Elon Musk Says Neuralink Should Be Ready for Human Testing in Six Months
wsj.com
wsj.com
I've worked in the medical device industry for 20 years, and animal testing is unavoidable. I've never seen such disrespect for animals in that process as what happened at Neuralink, and I worked on artificial hearts where as you can imagine you do pretty extreme things.
https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1598163890546053125
"As a big time animal softie, I've been impressed with Sorrells and her team's work. Is part of the BCI story that does not get touched on very much"
https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1598164196453396481
Her LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/autumn-sorrells-3368b519
I'd argue that Autumn is more than qualified for the job...
What you reference is clearly a PR campaign from Neuralink in response to:
"In a lengthy complaint filed with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) said the research caused “extreme suffering” in its test subjects, who “had their brains mutilated in shoddy experiments and were left to suffer and die”..."PCRM obtained hundreds of pages of health records, necropsy reports and other documents related to the $1.4m partnership through California’s open records laws. It said the documents reveal the monkeys suffered “extreme psychological distress” from the “crude surgeries”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/...
Also, Ashley Vance does not work for Neuralink.
"More than 600 pages of records previously released by UC Davis showed monkeys suffering from chronic infections, seizures, paralysis, and painful side effects following experiments by Neuralink. In two separate incidents, experimenters used an unapproved adhesive called BioGlue to fill holes in the animals’ skulls, which seeped through to the monkeys’ brains. In one monkey, the use of BioGlue caused bleeding in her brain, and she vomited so much from the resulting side effects that she developed open sores in her esophagus."
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220926005606/en/Phy...
There are many ways for a company to compensate people, other than hiring them as an employee (consulting fees, board seat, stock, etc.) I sincerely doubt Ms. Vance is doing this for free.
I cannot reply to the below reply to this post from Mr. Vance, so I've edited my comment here to conceded the point I made in my last paragraph. It seems that Ms. Vance is not being compensated by Neuralink for these statements. Why anyone would give their precious time away to a billionaire is beyond me, but to each their own I guess.
> There are many ways for a company to compensate people, other than hiring them as an employee (consulting fees, board seat, stock, etc.)
Again, that's a claim. The burden of proof is on you. Do you have any?
> I sincerely doubt Ms. Vance is doing this for free.
It's Mr. Vance.
How can we know that Vance is self-censoring? We can't. I'm sure they believe everything they're saying, but if they believed something different they would not be touring the Neuralink labs.
Can you find any source that a governing body has fined Neuralink for factually being complicit based on the claims?
Pump the brakes. With Vance out of the picture your initial comment is a link to someone's LinkedIn profile. Do you want answers to these questions or are you throwing up flak?
Are you familiar with the complaint lodged against Neuralink by PCRM? Did you read the Guardian and Business Wire articles that iancmceachern posted? Do you consider the Guardian and Business Wire to be reputable news organizations, and their reporting on the issue and the statements released by PCRM a form of substantiation? Is a link to Autumn Sorrells LinkedIn, a link to Ashlee Vance's wikipedia page, and a couple of tweets by the same intended as a response to any of the above?
No not really. Also, there are no “forms of substantiation”or “grey areas”. Either the allegations will be confirmed true (substantiated) or not (un substantiated) after the adjudication process…
So the logical thing to do is wait and see for any ruling to come out. I despise hopping on any speculative bandwagon.
It appears that they have killed 1500 animals so far, that is a staggering number. For context most of the projects I've worked on use a total of a dozen or so animals over the course of the entire program, and those devices are on the market.
Because so far I haven’t seen any ruling, fine, or confirmation from any governing body.
Have we as a society really devolved into a "Billionaire Bad" way of thinking? Sweeping generalizations are for the most part myopic and tend to ignore the overall picture.
Where is the nuance, good faith and thoughtful discussions?
Musk isn't in that boat, where is his good faith? Where is his room for nuanced discussions? The way he treats his employees is bad, flat out.
That’s your only criteria? SBF (FTX) fits that description. Yet he misappropriated retail customer and investor funds. Being myopic leads to gullibility.
FYI: https://fortune.com/2022/06/01/crypto-billionaire-sam-bankma...
Maybe you need to take a step back and try to steel-man narratives you don’t agree with. Before prematurely coming to conclusions.
> Where is his room for nuanced discussions?
What do you even mean by this? I meant discussions here in HN. Do you have anecdotal experience on meetings with Musk that made you come to that conclusion? If so, please share do share.
Most, if not all of your talking points have been news headlines. Which make me think you really haven’t thought deeply about them.
I am on to this act. All these dates are not something his engineers tell him that's possible, or at least he doesn't care if they are truthful. If you say "no" in a meeting with him, you might as well go back to your desk and pack your stuff.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-i-do-not-like...
Note that the podcast was done long before Twitter, back when Musk had some serious personal cache, so it's probably the most both-sides pod in the series.
It really dives into the myths that he has created of himself. The part where they mentioned how Elon and his brother routinely jacked emeralds from their grandfather's pocket in NYC and then sold it for petty cash - he never mentions THAT.
It's basically creating unrealistic deadlines to make the people down the ladder hustle.
If it doesn't work they are gonna be essentially maiming a bunch of people to figure that out. If on the other hand it does work we're only a short road away from ads on the inside of your eyelids and other such dystopian technologies.
I'm no luddite, but it'll be a cold cold day in hell when I let anyone implant tech in my brain, let alone Elon Musk.
You need to separate the hype from the tech, especially so with Musk. The tech looks great.
Musk being the shepherd of such a project terrifies me. He has almost exactly the wrong personality for it.