Musk’s bid to start Neuralink human trials denied by FDA in 2022, report says | Hacker News Reader

Musk’s bid to start Neuralink human trials denied by FDA in 2022, report says

arstechnica.com

47 pointsrbanffy76 comments

Even DARPA dropped the idea of brain surgery and has gone back to non-invasive technology, Neuralink should do the same. (2018)

> "To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people's brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it'll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/jets-pilots-mind-control-darpa

Plus enough with the animal torture already, for very dubious reasons at that.

Such devices are a dead end, imo. I think the next generation of BMI will likely be something you can put on your head like old time headphones with some being even less invasive than that maybe as mere 'pebbles' you just put on your temples or where ever else is potentially optimal for interacting with the human brain.

I get really strong "Fringe" vibes from all of this

>The regulator said the company needed to do animal testing to show the battery was very unlikely to malfunction, which could damage brain tissue.

>Another reportedly serious concern from the FDA was that the implant's tiny wires—which are thinner than individual human hairs—could migrate into the brain, potentially causing inflammation, rupturing blood vessels, and impairing brain function. The FDA was also concerned about the device overheating and questioned whether it could be removed from people's brains without causing damage.

Brutal. I can't even imagine which is worse - a closed source neuralink or an open source one lmao.

Closed source. Imagine needing a firmware update for a neuralink device after the manufacturer has dropped support. Consumer open source tends to support devices longer than consumer closed source

I really miss when discussions about Musk's companies were about the technology - there is a lot of interesting areas to discuss with Neurolink and how their approaching development. But now comment sections about anything Musk related are pointless - entirely about his personality and politics

Well you can only swallow repeated empty promises of progress on the technology front for so many years before you have to confront the blatant lies. Excuse me: "forward looking statements"

What's ironic is that at this point in time, yours is the first comment to mention him.

But I also think it's very fair for a medical device company take some scrutiny if its CEO is famous for overpromising and underdelivering.

Perhaps the way hn comments work. I read this page earlier this morning and all the comments were about how nobody wanted anything to do with Elon Musk. Now it is different.

No, aqme28 is wrong. There were comments about Musk before your comment. The very first comment on this submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041016) was indeed about Musk, and also the second one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041042). Then there were others (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041092) as well mixed into the whole thing, before you made your comment about it.

I am not wrong. The comment-ordering is not the same when I viewed the page as it was when you viewed the page.

The comments are arranged based on score and time posted. They're not going to be the same for every user who visits the page.

Here is the same comments ordered by time rather than score: https://ditzes.com/item/35040763 (you can also go directly to https://ditzes.com/item/35040763#item-35041285 and scroll upwards, every comment above that one was made before it)

You can clearly see that there are mentions about Musk before Vermeulen made their comment.

(also, you can hover the "N minutes/hours ago" and see the timestamp on HN too, which again will show you which chronological order things were posted in)

Why do you need me to prove this to you?

Here’s my view: https://ibb.co/W2kvvmz

You can “clearly see” that this musk comment is third.

You said "this point in time, yours is the first comment to mention him"

I took "First" to mean in time, not order of the page. I guess I understood you wrong, because if you're talking about time, their comment was not the first to mention Musk. But I guess if you mean "first" as in "highest on the page", then you're right that it's higher up.

But as you know, comments are not ordered by time, but time + score, but somehow this point seems to be lost while crossing through the wires.

You're relaying something I said earlier because you didn't read my comment that you responded to. "The comments are arranged based on score and time posted. They're not going to be the same for every user who visits the page."

Ok, you're still not getting it. Yes, if you just look from top to bottom, you're not seeing the chronological order of when comments happened. When you say "you made the first comment" you're implying "first" in the chronological order.

Good to see - when I posted this every comment was about Musk. I guess it just takes time on Hackernews to filter the worthwhile discussions to the top

Comments about Musk's politics and personality have trended upwards along with his increasing political and personal comments. He didn't need to behave this way.

The truth is that his ideas were always about his personality. Even the hyperloop he conceived because he wanted to dampen the CA HSR project and his general distate of public transit. Being someone who cared about public transit keyed me into the fact that he wasn't to be trusted quite early compared to everyone else.

This is the risk you drive with "great men" idols in any space, that's why it's always safest to talk about ideas and technologies themselves.

And the whole hyperloop makes me sad on general state of understanding of engineering. At least it is so big project that demo models just fail to work or scale up so money is only thing that will be wasted.

Neuralink is something that could kill people. And with manned space travel at least buyers that is agencies have enough rigor to ensure it is good before going forward.

Give the over promise and (way, way, waaaaay) under deliver of all his self driving bloviations there’s no way in hell I’d be down to let him implant anything in my head.

Ok, but how is this relevant to the story? Participation is voluntary. Nobody forces you to anything.

Reputation?

Same applies to drugs? No?

Isn’t the point of the FDA to limit the consumption of potentially harmful substances despite the willingness of someone to consume it?

Not quite sure what the FDA purpose is anymore. I donno if it’s true but I saw in a documentary that once drugs are approved they can be changed and don’t require reapproval. I don’t quite understand how the FDA works anymore other than a barrier to entry.

but how many people are willing to participate based on false information or reputation due to the perpetual hype/marketing/lies he has thrown out with regards to something. The general public thinks he has solved self driving, after all it's coming next year (for the tenth consecutive year), meanwhile an industry report recently ranked Tesla dead last in likelihood to deliver when compared to nearly 20 other companies.

Probably a lot. A lot of people still believe in musk.

Are you quadriplegic/paraplegic? I'm sure that will influence you decision

Are you knowledgeable in medical ethics? It’s well known that it’s unethical to be offering experimental treatments, even to desperate patients, that don’t have at least the very low bar of “does this cause immediate death or serious life worsening of animal models, does this appear to have any benefit in animal models”.

There was in fact a whole scandal about this recently with artificial tracheas. Living with a tube in your throat to breathe is a horrible way to live, but the people who got artificial ones died horrible and slow deaths because they evidence of their efficacy in mouse models were forged through a cult of personality of the head researcher and the promise of potential life changing gains.

Imagine claiming to have a monopoly on ethics.

I don't think "Move Fast and Break Things" should apply to biological experiments on living organisms (least of all humans). Supposedly this company has already shown a disregard for their animal test subjects in order to "move faster" by running experiments side-by-side, rather than in series (which would have allowed less total subjects, and harm reduction).

So, good job FDA, keep blocking it until they get their act together.

I can see how this end. Musk decided to do more experiments on monkeys. Soon monkey + chip become smarter than human. And human cease to exist shortly after.

Too much hate here.

It's surprising how quicly people jumped from "Elon is the genius" to "Elon is a fraud and a liar".

Telling loads of lies and committing massive amounts of fraud will do that to one's reputation, yes.

Has he though? If you read the headlines defiantly. If you read the follow up reports, no not so much.

Maybe I’m missing something though. Would you mind expanding what exactly you had in mind when writing this?

For one Full Self Driving is shaping out to be one massive bit of vaporware after being just around the corner for about eight plus years now. For the task of actual autonomous navigation Musk's gamble on going camera only looks like it's not going to pan out any time soon, the only groups getting close have LIDAR plastered all over their vehicles. That was something people at the time were saying too so it's not just the benefit of hindsight letting us say that. There were loads of people at the time saying camera-only was not a functional path to early Autopilot.

How do you know that people change their mind so easily? Isn’t it much more likely that the haters and fanboys are different people, commenting on different topics? It’s much easier to hate on a topic like this and much easier to cheer for him when SpaceX had some world-first success.

I, for one, am not one of those. I was never a "fan boy", but I certainly held Musk in esteem. That went away during his obvious decent into narcissistic madness over the last ~5 years.

Anecdotally I used to think he was actually pretty smart and at the least good at building businesses around good ideas back when Tesla was relatively young and SpaceX was his only other really large venture. In the decade since though my impression has really soured. I'd hesitate to call myself a fan-boy of Musk ever though.

I mean, I've thought he was a weird idiot since before it was cool, but I think the Twitter debacle really has made it a lot clearer to people (and has made me revise my previous assessment; I hadn't previously realised he was _this_ bad).

There is nothing surprising. Elon is for a very long time on the scene. You must be a really good performer not fail during 2 decade long show. I don’t mind Tesla’s poor self driving, Tesla Model X is really cool vehicle (with some design flaws, but it’s ok). My personal turning point was calling a diver “pedo”. After all he’s just another mega rich guy totally decoupled from reality.

Yeah, the "pedo" bit did it for me too. It's when it became obvious how petty and fragile the man was. He wasn't willing to accept criticism of his unsolicited terrible idea (his scuba coffin things) and angrily lashed out at a domain expert who said as much.

It's not been a Holmes / SBF overnight reveal, it's been a long slow decline due to his twitter usage since the "diver paedo" incident.

Yeah, calling a selfless rescuer earnestly trying to save the lives of some children a pedophile was when I started to stop respecting him as a human being. I stopped respecting him as a professional when the racist Tesla workplace and management started coming out, with allegedly black people being shuffled off the floor when Elon walked through the factories so he didn’t have to see them.

The more surprising thing is the amount of people defending Elon.

Elon was always a fraud and a liar. As he became more outspoken on social media, more people were exposed to what he actually is.

I've considered him to be a fraud and a liar for many years now, I'm not going to begrudge anybody for figuring this out only recently.

Looking at all the cell phones catching fire and seeing how short the lifespan those lithium batteries have, I don't think it is a good idea to put them in people's skulls.

After seeing Musk’s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” approach to self-driving (and management at Tesla), Musk is the last person I want involved in a human trial.

Did you see this first hand or was it or just reading about it in the media??

It's pretty obvious that Waymo has done a million miles completely driverless with no major accidents, while Tesla has shipped a buggy and frequently updated piece of software to thousands of "beta testers" who demonstrate that it's unsafe on YouTube constantly.

In an almost completely controlled environment in a single city. Not to mention Uber has literally ran over and killed someone while driverless but let’s keep beating up Tesla.

It's not because Uber is worse that we have to accept Tesla's way of doing things. They have been lying to their customers about having full self driving available for years and now just admitted that some of their videos promoting it were actually entirely faked. Both can be wrong.

FSD is not available to the general public. It’s beta, can be used by customers who select to do so.

That counts as "available to the general public" by any reasonable measure; either as a one-off purchase or a monthly subscription.

And really, "FSD" is too specific, even the lane keeping autopilot the car comes with by default has the same problems. I love my model 3 but let's call the spade a spade: advertising the car as having "full self driving" at this point in time is nothing short of fraudulent.

I guess my concern with this is the FSD, while not technically available to the general public, is still going to effect the general public given that if it's a buggy beta test it'll be buggy on public roads.

A buggy beta does not equal a buggy release. Generally speaking bugs are fixed prior to release.

But it's in beta right now for specific cars who use it to drive around on the public roads?

So are tons of legally driving humans who are incompetent, drunk, etc.

Drunk is not legally driving.

That’s the point. Running trials in a controlled environment is responsible and exactly how something as dangerous as self driving cars should be tried.

Uber had the decency (or foresight, shame, acceptance of reality) to give up on autonomous driving not too long after that.

Yeah Uber was acting irresponsibly and almost killed someone. Waymo is acting responsibly and is making progress without putting people in danger. Do you think Tesla is more like Waymo or Uber?

Since when are frequent software updates a bad thing? At what point did any beta software worked perfectly?

This is troubling.. This was the point made above. I don't feel too comfortable with someone playing "POC" on my brain.

Keeping to a consistent update schedule would be an advantage.

I think the main issue is that Tesla is seen to be 'fire fighting', rather than working according to a predetermined plan.

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