Ex-Neuralink employees describe rushed timelines clashing with science’s pace

Perhaps this[1]? It starts with a bit about how they had to SSH into everyone's car to fix a bootloop, and goes downhill from there.

[1]: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

The trick is to say no, and then yes, then when it fails anyway, you can say I told you so.

- Real leaders everywhere

10k miles on Autopilot over here. Made me go from hating driving to loving it. I’ve been seeing just as much hate for Neuralink as Tesla had early on, which has me excited. Let the public put pressure on them, then when they come out with something even a little impressive, it’ll blow everyone’s minds.

Unfortunately with the way things are, outside of public research, the only way to fund a project of this nature is with large amounts of hype.

These numbers are quite meaningless without the counterfactuals how many deaths were there by comparison?

I don't doubt your point, just looking for magnitude here.

> There have been a total of six deaths related to Autopilot misuse over 3 billion Autopilot driven miles by the fleet. Humans are terrible at risk management.

Or, humans rightly assessed that despite marketing to the contrary autopilot only really works on the easiest part of driving (highway miles) and still managed to kill 6 people.

Remember, it doesn't matter if you've survived 100 Chernobyls, 50 Tsunamis or 20 Covids, all it takes is one bad one to wipe you out of the gene pool(kill). The worse is called worse precisely because it did not happen until then. Yes, testing helps but only when you know what to test, a hastily designed system where the workers are put under pressure and made to ssh into a fleet(See: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376) to fix bugs, is not a mere matter of testing. It is a matter of culture, autonomy, prudence, care, and add other things that would help build a well-designed system from ground up.

The issue isn't size of the testing suite, it's covering all the edge cases.

Some rather common edge cases go ignored. Unless they've updated Waymo in the last couple of months, they still fail to distinguish when they have a reserved destination lane when making right turns, as exhibited when going from eastbound Central to southbound Castro every damn day (before Castro was closed).

Self driving system vendors can claim that fewer deaths will occur with their system vs the average driver, but that mostly reflects how dangerous the "average"/distracted driver is. Those numbers are little comfort to the loved ones of someone killed in an "edge case" that a competent driver handles without injury.

> Seems like a better testing suite is in order

The cry of every neuroscientist! The trick is how to make an ex vivo brain simalog at all.

Currently we use the brains of other animals. It gets you somewhere. I mean, you can deal with how the heart moves the brain about, how grooming and eating move the brain, you can even get seizures and ischemic events working with the tech. But, those last few percent is where all of it matters. Kinda like viewing an eclipse: the difference between 99.99% and 100% totality is everything.

And that's kinda the problem. Figuring out all the edge cases is really hard and time consuming. And making a faux-brain simalog is probably harder than just going slowly.

Even if that’s the case (it’s not necessary at all), net change is a terrible metric, because the negatives are externalized often onto those that are already oppressed/marginalized

  new technology will always empower more positive change than negative.

Empower, yes. Implement, not necessarily.

On the flip side, everyone is now walking around with an internet connected camera, microphone, and location tracker in their pocket. Most of us are livestreaming their location to cloud services.

I don't think this will come to pass as a mandate from on high, but it might come to pass as a practical device that everyone needs to function in modern society.

Unless they don't know it's coming to pass :o

Or you're in an authoritarian regime where not having an implant may result in longer lines, less financing options, no plane access, harder train access, and direct pressure on/from friends.

I'm not worried about those things happening in Canada tomorrow though.

Most tech companies are in-line with some form of abuse. Whether it's creating campaigns against reasonable salary increases to installing highly intuitive applications to track and monitor your activity as an employee.

More simply put, things we'd give people felonies for tech companies (and others) get a pass.

I could believe this dystopian future, especially as political forces continue to form stern camps whose only substantive difference is an opposing view to the other.

I find it strange that you point out that policy makers do not comprehend these concepts, yet believe it will be voted out.

They are just as likely to create policies to the benefit of their wallet, especially when they do not comprehend a topic.

we already have cameras everywhere, you cant participate in society without signing up for and along with someone else massive system of bullshit. We cant even review utility bills without installing an app or visiting a website and starting an account. 'That future' we are in the middle of it.

> Nobody will ever let thought intrusion come to pass.

Human rights will take steps backwards if it's necessary to keep an economic advantage.

If thought intrusion has any productivity value, a less scrupulous nations will take that advantage, and deregulation by more scrupulous nations will be re-framed as gaining necessary competitive advantage, and will be demanded by unemployed citizens and business minds alike.

> The evil forces haven't even managed to get an encryption-backdoor law passed

They've managed to do a few other pretty evil things recently, though. And they're going to keep trying until they get it through. They only have to win once, and then no government is going to voluntarily give up the extra power and control.

Maybe being required to use it is a compromise the people get in exchange for having free will at work. 2050's labor rights!

There are many sweet spots, Musk is good at targeting the “deliver quickly, fix the glaring problems later if at all” sweet spot.

No, it's like saying the owners of aerospace engineering companies don't deserve credit for the designs the aerospace engineers working at them produce.

It's not a statement I agree 100% with, but it's definitely the case these days that individual workers are not given enough credit. It's also the case that the owners, executives, and other high-ranking management types are given far too much credit for successes and far too little blame for the failures.

It's cool that Tesla made an ASIC, I guess.

I think more relevant though, would be Tesla's hype around "Autopilot" when they still can't reliably avoid parked cars.

Is a custom chip really that big of an accomplishment for a company the size and scale of Tesla? I really don’t know. Maybe someone here has some insight into semiconductor design and fabrication and can provide some insight into just how hard it would be to build a chip similar to what Tesla has built.

It's an order of magnitude better at specific tasks compared to Nvidia.

And this isn't that impressive in the slightest.

Isn't Tesla's FSD computer best compared to Google's TPU? Both use integer operations instead of floating point and are optimized for matrix operations.

It's a great product and genuinely impressive, but you're comparing specialist vs generalist hardware. Half an order of magnitude improvements are table stakes, otherwise it's crazy not to just buy off the shelf.

My 2070 Super does 9 TFLOPs but it's paired with an 3900X which barely does 1... is my graphics card an order of magnitude better than my CPU?

FYI, dang is the site admin.

If you weren't being sarcastic, then I completely misread your comment and am sorry.

Ah. If it wasn't snark, I 100% misread it and bow in humble apology. Pattern matching fail!