naturally incentivized to do things like “NASA-levels of publicly-auditable QA testing and fully disclosed source code and schematics”. Unlike any private business controlled by a person who is mainly interested in earning or maintaining a personal fortune and whose day-to-day is completely unaffected by the operations of the business beyond the profits it produces, who would only do such things if it literally made them more money in the timetable they have set for themself, if it gave them some kind of warm fuzzy feelings of equal value to whatever they would save by skipping such things, or if the government literally forces them do it.
This is already a big problem with much simpler (and much more essential) medical products: https://www.wired.com/story/medtronic-insulin-pump-hack-app/.
"Hello, We're sorry, your most recent anti rejection medication was denied by your insurance. This is not in relation to your delinquent subscription payment for Neurolink +. Please have a nice day"
"Hello, We're sorry, your most recent anti rejection medication was denied by your insurance. This is not in relation to your delinquent subscription payment for Neurolink +. Please have a nice day"
They can't be setting the bar too high. I remember the story of the pig-heart transplant in 2022. Doctors and scientists certainly learned a lot from moving to human testing, but the procedure was...
They can't be setting the bar too high. I remember the story of the pig-heart transplant in 2022. Doctors and scientists certainly learned a lot from moving to human testing, but the procedure was not in any way safe. The patient died two months later of heart failure. But he was too old to qualify for a human heart and his heart would have failed soon. From his perspective, he did not have an alternative to a Hail Mary. Perhaps the standards were set too high, because his age and failing immune system prevented him from taking enough anti-rejection medication. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230630123122.htm
I can see how guidelines for a brain implant could have similar requirements for the receiving patient. Life would have to be unbearable enough to justify this risk to life, but just like with pig hearts, something going horribly wrong is understood as a possible outcome.
With the pig heart transplants they were dying and there was a chance to extend their lives. Failure having minimal impact vs doing nothing at all... success having massive benefits for the...
With the pig heart transplants they were dying and there was a chance to extend their lives. Failure having minimal impact vs doing nothing at all... success having massive benefits for the patient and for medicine as a whole.
In the case of Neuralink I guess when the brain is involved then the risks are potential brain damage, seizures, etc. What is the direct benefit here? Medium term I could envision better prosthetics. Long term maybe a sci-fi brain computer interface (doubtful).
My biggest hangups are basically Musk's patterns of behaviour in any company he's publicly involved with: his reckless disregard, his constant lying, I would argue fraud, and the lack of transparency.
Neuralink did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for further details.
If I was paralyzed from the neck down or something. I'd probably be pretty willing to let someone monkey around in there. Especially if I could negotiate some sort of payout for my family when it...
If I was paralyzed from the neck down or something. I'd probably be pretty willing to let someone monkey around in there. Especially if I could negotiate some sort of payout for my family when it inevitably fails.
Honestly I could believe this is just bulshit until there’s more proof than a musk tweet. I want to see the medical journal on this. Edit: and for reference I wouldn’t be shocked if the answer is...
Honestly I could believe this is just bulshit until there’s more proof than a musk tweet.
I want to see the medical journal on this.
Edit: and for reference I wouldn’t be shocked if the answer is rather than some deep brain implant they just put something like this:
Actually the most plausible explanation to me as to how they got clearance to do this is that they've been vastly exaggerating the scope of the neuralink, which would be in character.
Actually the most plausible explanation to me as to how they got clearance to do this is that they've been vastly exaggerating the scope of the neuralink, which would be in character.
In 20th century science-fiction, bio-integrated technologies like this were seen as some kind of manifest destiny by technophiles. I think Musk is driven by Neuromancer as much as anything else....
In 20th century science-fiction, bio-integrated technologies like this were seen as some kind of manifest destiny by technophiles. I think Musk is driven by Neuromancer as much as anything else.
But nearly all those stories were cautionary tales about how the wrong people get in charge of your thoughts and have unfettered access to your memories and perceptions of reality. We are being promised Star Trek but we will end up with Total Recall.
I actually think our current tech is pretty much perfectly suited for the way humans operate. We already have a very strong controller that prevents people from reading our thoughts. It’s called keeping your fucking mouth shut and it generally works really well. We have developed and evolved over millions of years using our larynx, tongue, and lips as physical editors and censors for our thoughts.
Apart from certain medical scenarios and maybe the last generation of fighter pilots before drones blow them out of the sky, I have yet to see an inside-the-skull use case that performs better than the cell phone in my hand.
It'll probably come with a hidden transmitter that secretly collects data on your every thought and injects subliminal messages to tweet (is it still tweeting even thought it's called X now?...
It'll probably come with a hidden transmitter that secretly collects data on your every thought and injects subliminal messages to tweet (is it still tweeting even thought it's called X now? Xing?) and buy his cars.
Yeah to be honest I fear a situation occurring here where we won't learn much of the successes, but of the failures of the company. The World Wars "contribution" to our understanding of the brain...
I'm interested in the potential of this kind of tech for helping people medically and the whole idea of improving ourselves with technology.
Yeah to be honest I fear a situation occurring here where we won't learn much of the successes, but of the failures of the company. The World Wars "contribution" to our understanding of the brain comes to mind.
Considering how he's been running Twitter into the ground even through rock bottom, I fear for the people who are going to have the chip installed. It reads like the start of a bad sci-fi horror movie.
I have to say I'm startled and perturbed that the FDA gave the go-ahead for Neuralink use in humans.
Even though stories about the device and implementation injuries in the monkey experiments (archive link) are somewhat sensationalized, there are so many fundamental questions of biocompatibility and structure involved that this isn't a good opportunity to "move fast and break things". Not to mention Musk's tendency to spout egregious nonsense ("terminal monkeys were used", sheesh) when he's pushing a product. With the number of basic problems to be solved, Neuralink is just slightly more believable than Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos blood tests, given Musk's ability to drive others to invent and deliver for him.
I'm sure more details will be forthcoming, but thought there'd be general interest and opportunity for commentary here.
To be fair, at this point I don't want anything Musk is associated with in my brain.
Why do you think the monkey stories are sensationalised?
Tbf, people once thought Moderna was going to be the next Theranos, but they turned out to make some pretty important mRNA biotech.
https://www.thrillist.com/tech/nation/what-does-moderna-therapeutics-do-why-is-it-a-silicon-valley-secret
The idea of my physical body literally depending on continually maintaining a product made by a person who saw healing my personal condition mostly as a means to achieve their personal goals, is one of my greatest nightmares.
That, and like....I want NASA-levels of publicly-auditable QA testing and fully disclosed source code and schematics for anything that is going to be hooking directly to my brain.
Given Musk's history, especially the whole Twitter thing, nobody with more than 2 functioning brain cells should remotely consider being his test subject. Are you gonna trust the guy whose first order of business after buying Twitter was to utterly destroy it and welcome back the Nazis?
I honestly think it might be my line in the sand. I'll stick with screens, keyboards, and mice. I'm OK being left out of the brainchip world.
"I honestly think it might be my line in the sand. I'll stick with screens, keyboards, and mice. I'm OK being left out of the brainchip world."
I agree 100%, but I have a choice to say no.
However I can imagine people who lost the ability to move their legs don't feel they have a choice.
Maybe now they'll be skeptical/wont take it. But what about ten years from now, when the news about these kind of products might have become more ... "normal"?
You’re really hitting on the sorts of things I was trying to evoke with my comment. Something else that’s important to mention, as this kind of technology does begin to change people’s lives, it will almost certainly be used as an excuse to put the kibosh on the Universal Design movement, and people who are uneasy about the technology but who would become more “compatible” with existing design because of it, will start to become actively resented by society for their hesitancy.
I am deeply concerned about how this technology will change us.
Yeah if you can "fix" disabled people why design for them.
I feel similarly about wegovy and other weight loss "miracle drugs" - it feels like some people are just waiting for a chance to more actively blame and discriminate against people for being fat
To me it seems the opposite might be true with that example. We're weirdly moralistic about weight. We want to see it as a personal failing. But really what it comes down to is that each individual has a certain "full" meter, and most peoples' meters are broken. Maybe it's just because we're not evolved to live in food abundance, or because of plastics in the environment, or because of highly processed foods. For whatever reason, most people's internal "full meters" are horribly miscalibrated, and they seem to be pretty fixed, not something that can change with therapy. So people who have functional full meters have an easy time staying thin, and then they see those without properly working full meters as immoral or lazy. People of course can lose weight through shear force of will, but the reality is they'll have to constantly starve themselves to maintain that low weight, while someone with a working full meter can do it with little thought or effort.
But what if a pill exists that can effectively fix peoples' broken full meters? Suddenly, all the claims based on morality just fly out the window. They become as antiquated as believing leprosy to be a moral failing. People once believed that leprosy was due to somehow angering God. It was pretty hard to keep believing that once it could be easily cured. If we can fix people's broken appetites with a simple pill, it proves that weight is largely not a function of willpower, but simply having a properly working body. You can't give someone willpower with a pill; it's clearly just correcting a medical condition.
We shouldn't view obese people as morally lacking. We should view obesity as a medical issue where people's appetite regulation system becomes damaged for one reason or another. And having a pill that can fix the issue really goes a long way to showing that it is a medical issue, rather than a moral one.
People just really don't understand these conditions in the depth that they need to before passing a moral judgement. It's not just a 'full meter' that can be out of whack when it comes to obesity. Processing food itself is an extraordinarily complicated process involving all kinds of organs and a ton of different chemical processes. Hormones regulate what your body decides to do with this. The processes that your body undertakes to simply live - to generate heat, to move, to think, to digest, to breathe, to fight infection, to perceive the world, and so much more are all variable from human to human. Each step along every process of living can be different in so many different ways between humans. We often recognize the obvious disease states - diabetes or having troubles with insulin can lead to obesity because the bodies are told to store more of the energy that it consumes than to spend it, turning down processes like thermoregulation, slowing digestion, and causing lethargy to just name a few. But to understand that these processes are all interlinked and each person's weight is the sum of how well these all functions is lost on most people, because they just don't have that kind of familiarity. People are often completely unaware that you can have dysfunctions of metabolism, meaning that the way you break down certain kinds of fats or other sources of energies are abnormal and might result in your body deciding to upregulate or downregulate energetics or lead to issues with platelet formation, inflammation or other factors which can influence weight.
And none of that touches on other medical issues we often attribute morality to, such as drug use and dependence (with an interesting cultural influence on which drugs are "okay" to use and which are not), ability or disability (it's less of a moral failing if you lost your arm in an accident than if you were born with a dysfunctional brain), and how upbringing can influence mental health and behavior. But ultimately humans like to discriminate for a variety of reasons and moral judgements often come from a place of insecurity and need to feel like they are doing something right or make themselves feel better in an often cold and cruel world.
I agree that there can be a pivot to a medical perception of fatness which could reduce the moralizing around it. I also think there'd be the exact same moralizing for anyone who didn't take the "magic pill" or who remained fat (or even slightly overweight). I don't see it addressing body-shaming, accessibility for fat bodies, access to clothing, transportation, etc. There's a reason that some surgeons will refuse to operate on fat people due to "risk" until the proposed surgery is weight loss surgery. And why it's something of a running joke that you could carrying your detached arm in with you to the doctor's office and still be asked about losing weight.
we have a long history of "magic pills" that solve diet problems, and maybe this one is the real one, but mostly they have rough side effects and require you to remain on them or the benefits reverse, often with a yo-yo effect leading to even greater weight gain. Same with most IWL (intentional weight loss) diets.
I'm pretty passionate about Intuitive Eating - and just the idea of being thoughtful and intentional about food, when your life allows for it because often it doesn't - and joyful movement rather than any sort of weight loss diet and prescribed exercise. But I think the issues lie more in affordability of food, time, access to adequate stores, etc. and that isn't solvable with any magic pill. I also just don't trust people to stop being moralistic about medical issues, as evidenced by vaccines, HPV, HIV, diabetes, any number of STIs, lice, etc.
I suppose some people could be desperate, but for me, even if I really wanted one I would expect it to be at least demonstrated to a very high reliability in animal testing, and not just a prototype. They really couldn't wait five more years until the technology is more developed? Do we need brainchips right this instant, to the point where we're willing to allow someone who has proven himself to be an egomaniac frantically push tech forwards?
Musk has repeatedly shown that he cares more about being a famous inventor and, if I had to guess, really wants to brag about making brainchips. Not for a second do I believe that he is doing anything with disabled people in mind, if anything he is offering them false hope by sensationalizing this technology before it's even close to maturity.
That seems to be his MO in general.
More recently this has become more true, but in the case of SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla (aside from self-driving stuff) it was somewhat a case of the technology being there but held back by powerful political and incumbent corporate interests. I wish he’d go back to focusing on things like that.
And this is one of the problems with morality being wholly dependent upon "consent": when each of us is subjected to varying amounts and kinds of pressure, our ability to make good decisions can be taken away or be clouded.
The rich can always find enough poor / lonely / depressed / sick / desperate people to sign on a dotted line, especially if their activities are creating more and more people who are left destitute.
Or when most of the workforce has it and unless you have a chip in your brain, you can’t possibly compete with people that do.
The reason I say “a product made by a person who saw healing my personal condition mostly as a means to achieve their personal goals” is to suggest that a business that is controlled by the consumers and workers (stakeholders) would be naturally incentivized to do things like “NASA-levels of publicly-auditable QA testing and fully disclosed source code and schematics”. Unlike any private business controlled by a person who is mainly interested in earning or maintaining a personal fortune and whose day-to-day is completely unaffected by the operations of the business beyond the profits it produces, who would only do such things if it literally made them more money in the timetable they have set for themself, if it gave them some kind of warm fuzzy feelings of equal value to whatever they would save by skipping such things, or if the government literally forces them do it.
This is already a big problem with much simpler (and much more essential) medical products: https://www.wired.com/story/medtronic-insulin-pump-hack-app/.
"Hello, We're sorry, your most recent anti rejection medication was denied by your insurance. This is not in relation to your delinquent subscription payment for Neurolink +. Please have a nice day"
This being green lit for human testing made me realize I have no understanding of the standards that need to be met.
They can't be setting the bar too high. I remember the story of the pig-heart transplant in 2022. Doctors and scientists certainly learned a lot from moving to human testing, but the procedure was not in any way safe. The patient died two months later of heart failure. But he was too old to qualify for a human heart and his heart would have failed soon. From his perspective, he did not have an alternative to a Hail Mary. Perhaps the standards were set too high, because his age and failing immune system prevented him from taking enough anti-rejection medication. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230630123122.htm
I can see how guidelines for a brain implant could have similar requirements for the receiving patient. Life would have to be unbearable enough to justify this risk to life, but just like with pig hearts, something going horribly wrong is understood as a possible outcome.
With the pig heart transplants they were dying and there was a chance to extend their lives. Failure having minimal impact vs doing nothing at all... success having massive benefits for the patient and for medicine as a whole.
In the case of Neuralink I guess when the brain is involved then the risks are potential brain damage, seizures, etc. What is the direct benefit here? Medium term I could envision better prosthetics. Long term maybe a sci-fi brain computer interface (doubtful).
My biggest hangups are basically Musk's patterns of behaviour in any company he's publicly involved with: his reckless disregard, his constant lying, I would argue fraud, and the lack of transparency.
If I was paralyzed from the neck down or something. I'd probably be pretty willing to let someone monkey around in there. Especially if I could negotiate some sort of payout for my family when it inevitably fails.
Honestly I could believe this is just bulshit until there’s more proof than a musk tweet.
I want to see the medical journal on this.
Edit: and for reference I wouldn’t be shocked if the answer is rather than some deep brain implant they just put something like this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbtR4vorgY
But smaller under someone’s skin (like how people do rfid chips)
Actually the most plausible explanation to me as to how they got clearance to do this is that they've been vastly exaggerating the scope of the neuralink, which would be in character.
In 20th century science-fiction, bio-integrated technologies like this were seen as some kind of manifest destiny by technophiles. I think Musk is driven by Neuromancer as much as anything else.
But nearly all those stories were cautionary tales about how the wrong people get in charge of your thoughts and have unfettered access to your memories and perceptions of reality. We are being promised Star Trek but we will end up with Total Recall.
I actually think our current tech is pretty much perfectly suited for the way humans operate. We already have a very strong controller that prevents people from reading our thoughts. It’s called keeping your fucking mouth shut and it generally works really well. We have developed and evolved over millions of years using our larynx, tongue, and lips as physical editors and censors for our thoughts.
Apart from certain medical scenarios and maybe the last generation of fighter pilots before drones blow them out of the sky, I have yet to see an inside-the-skull use case that performs better than the cell phone in my hand.
So... will Musk be eating his own dog food and getting one of these implants himself?
It'll probably come with a hidden transmitter that secretly collects data on your every thought and injects subliminal messages to tweet (is it still tweeting even thought it's called X now? Xing?) and buy his cars.
Yeah to be honest I fear a situation occurring here where we won't learn much of the successes, but of the failures of the company. The World Wars "contribution" to our understanding of the brain comes to mind.
Considering how he's been running Twitter into the ground even through rock bottom, I fear for the people who are going to have the chip installed. It reads like the start of a bad sci-fi horror movie.
Interesting, do you have any links to what happened and when it started to change?