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Comment by benrr | Hacker News Reader

This is appalling if true. People will try and justify the pain and suffering of these animals and the employees by the potential benefits of these devices, but none of this is acceptable. Who’d even want a device like this put inside their brain by a company responsible for botched surgeries and unnecessarily killing living sentient beings. The idea that this is a result of this new wave of toxic productivity mantra is also terrifying.

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>Who’d even want a device like this put inside their brain by a company responsible for botched surgeries and unnecessarily killing living sentient beings

Going to guess the people that would be able to walk again

I'm not sure that's the great argument you think it is.

Doesn't it seem a bit coercive if the people who want/need this are so desperate for it that they literally cannot care about the ethics of the company behind the product?

I guess it depends on how important you hold the lives of lab mice considering they make up the vast majority of the 1500 number cited.

I have no idea how that matters to the argument I made. I'm very confused by your statement in the context of what I said.

The key distinction here is that "unnecessary" isn't really an objective measure. You are taking that for granted, while the person replying to you was not.

Ah. That makes sense. Thank you.

I assume you also never kill mosquitos, flies, or any other kind of pests, or take antibiotics and vaccines?

I think you misunderstand science and are maybe presuming that it’s okay to be sloppy because it will eventually result in a cure, and the only people who are disagreeing with you are animal rights activists.

What people are actually criticizing is that this technology is built on shaky science with sloppy experiments casting doubt on any claimed medical breakthroughs. We cannot just presume that because the possible quality of life increase is massive that we should stop caring about ensuring a quality of life increase.

It’s entirely possible (and has happened historically) where someone over promises a massive quality of life increase and it thereby ends up shortening peoples lives and causes more suffering precisely because whistleblowers at animal trials were ignored.

for what price? how many animals are worth one walking human?

Given the choice I'd kill literally every monkey and pig on the planet if it meant we had the technology to cure paralysis.

I honestly can't comprehend the alternative. You'd walk up to some poor sap paralyzed from the neck down and say "Gee I'd really love for you to walk again but I'm a little bit more concerned about the pigs and monkeys?".

I think what you're failing to comprehend is that some people have a trait called empathy which prevents them from genociding the better part of a billion individuals for the sake of a few being able to stretch their legs.

The juxtaposition of an accusation of missing empathy with describing curing paralysis as "being able to stretch their legs" is striking.

A lot - we eat thousands of animals over our lives.

We kill 80 billion animals for food every year. Pretty sure 1500 to advance science is nothing in comparison.

And I wish we had a better way, but we just don't yet. Bioinformatics is working on creating virtual bodies, but we're not there yet, it's decades away.

Torturing 1500 creatures to death just so someone can walk again?

It's not one person. It's low hundreds of thousands to millions, depending how we count, against 1500 animal tortures. Seems like an easy choice to me.

It's a very selective choice.

Neuralink won't be giving this product away. The company is not sacrificing these animals to better mankind, it's sacrificing them to make a profit, and our hope is that in making a profit they will accidentally make a lot of peoples' lives better. However, we have regulations and restrictions around that process because when that company makes decisions about what it is and isn't willing to sacrifice, those decisions are not going to be made based on the number of people they help, they'll be made based on profit maximization.

We can do (and should do) better work than this to improve lives for disabled and differently-abled people in ways that won't require this sheer level of suffering and that won't gate those peoples' quality of life behind expensive devices controlled by a single company, headed by a man who is historically against right-to-repair movements, against consumer privacy, and against consumer rights. There are the cliche opportunities to help (which is not to say that they're not important) like improving building and process accessibility, improving disabled rights. But there's also pure research opportunities like making the devices that already exist cheaper and more easily available. Neuralink isn't going to be cheaper than the existing hardware we have today to help disabled people, and if that hardware is out of reach of many disabled people, than Neuralink is also going to be out of reach for them.

Heck, we can also do (and should do) this exact same research outside of a startup culture with less animal suffering involved, and the outcomes will very likely be better.

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> It's low hundreds of thousands to millions, depending how we count, against 1500 animal tortures

This also isn't the choice being offered. Neuralink isn't ready for human testing, and we have no guarantee that the company is going to succeed or that they'll end up being competitive in the market. People are treating this as if you just press a button and grant people the ability to walk at the cost of 1,500 animals, but Neuralink has a lot more testing to do, and we have no guarantee that those animals aren't going to eventually turn out to have been killed for no reason at all.

This is also why we have regulations around this; because every single company believes that they are working on something so important that it justifies this level of sacrifice, and every company believes that if they were allowed to make those sacrifices that they would be certain to succeed and their products wouldn't have any serious tradeoffs or problems. Even makeup companies believe that they are working on something important enough that it justifies this level of sacrifice. So we have rules about research that apply to everyone, even (especially) people sticking computers in our brains.

The U.S. factory farm system has killed 120+ million pigs and over 7 million sheep this year (hopefully not many monkeys). I am quite sure most of those pigs were subjected to torturous conditions before they were put out of their misery.

TBH, I think any outrage is hypocritical from anyone one who is not already outraged and boycotting the global meat industry.

The global meat industry provides us with 350 million tons of food a year.

What has Neuralink given anyone for 1,500?

I wonder if people are reading the article too, the problem isn't even that they're killing animals, it's that they're killing more than their research requires because of unreasonable external pressure?

This feels a lot like "If you don't care about factory farms, but you do care that little Timmy is kicking puppies for fun, you're a hypocrite!!""

People being morally outraged about the mistreatment of animals in some contexts might lead to them being morally outraged about the mistreatment of animals in other contexts.

This is a scenario where as a vegan I'm happy for people to have standards about animal wealfare in research. Yes, sometimes "think of the animals" arguments can be used by omnivores in ways that are harmful, but if the standard is that people need to be 100% committed before they complain about anything, then no one is ever going to be 100% committed. Any conversion to any cause almost always starts with people caring about the issue at the edges, and that process often starts out as messy and hypocritical.

So in general I look at what behavior people want from me to evaluate why they're making an argument. I've seen people complain that vegans/vegetarians are hypocrites for getting a COVID vaccine that isn't vegan, but they're typically not arguing for people to care more, they're arguing that the hypocrisy means they should be able to eat meat. And in this comment section I see people arguing that the meat industry is worse than Neuralink (and to be clear, it absolutely is), but is that argument being made to try and convince people to stop eating meat? Or is it being made to argue that Neuralink shouldn't face scrutiny for unnecessary carelessness in its animal research?

On average, people have a natural instinct (which can admittedly be overcome) to empathize with animals around them, which is why the meat industry needs to work so hard to separate consumers from the sources of modern meat and to mask how industrial meat farming has evolved and scaled over time and what the costs have been. I want people to develop that instinct, not suppress it. I don't really care if they're hypocritical right now, maybe if they foster that empathetic instinct they'll get less hypocritical in the future.

But I don't want them to say, "well, I eat meat, so I guess I shouldn't be upset about other forms of suffering." I think that would be moving in the wrong direction. The argument should be, "yes, and", not "no, unless".

Think it’s disgusting to try and claim someone having the chance at no longer being a prisoner in their own body is morally in the wrong just because they might be ok with some animals suffering to make it happen.

Luckily I’m not one of those people so I’ll happily say the suffering happens once, the benefit lasts for the rest of humanity.

The criticism is that there’s no evidence that the undue suffering is actually contributing to faster production. Not euthanizing animals when the trial is over, instead making them vomit until the stomach acid ate their esophagus for a week. Incorrect implantation (so experiment flawed from the get go). Things like this.

We should be extremely cautious that this kind of sloppy science doesn’t worsen he quality of life of already vulnerable people through botched science. We recently had a case with experimental windpipe implantation that could promise literally giving people their voices back and it liquified their necks!

Not covering anyone, why assume the animals suffered significantly?

"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...

>> Who’d even want a device like this put inside their brain by a company responsible for botched surgeries and unnecessarily killing living sentient beings.

I guess at least anyone who slaughters animals for sport or simply for their taste. I know few people near that burger-shop.

Torture is not the same as murder and by implying that they are you make it harder for people to advocate for less torture. Nobody wins in that case, not even you.

Experiment isn't the same as torture, either. They're not being accused of devising optimal ways to make animals suffer. If you're referring to inadvertent or incidental torture; alone in a feedlot pen too small to turn around your entire life, standing in your own shit, stuffed with grain, then unnecessarily killed (no one needs to eat meat.)

I grew up in Texas smoking briskets and practicing at targets in family cookouts. Now I’m plant-based living in California and my three guns are collecting dust in my mom’s closet. To each their own, but I don’t see how culturally or logically either lifestyle would lead me to put a chip in my brain… though I’m sure a lot of people will when/if neuralink is viable, desirable and affordable, regardless of their habits and beliefs.

You're getting downvoted, but you're simply correct in pointing out the hypocrisy in those who claim to value animal wellbeing while also funding animal agriculture.

It's about responsible agriculture, responsible animal testing. It's not black and white. What Neuralink did was irresponsible animal testing.

Non sequitur, both claims are unrelated.

"Living sentient beings" is also an unnecessarily redundant way to refer to the more popular term that is just "living beings". This is not different than saying "living living beings". Everything alive is sentient by definition.

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