15 of 23 Monkeys with Elon Musk’s Neuralink Brain Chips Reportedly Died | Hacker News Reader

15 of 23 Monkeys with Elon Musk’s Neuralink Brain Chips Reportedly Died

consequence.net

The article felt a bit flat. Surely there's no such thing as "oops, monkey died, let me just grab the next one off the shelf". There's no real reporting into the why or how, just uncritical repeating of the complaint that the neuralink research is dangerous / unethical. The reporting is so flimsy that one starts to look at the page and ask "wait, what site am I on anyway?" Hmm, I wonder what sort of bias a site called consequence has.

So naturally I click around. It appears to be some sort of music blog, with articles that are primarily focused on celebrity outrage gossip. Well, that explains a bit. Still neuralink is a bit outside their wheelhouse. How did this article get on their front page. Scrolling around at the top we see that the contributor basically just paraphrased what he read elsewhere for clicks. "Via Business Insider and the New York Post, the news comes from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal-rights group..."

Ok, so its a report of a report of an animal rights group claiming they plan to file a complaint (but haven't done so yet). This is all rather tenuous.

Regardless of where the news was reported in the original post, the only thing of importance is whether or not it's true. Did you check some of the original sources?

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/extreme-suffering-15-23-...

https://nypost.com/2022/02/10/elon-musks-neuralink-allegedly...

This is worth looking into. First, it's using Tesla drivers as guinea pigs for automation. Then some strange experiments with boring holes under ground. Now torturing monkeys so we can transfer our consciousness. Someone needs to place this guy in check.

Neither of those are "the original source." Those are reports on what an animal rights group claims they have evidence of. The original source would be if you linked me to the "700 pages of evidence" which is supposedly going to be submitted to the Dept. of Agriculture.

I don't know the procedural rules around this sort of proceeding, but it strikes me as odd that they go to the press before submitting the paperwork. If they went after submitting the paper work, then you'd presumably be able to look up the 700 pages as a matter of public record and then I'd have egg on my face for not actually having looked into things. But as it stands, my face is firmly without egg.

You know that Musk Elon has a mental condition?

He didn't killed the monkeys by his own hands, so... how is this relevant to this discussion?

Well, In fact the only source of this news, is less than impartial and has an agenda to fill for profit, so... maybe we should hear the other part also first (instead to assume things by default).

Narcissistic egomania?

So what if he does?

But he's also a middle-aged white guy, so surely that's a wash?

Hope that illustrated the silliness of this line of argument.

Yeah, the URL should probably be changed to the Post article: https://nypost.com/2022/02/10/elon-musks-neuralink-allegedly... (which was posted here a couple of times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30293937 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30305100)

>Well, that explains a bit.

I am thinking if I should flag the submission. Not for or against the idea, but the content was just poor.

2 days ago Tesla Fremont was sued for being a racially segregated workplace. Like really, in 2022, in California. On very dubious grounds based on teslas blog post reply.

These are opening shots in the musk vs woke war. We can’t have him standing up to warren and sanders, posting red pill memes and selfies with Jordan Peterson…

Well good luck. I look forward to musk fighting them. He’s not your average corporate CEO who would rather bow and apologize. He fights. Hard.

Elon created his own little apartheid state, his dad must be proud.

Has anyone located the emerald mines in Fremont yet?

"Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autopsy revealed the animal suffered from a brain hemorrhage."

I'm fairly certain in 50 years we'll look at the way we treat highly intelligent and social primates not to mention other animals the exact same way we've looked at the atrocities and ethical breaches in scientific research of the past.

I'd actually like to see an interview with the people who have to witness these kind of Frankenstein experiments first hand and how they justify it.

We allow poor people to mine tiny bits of gold by burning (boiling?) off mercury, poisoning themselves, their family, and the whole ecosystem, as their nervous systems degenerate like a slow form of torture.

This is tame.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/climate/amazon-forest-mer...

Not to mention more than 80% of gold use is superficial. Majority of it is held in banks and reserves.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

Well "illegal gold mining" is banned kind of by definition. Admittedly it seems Peru and places aren't enforcing the laws as well as they could but it's kind of a different category of problem. And I'm not sure you can regard the US as responsible for making gold valuable as it was for thousands of years before the US existed.

I'm just comparing people who intentionally make a choice to poison themselves and so many animals around them for tiny shiny bits opposed to unintentional deaths during medical research. I don't blame US in any way.

Same with "artisanal" cobalt mining.

The justification will be a consequentialist argument, we sacrificed/tortured animals and in exchange we gave this to humanity; the overall calculus is a net positive.

This post shows the very worst of the equation, and they will bring up the best, maybe some people that couldn't walk that now can, or some psychological disease for which this contributed to the cure.

They will probably bring up numbers like, this damaged hundreds, but will benefit hundreds of thousands.

This is not the first time society accepts such a compromise. There are innocent people in jail serving life sentences, because every criteria will have false positives. We can undo this wrong right now, we just have to let everyone out of prison.

Net positive for who? Humans? Only one species but net result is huge negative for all other species.

Only as a selfish species we find this positive.

What if it don't? How can we valuate an uncertainty? Where is the systematic evidence?

Most Nazi human experiments were just atrocities without scientific value but the Dachau hypothermia valuable data. Is that justified? https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006

Personally I don't thinks these questions have good answers and thus I think we (as society) should adopt a values first mode while critically reflecting about where our values will lead us. I understand the consequentialist appeal but it's deeply flawed as expectations are made up and it's just too easy to justify anything.

What worries me about Neuralink is that I don't think the experiments are motivated by base research or will benefit humankind or any kind besides Musk and his partners. It's a private company based on hype. Best case scenario it's just propaganda.

I agree with you these arguments can be used to justify atrocities. Actually they can be used to justify atrocities arbitrarily large as long as you find enough people that you think are being benefitted.

However I don't think they should be entirely dismissed. Specially if at some point the weight on each side of the balance differs by enough orders of magnitude.

I don't think so. We hold a special place for humans only a small minority elevate any other animals to that special place. I don't see that changing over time. I could be wrong I just doubt we will move in that direction.

I think that's inverted. We don't have to elevate any other form of life or ecosystem to develop a social conscience or ethics. I don't see myself as lesser or greater, just part of it all.

As for things changing over time, that has already happened since the rise of ubiquitous communications. Social attitudes have changed drastically since the 1980s.

I have to tell you that while you see it as unethical, I don't.

I think this type of research might bring us a level forward for people who are blind or have parkinson's or other things and that this also might be the way for us humans to evolve further.

If the results of this type of research is fruitless, that will still be a discovery.

I do justify the experiments and death of those handful animals through the type of research, the goal of it and the importance.

It is unethical. You just don't see it because we are selfish and does not care about ethics when there is our profit, humans in a nutshell.

Why wait 50 years? These sorts of experiments are toe-curling and horrible to think about today. If the claims are true and they seem rather specific to be false, I'll never look at Neuralink the same way again.

And Yet I see noone here talking about the (more) cruel experiments on dogs that Faucci supported. People find their principles whenever its convenient to attack someone they dislike for other reasons.

Even assuming what they're reporting is true (which having read IIAOPSW's comment above now seems rather unlikely) I don't see the situation as terrible. "15 of 23 monkeys died" is in itself meaningless. We don't know how long they intended to keep them alive anyways - a reasonable protocol in this kind of studies is "have procedure, observe for X weeks, then have an autopsy to take a closer look at what actually happened". TBH, that's pretty much what I expect they do - I wouldn't want that in my head without them actually looking at brains under a microscope to check for unexpected side effects.

They're also using monkeys - which yes, look cute, but are not primates. If I'd hear chimps, for example, I'd expect them to be implanted long term, and be much more careful and sparing with autopsies.

Also most of the issues in the article don't directly touch neuralink technology but generic brain surgery stuff like infection. So worst case scenario they should improve their procedures, but there it doesn't say anything there's inherently bad about the tech.

And on a second reading of the article I realize I can't really get much cold info out of it. It reads a lot like somebody got gossip over a few beers and posted on social media and a reporter took it from there.

> They're also using monkeys - which yes, look cute, but are not primates.

Monkeys are primates.

Perhaps you mean they're not apes?

Ups. Yes.

A fitting quote:

"The error in depicting critics of animal experiments as anti-science becomes clear when one begins to question the extent to which the purported scientific aims of these experiments are actually accomplished. For then it turns out that the experiments and not their critics are unscientific. Those experiments that cannot be justified on scientific grounds can be no more justified than the frivolous killing and torturing of animals. In fact they are even less capable of justification, since such experiments block more fruitful uses of scientific resources."

-- Deborah Mayo

That quote is either really stupid or downright evil.

> Those experiments that cannot be justified on scientific grounds

Duh. Those experiments are also already illegal. So that quote either thinks that scienists are comic book villains that want to torture for fun (really stupid) or they want you to think that (evil).

One of their nearest-term practical goals is to find a way to help paralyzed people to move again. Figuring out how to take people from quadriplegic to walking around seems like worthwhile science to me.

> [...] no more justified than the frivolous killing and torturing of animals.

Maybe Neuralink is doing something unethical. But this kind of rant makes the whole accusation way too easy to dismiss as the work of a crackpot. People that do stumble upon something unethical and feel the need to blow the whistle should probably keep that in mind and focus on the facts if they want to be taken seriously.

You mean like this: https://www.trtworld.com/life/breakthrough-nerve-stimulation...

Ah, the "no true scientist" fallacy. What does it mean to be "unscientific"?

Cannot be justified on scientific grounds? Surely they arent running this like what certain countries did in wars?

You don’t know the end result of an experiment. That’s literally why it’s an experiment. /facepalm

And died in the most gruesome ways imaginable. One of them appears to have chewed off its own toe.

Elon's folks tortured them to death for a goal I cannot properly articulate, tbh.

The ones where they specify the cause of death they were put down, presumably by a vet. I can imagine dying more gruesomely.

“Pretty much every single monkey that had had implants put in their head suffered from pretty debilitating health effects,” said the PCRM’s research advocacy director Jeremy Beckham. “They were, frankly, maiming and killing the animals.”

Elon's desire for human trials in 2022 definitely isn't going to work. Human trials in 2032 seems a much more realistic timeframe.

> Human trials in 2032 seems a much more realistic timeframe.

Wait: the guy tortures (or pays for the torture of) intelligent life for literally zero benefit and your conclusion is that his trial timeline isn't realistic? I actually lol'd

Self-crashing cars, science-blocking satellites, Ativan tweets, and now sadism to primates: what more evidence do we need that what this person requires -- in the most charitable possible case -- is to be tarred and feathered and sent to live forever in that garbage patch in the Pacific?

Honestly it's like 2 decades now with this guy, what's it gonna take

I think, more charitably, is that the OP's point is it's patently absurd that Elon wants human trials in any form this year when these kind of horrific deaths are happening to these monkeys.

No no I know, you're probably right, but like you see how the phrasing was just horror/funny right

The benefits will be "literally" life changing for hundreds of thousands of people that suffer from conditions that could be aided by these devices. Then as the technology matures it's the kind of thing that can bring species wide changes. The benefits here can't be overstated.

We are 2 minutes to midnight not just of our own causing but of the natural cycles of the Earth, the sun, and in fact the galaxy. Those who fight for survival are the fittest to do so, with all that this implies, and we are lucky it's not that Adolf guy from the 40s who is preparing to send people to Mars.

On Earth moral conduct is often only a luxury. If the risk assessment conducted by the global survivalists is correct, then in this case we could not afford morals. This is the diabolic equation which structures the lives of the elite.

According to 2018, Tesla trucks should be in production last year.

He’s a well of stupid ideas and false promises. Trucks, Cybertrucks, FSD, robots, tunnels, going to Mars in 2025, using Dogecoin for interstellar purchases, uploading our brains and sending that in to space.

The list is endless.

This discussion sounds a lot like Reddit. Haters vs. fanboys.

A lot of Musk's business proposals or projects either didn't work or didn't keep to the promised timeline. Some of them did pan out, though. The US now relies on Falcon 9 to get astronauts to space and back. The list of human-rated launch vehicles since Gagarin is pretty short, the very opposite of endless. And people were scoffing at the idea of usefulness of a reusable rocket just weeks before the first successful landings happened.

I also rode a Tesla shotgun. It is a nice car, even though expensive and overhyped. But that isn't the same as vaporware. Traditional car makers suddenly had to compete with a newcomer - after how many decades of a mature market?

If you mentioned those two, I would be inclined to consider your take as more balanced.

Yes. Falcon is nice. And it is admirable how Tesla made electric cars palatable. Remember the Prius?

Musk has cornered de market for wishful thinking

If you have ever tried to bring an idea to reality before, you know very well that it is hard to predict if your idea is going to be stupid or not in advance.

Self-driving cars have been postponed indefinitely. I don't trust his companies with human brain implants before they can get cars to reliably drive accident-free.

The report is about research done 3 years before the Neuralink pig demo.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/y1htsprat2iup04/2022-02-10%20PCRM%...

We'll get human trials after they actually launch FSD

So... never

Maybe 2132

This. The whole thing sounds wildly science fictional, much more so than something as a simple as a reusable launch vehicle.

I don’t think so.

They are just implanting stuff into you.

There are already working implants, like pacemakers, this is just more complicated.

They have to figure out how to do it without causing too much side effects.

We have brain implants since 1997 too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_brain_stimulation

They're used to excite brain areas, with some success in granting euphoria to depressed patients, as detailed here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/pleasure-...

Neuralink's main innovation is its aim in making the brain implant able to transmit information outward, for use in prosthetics, and yes, mind-to-machine input. The last is what he's going for, allowing us to bypass text-input/voice-input or gesture in favor of directly thinking them. We'll see how much of that aim is able to be done or not, with our current technology.

Connecting to the brain is a vastly more complex problem than stimulating a heart.

I can't even imagine how these experiments are passing an ethics committee.

I had never heard of this experiment before, but this report is one of these moments, that make me question, if we took the wrong branch of reality.

A billionaire torturing animals for a self gain goal disguised as scientific research sounds like a plot from a James Bond movie of my childhood.

I just can't wrap my head around.

To be fair, it's easy for us to sit here and dismiss research into brain implants while we have full use of our bodies and are fit and healthy. On the other hand, people who have suffered horrific injuries likely feel quite differently about the research. While what's allegedly happening to the animals is horrible, let's just be clear that "self gain goal disguised as scientific research" is a highly subject take. No progress happens without research and I dare to say, many of us take medicines that we wouldn't have without animal trials. Are we not guilty then too?

I'm suffering through learning to code again without much use of my hands. I would very much like Neuralink to be a thing.

Out of genuine curiosity, without wishing to seem challenging, and appreciating that engaging in lengthy conversation online might be difficult for you... I wonder if other technologies might come to market quicker.

Frankly, I wonder if neuralink will come to market at all, and how affordable and accessible it will be. I can't imagine someone without the use of their limbs in a developing nation benefiting from neuralink ever, for example.

oh, I definitely have no loyalty to Neuralink. I'd particularly like it if something like Open Water, a non-invasive IR refraction imager, would succeed. Implants sound dangerous, difficult to maintain and intractable to upgrade.

And accessibility tech tends to be crappy and massively overpriced unless it's marketed to able-bodied users as well. My eye tracker was $200, because it's for "gamers", while the eye trackers for disability cost >$10K despite having the same hardware. Neuralink is never going to be affordable.

I probably overstated my impairments a bit. I can type and walk for short periods, just not sustainably. Basically my joints dislocate constantly and my nerves are unreliable. I'm at the level where e.g. something like a powered exoskeleton would be extremely useful, but not bad off enough for insurance to cover it if it costs $200K (since I can get around the house most of the time as long as it's short, and wheelchairs are cheaper.) So even in developed countries cost is an issue.

My response to this is a few days late. I thought to check my replies after reading the recent lack of notifications thread. And I had a thought. As you say, implants sound dangerous and hard to maintain but also, intractable. I wonder if a solution may be to have a client/server approach.

When I've used arduinos in the past (and it has been some years since I've had the time to tinker with them), I remember writing some software to act as a client on the arduino, that would receive commands and pass back telemetry to a raspberry pi. I wonder if the same style implant could work. Something to handle IO but which relied on an external, upgradable unit for processing?

Just a random thought. Hope that your journey to handsfree programming goes as well as it can.

Thanks for the reply, very much appreciate your sharing your personal perspective.

Anywhere that I can read more about this? How do you do the coding? Feet? Something else?

Very cool - definitely an a11y area I don't really think about

legs are messed up too. I use voice and eye tracking with talon and cursorless and a tree-sitter extension I wrote that enables different command grammars based on where the cursor is, and syncs the vocab list with the symbols in scope.

But are you comfortable torturing other entities for your personal gain?

That’s pretty much what this comes down to.

I'm not sure. if I need it to survive? yeah, probably. I'm vegetarian but I'd kill animals if the alternative were starving. all the meds I take were tested on animals, some of them probably primates.

if there's an alternative that's a bit crappier but pretty usable? then I'd choose that.

if the alternative only lets me eke out a meager existence, dependent on help and unable to work? I'd probably still go with what works, even if it means animals were harmed. I dunno if that makes me a crappy person, but it's hard feeling this helpless.

I think this makes you an honest person.

I imagine most people wouldn't admit to it, but when it came down to it, would go the same way. Hunger and survival changes people.

It's not the personal gain. The results of the experiment can be used not only for humans but for animals as well. Refrasing your comment, are you comfortable torturing many humans and animals (alive and not yet born) in order to save several tens of monkeys?

They wouldn't be used for animals because there is no return of investment on that.

Ethics don't by nature stop suffering of the many. What they do is protect the few from being defined as arbitrarily less valuable than the many and thus being exploited. I think there are plenty of history lessons around that one which are worth reflecting on.

Edit: to be clear, both our perspectives are valid. But one does not allow arbitrary escalation of harm to others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant

Has been around for half a century

Move on

That seems like an odd comparison. And anyway, cochlear implants were developed with human volunteers in the 60s and 70s. Some modern cochlear implant experiments use animals that have been deliberately deafened, and this most certainly raises ethical concerns.

The words "move on" are particularly odd. What do you mean? Should we never look back at what we've already done, and work out how to do it better? That really doesn't feel like progress or to me.

Imagine they have the potential to make people with broken backs walk again.

A billionaire who doesn’t give two shits about money and lives in a box, who is looking at technologies to make paraplegics be able to walk again or even communicate.

For some reason your attitude is very sceptical for no reason.

I imagine you want to dismantle capitalism too while you’re at it?

One reason work like neuralink can be unhelpful is that it can distract from other (often more promising) work. Medical experimental and academic work is (ideally) conducted in public at every stage, and is announced via peer-review. Privately developed work may also go through peer-review, but often makes heavy use of PR tactics like press conferences, puff pieces in popular media, snazzy videos, etc. Sure, the public sector can learn a lot from the private sector, but vice-versa is also true.

I'm well aware of the issues with academic processes and peer-review publication, but I'm also aware of the ongoing efforts to improve them, which gives me hope. Also, this painful evolution is happening in public too, as it should be.

Interesting jumps you make. Why should I want to dismantle capitalism?

I have no qualms with people making money. I like to make money myself. As long as I treat others fairly and take care of others, why shouldn't I be compensated for that?

I think in the end it comes down to values. I believe in things like ensuring that my negative impact on this world is as little as possible. While I try to maximize the positive impact on the other hand.

There is prior scientific exploration of things like Musk is testing. With proper protocols in place to ensure minimal suffering (and yes probably some suffering can't be foregone). Why not support these? Why do his own thing without these long honed traditions in science to also take the animals' suffering into account?

I would neither want to dismantle capitalism nor scientific inquiry. But I can't say that egomanical ideas (imho) thinly veiled in science for humanity don't make me want to forget my good upbringing.

But I admit. I just might be wrong, his intentions might be great and only this experiment failed in a horrible way.

Why do you think he doesn’t take these protocols into account? Based on the word of a newspaper? Did anyone even say this?

You are assuming bad intentions without any proof or response from the accused.

I do enough hardware security work to where I wouldn't want anything like this anywhere near the motor or sensory or emotional functions of me or my loved ones anyway. One abusive partner or associate could do so much damage.

Don't want to even feel a bit of pressure from people who say I need this kind of tech to "stay competitive in the marketplace."

My initial bias as a potential customer is that I really don't like this stuff. And it seems like the leadership chain in this particular product isn't doing anything to assuage my concerns or show seriousness about minimizing harm. This is self-defeating product strategy at best.

At worst...well others have said it better.

If you'd like to remind yourself of the original demonstration video of a monkey with Neuralink, playing a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXrGH52aoM

We've been able to get a one- or two-dimensional control signal from average brain activity for a long time. This is infinitely more simple than actual "mind-reading" and "mind-writing" which, as any neuroscientist will tell you, we don't have clue how to do.

And without invasive procedures.

What did they claim the chip was doing? It just looks like a monkey trained to play basic video games for food.

That chip could be the sticker of the backpack of a little Lego spaceman.

It ends up playing using only the neuralink when the joystick is disconnected.

I should have be more attentive (and up to date), that is impressive. I hope those allegations are false, no amount of progress can justify such lack of respect for the life of a primate.

Not even helping every human who lost the use of some or the whole of their body? Isn't being locked into your body for the rest of your life torture as well?

Elon almost always overpromises and under delivers. The majority of his projects never really come to fruition.

I'm kinda biased since I like his balls but I find people kinda set Elon's bar way too high. From what I see he's just a workaholic chasing his interests/dreams although at times naively.

That doesn't excuse the generic assholenes he exudes ( remember the "pedo guy" insults?) nor the arrogance ( submarine for that cave?!) nor his tunnel vision ( let's build a lot of tunnels for my Teslas, that will fix traffic congestion!). He speaks too much, and way too often it's complete bullshit. If he didn't talk publicly, he'd be a commendable workaholic chasing wild dreams and achieving some of them.

A marketer's trick. But he has at least one big win - SpaceX.

Tesla is also one (a lot less so than SpaceX). They kinda reached their claims and stayed alive longer than expected.

Is SpaceX a win? So far they seem to only be able to spend many billions of dollars. Are they just doing something that is so expensive that it loses tons of money and that companies that need to make money are unwilling to do?

Irrespective of one's feelings about Elon himself, SpaceX is pretty special, and few people who know about this sector would disagree.

They've revolutionised launching things (now including humans) into space through building cheaper rockets and then pioneering landable and reusable rockets. They've done this for a relatively low cost and pretty quickly, vs. their competitors who spend more money and time doing less impressive things. They've probably reduced the cost to orbit per kg by ~10x.

Regarding spending (and as with Tesla) don't confuse the cost of ongoing R&D with general running costs. Their launch business with Falcon 9/Heavy is profitable; but the R&D to get to where they are (with those reusable landing rockets, engine improvements, Dragon, Crew Dragon, drone ships, etc.) cost a lot. And they're now spending even more to develop Starship and a new generation of engines (Raptor) which will probably drop the cost to orbit by at least another order of magnitude.

I wish we had more people who under-deliver the way Elon Musk does.

So far he's...

- planning to dig tiny tunnels with no ventilation or emergency egress for cars instead of, you know, trains [1] - [edit](as if the only reason we have traffic is because lanes are uncovered? maybe just put a roof over the highway as a beta test?)

- he's walked back the whole hyperloop thing almost entirely [2]

- some electric cars where he tried to overthrow the government of Bolivia to source lithium [3] - at a company which produces a single digit percentage as many cars as say Toyota, but is valued at the entire rest of the car industry put together

- [edit] and a publicly available beta of an autopilot system that seems hell-bent on murder (including having tried to off me, a few times - btw, super fun when it's not)

- some very expensive space internet [4] cat heaters [5] (although after reading this article I assume the cats are being slowly roasted in some sort of bandwidth trial)

- built rockets that aren't actually less expensive than competitors - they hope to be, but presently are not, and tbh, I don't see a path (but would be happily proven wrong) [6]

- and tortured a bunch of monkeys to death.

11/10. Nailed it.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/22/review-of-elon-musks-dc-to...

[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-dreams-sla...

[3] https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-becomes-twitter-laughi...

[4] https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-new-premium-tier-is-fas...

[5] https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/cozy-kitties-spacexs-sel...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TxkE_oYrjU

I think that you'll learn that besides haters, nobody cares about the failures. Or hit rate. Only about the successes. And Elon's had such huge ones that he can keep trying for more.

He made some electric cars. They're pretty cool when they're not trying to murder. And some low-orbit satellite internet that should help connect some remote areas. The successes are genuinely massively overstated.

He's a marketer, and a good one. A P.T. Barnum type.

“Some” electric cars? They made roughly 1 million of them this past year, 80% more than the previous year.

Absolutely, about 10% of the number that Toyota makes every year - a company valued at $300B (vs. Tesla's $900B). They're cool cars, when they're not trying to murder. Electric cars aren't a step-change for humanity. They're an incremental improvement.

Especially at the moment when a $20,000 battery replacement awaits Tesla owners at the 8 year mark - and in places that are primarily coal-powered, the CO2 break-even is around year 6. [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

Good thing power isn’t primarily coal powered in most of the US ;-) In CA, that’s a total non-issue, for example.

No argument that their valuation has gotten way ahead of where they are, but the thesis is probably that it doesn’t take too many years of doublings to 10x, and companies that appear likely to decline take a significant discount to even what their current production would imply, because shareholdings are a claim on future earnings, not just where they are. Toyota really whiffed with its focus on hydrogen, frankly.

Wasn't most of the hard work done by the two actual founders of Tesla?

They achieved something almost equivalent to the modern day Tesla before Elon contributed anything (funding excluded).

No. They hadn’t even gotten the hand-built roadster working properly before he took over (iirc the two speed transmission was still shredding itself before they switched to single speed), let alone launching the Model S, X, 3, Y, and then scaling up the manufacturing (the real hard part). Credit to them for the idea and the initial prototypes - the idea that EVs could not only be decent cars that people could stomach, but actually lustworthy sports cars that hold their own with the best ICE cars was key to their success, and it was the founders’. But the company building and keeping it alive was solidly Musk.

Easy to build a company out of a genius product/IP some other intelligent team built. I grant that Elon is a decent salesman (even though all the false promises are chipping away at that title), I haven't seen proof of much else.

>Easy to build a company out of a genius product/IP some other intelligent team built.

Not at all true, especially when it comes to heavy manufacturing in a very well established industry. And the vast majority of the significant R&D came after Musk took over.

You can give him credit for pulling off some amazing feats and still think he's an asshole, those aren't mutually exclusive.

>And the vast majority of the significant R&D came after Musk took over.

I dont agree with this opinion. I think the most "significant" R&D was done by the original founders judging by their claimed timeline of how the product was developed.

We can agree to disagree.

What are his huge successes in your view?

Reusable rocket is a pretty huge game-changer. It is something that was quite already possible in earlier decades, but there was no appetite to do that because of economics (from '80s to 2010, Soviet Union fell and American Space sector was gutted into cost-plus pork barrel grant of jobs to various states).

SpaceX is the first success of NewSpace, and the revolutionary cost-saving of Falcon 9 seems to continue with Starship, which is 100% reusable, unlike F9.

Not really. You don't actually get much benefit by re-using the entirety of the rocket, which is why it's a non-goal for most programs. Even according to their own numbers, they expect fully reusable rockets to end up being about 10% less expensive than disposable rockets. ... if they actually manage to get there because so far, they're more expensive. Despite Elon's claims of 100X improvements.

giving employment to ~110,000 people and counting and inspiring people around the world

What hits? Most hits attributed to Musk aren't his.

And made billions doing all of it.

Perhaps his success is as a salesman.

Can you tldr #6? Because readability very clearly makes things cheaper for SpaceX (they pass only a small fraction on to the customer, because I don’t think customers have any other alternative at that price point anyway, but for things like Starlink launches, it’s a huge help to them).

Whoops, that should read “because reusability”

Direct link to PCRM's article: https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/physicians-group-fil...

And the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is more than an animal rights activist group.

---------------

The Physicians Committee combines the clout and expertise of more than 17,000 physicians with the dedicated actions of more than 175,000 members across the United States and around the world.

The Physicians Committee is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, headquartered in Washington, DC. Our efforts are dramatically changing the way doctors treat chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and cancer. By putting prevention over pills, doctors are empowering their patients to take control of their own health.

And we are also building a new way of viewing research. Since 1985, the Physicians Committee has worked tirelessly for alternatives to the use of animals in medical education and research and for more effective scientific methods.

Our staff of physicians, dietitians, and scientists is working with policymakers, industry, the medical community, the media, and the public to create a better future for people and animals.

------------

From: https://www.pcrm.org

How else is brain implant research supposed to happen? It's not surprising earlier attempts ended badly, they're putting things in brain matter. It's hardly pointless cruelty.

Brain implants are way more important than self driving cars and reusable rockets. The latter are useful economically, while brain implants are a necessary step on the path of upgrading humans beyond biological limits. In the medium term they would finally allow functional artificial limbs.

Instead of bashing and defending Elon Musk, I would appreciate an answer from a medical researcher or someone with equivalent knowledge on how do the findings relate to other medical studies where monkeys are used, in terms of numbers used, way monkeys were treated as well as research outcome value compared to similar studies done elsewhere. (thanks)

The NIH has been narrowing the scope of primate research for some time. Several years ago, they announced they'll no longer fund invasive chimp work. There are regular scandals about the conditions or experimentation on primates that crop up every couple of years.

As far as "research outcome value," unfortunately this is notoriously difficult to quantify for all aspects of the research enterprise. Most of the metrics typically used are abysmal for any serious utilitarian analysis (e.g. publication count, references to those publications, patents approved, funding raised, etc.). And you would not be surprised to hear stories very similar to this one quietly passed around in both academic and industry contexts, where consequences are few if any. It makes many people uncomfortable, but the power dynamics are such that they continue so long as they continue to support career advancement and continue to be approved by IRBs and funding agencies. That's not to justify what's being reported here-- far from it. If anything, I would support a broad ban on primate experimentation with few exceptions.

Trolley problem. I wish most Neuralink detractors would even attempt to understand the problem scope, trade-off, and everything that's at stake here in our lifetimes. "Elon Musk wants more $" is such a brain-dead take.

The reasoning behind Neuralink is explained here: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html#part4

TL;DR Some of the smartest people in the world consider AGI an existential threat and Neuralink is the leading hedge that instead of competing against AGI in futility, we augment ourselves to become the AGI instead.

Supposing for the sake of argument that I accepted this premise, you would still have to demonstrate that it's not feasible to do this research humanely. We have been successfully implanting hardware in humans heads for a long time, at minimum we should be doing it equally carefully with these animals and reversibly.

> TL;DR Some of the smartest people in the world consider AGI an existential threat and Neuralink is the leading hedge that instead of competing against AGI in futility, we augment ourselves to become the AGI instead.

That's ridiculous

i am of the position that AGI is impossible or if it is even possible won't be done for centuries to come

This website will probably post an article next week "100% of people who drink dihydrogen oxide will die"

Apparently according to many in this thread animal rights trump disabled peoples rights.

Just so we’re clear that’s what we’re talking about.

The project has attracted a great deal of interest from celebrities like Grimes

You don't say!

One must break eggs in order to make an omelet.

All good and dandy until the egg is you or someone you love.

To put ourselves in the shoes of the monkeys that died a pointless death for who knows what (a chip that will allow broadcasting ads directly into the brain?) is a thing that we call "empathy". Try having some one day.

I wonder why is it pointless?

As for the empathy, this is a classic trolley problem - on one hand you have a pack of monkeys, on the other you have many people and pets (and may be even animals) with certain conditions which could be (potentially) fixed by neuralink. On which side will you guide a trolley, where will you apply your empathy?

It's pointless because Neuralink solves literally none of mankind's problems (like in "our life sucks mightily without that thing") that would warrant someone, let alone someone from a different species, dying in any shape or form. Not even mentioning that those devices would primarily serve us approaching the most grim cyberpunk dystopia ever.

The description also hints that those surgeries were botched as fuck. Likely because who would care, it's just a monkey after all. I'd expect higher standards, and here they seem to have no standards at all. This is really the "forgot a meter of gauze inside someone's skull" level of botching things, I thought we'd left those in the early XX century.

The omelette is already made. We already have the technology he's "developing".

Exactly. Though it is used primarily to record activity in experimental animals, rather than to stimulate it, for example:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Left-A-PBM-array-on-the-...

one must break heads in order to make an homme-lette

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