I am conflicted about neural-link. On one hand, if successful, it will improve lives of many disabled persons. On the other hand, fiddling with nature in this manner has never been good for anyone involved. I mean, poking things into your brain to control external devices, does humanity really need such tech?
It’s also unnatural to live in mega-cities, fix your teeth and survive many infections. Also, surviving past childhood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
This technology will be life changing, consumer applications aside.
Sometimes new tech enriches all our lives, nearly everyone benefits from renewable energy for instance. In other cases you risk furthering the divide between haves and have nots. When a person experiencing homelessness has their neural device go bad, how do we ensure they aren't just left in the street suffering? Are we comfortable living in a world where the elderly are permitted to suffer from Alzheimer's when we have a cure like you describe, just because they were too poor to afford treatment?
Secondly, it is important to ask, how could the technology be used if greed or maliciousness are the main motivators. Do those downsides outweigh the positives?
I'm moderately bullish on brain computer interfaces, but I caution or challenge people to put on their engineering hats and really think deeply about both the positives and negatives of new technology.
I'm saying looking at the current model and asking yourself, "Is this really the right model?" is a key part of building something new.
Also, unlike emails, memories are fuzzy, subject to change, and to being dreamt up, drug induced, or all manner of other things we probably aren't ready to cope with, given all the other ethical problems we have in our justice system.
I bet the reason for leaving has more to do with a vision they disagree with, some internal inter personal issues, or something similar. Or possibly there are competitors that are offering attractive salaries. Who knows? Ethics are very unlikely to be a factor here.
Anyway, us fiddling with nature is our very nature. It's what we do. Modern society is the result of thousands of years us fiddling with all sorts of stuff. I'd argue the net result isn't all bad.
I agree the far-future type goals are a bit creepy.
I really love technology, of what is possible, of what positive changes it can bring about. But history, even the very very recent ones, have show how quickly technology can be pivoted to suit vested interests.
I still go stand in line to vote just like I have the last 25 years. The elections results are announced, the winners take office, the losers go home. Same as it ever was.
YOLO. Live the dream!
Since nazi germany and Mao I don't think there was a category of people that caused as many death and suffering as bioethicists. Moderna was clearly ready to bring a product to market, but it took a pandemic for us to get rna vaccines. God know how many people died needlessly because people created a whole career path by chanting "thalidomide".
And the cost? Infecting 100 or 1000 volunteers in low risk categories, with an expected death count of under 1. There were websites where people registered in thousands for this.
Nowadays we have much better protocols, mostly based on the Bayesian method which is much more robust on getting small pieces of information. One of its principles is actually this: no matter how small and useless an experimental result is, it should still budge your understanding of the phenomenon even if it's a tiny bit. There are some caveats here as well, but overall it's a whole different ballgame from the big, old, clunky scientific method.
So how does this apply to this situation? You have a cycle of 2 weeks for covid infections. A completely-pulled-out-of-my-ass protocol would involve 100 very-low-risk individuals split into vaccinated and control and infected deliberately with various doses. You get some data from this: how well is the vaccine working? how is the disease progressing depending on initial viral dose?
For the next 2 weeks you switch to slightly higher vulnerable populations, again split into control/vaccine.
For the next 2 weeks you ditch the control to lower the risk, and add another decade to the age of the population.
Now you have good enough data to start vaccinating vulnerable population at large.
You keep testing on volunteers, because you're about to vaccinate millions and you NEED extra data, like what's the fastest protocol to vaccinate everybody. Except now you have enough efficacy data to know that you won't kill your vaccinated volunteers, so you start using more mixed populations with higher ages - though the bulk will still be low-risk. And play with whatever variables you need adjusting, like vaccine dosage or booster timing, and adjust the population-at-large protocols based on that.
Compare this with what we did, which is literally last century methodology. We pulled out of the ass a protocol: vaccine dose of X, booster timing of 3 weeks. Then we tested it in a large scale long term trial. We confirmed it worked. And used it as-is, and declared that any change will require another large-scale long-term trial. Look at the definition of the scientific method in the beginning of my comment. It's just not common sense in a pandemic, except for bureaucrats minimizing their personal risk. Which is why my rather justified anger with the system.
You need a minimum of 5 weeks before you can begin your challenge trials, starting from the same point, for the 3 weeks between doses and the 2 weeks after the second dose where immunity is being tested.
If you run three 2-week rounds of challenge trials after that, you're already up to 11 weeks to finish your challenge trials and begin administering the vaccines to the population at large, versus the 16 weeks for a regular-old phase 3 trial.
Now, five weeks is nothing to sneeze at -- given the other parameters, it's not unreasonable to think that on the order of a thousand deaths could have been prevented by using what vaccine supply we had available earlier -- but it's also patently not the case that we would be five weeks ahead of where we are now if we had started vaccinating earlier: we spent most of the last five months in the US supply constrained, and we didn't wait to start building out our capacity, so we'd probably be at the same point we are now in terms of total vaccinated today regardless of whether we started vaccinating 5 weeks earlier or 5 weeks later.
We have a natural experiment between countries that waited for standard clinical trials before beginning mass vaccinations, and countries that didn't. It's too early to take the "final score" [accurate, globally accepted final death tolls by country probably won't be available for a year if not years] to see who handled the pandemic best, from beginning to end, but right now it doesn't seem like vaccinating first made for a lasting lead in the vaccination race.