Neuralink’s FDA troubles are just the beginning
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Perhaps because it's much less prominent in science fiction.
Reversing aging does nothing to solve the same problem.
It's also a huge pet issue for all his wealthy SV friends (Thiel et al), so he may not feel he needs to add anything to it personally.
He explicitly said that he doesn’t want to live forever. Very different from other Silicon Valley rich kids. Humble, actually.
Remember Kurzweil? Called Steve Jobs’ commencement speech about death being nature’s change agent a “deathist statement”.
Of course Jeff Bezos is a bit closer, but Jeff investing only a few billion dollars in 1 company (even though it’s the most important company) is also not rational.
“I love how childish and petty it is. There is no depth or human complexity to Musk whatsoever: he's just a rich kid who got lucky and now we marvel at his exertions day in, day out. The New York Times still casts Musk as a public intellectual, even now, because its editors live in a floating world of narrative imagination and are impervious to the facts of the matter. In return, he calls it ‘diarrhea.’ They completely deserve one another.”
https://boingboing.net/2023/04/02/petulant-musk-rants-about-...
What brings it to mind here is there’s a thought experiment that considers a very large number of people playing a series of rounds of Russian roulette. At the end there are a handful of very lucky and very wealthy people (and a vast graveyard of th unlucky).
I don't understand why we think successful business people somehow have the same acumen, or equivalent inclinations as a philosopher or an artist. For sure there is some overlap, but at the end of the day I think it's more probable Elon's intelligence and aptitude are overrated by just about everyone while his people managing skills and luck are underrated by just about everyone.
Selection bias in action - we don't hear anything about the people who were less lucky than him.
One should never underestimate the importance of luck (and, if you are clever enough, you can even optimize for that).
> He takes questions at Tesla earnings calls that other CEOs would delegate to lower level executives
He can lie better and he is controlling micromanager.
(i’m very much not holding my breath for the vr/ar goggle thing, though)
I work in the industry, have designed and tested many similar devices, and the credible accounts I've read of the things they did are criminal.
https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/ahead-elon-musks-sho...
This has some more details from the public info: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/future...
The Vox article for example was written by the partner of someone who worked at PCRM - the advocacy group that filed the complaint.
The article is also packed with pictures of animal abuse that has absolutely nothing to do with Neuralink - which they do mentioned in the fine print.
These images of course are entirely misleading and have no place in the article other than trying to draw a false equivalence.
I don’t think animal testing is bad per se, and I’m very distrustful of news releases from organizations that are against all animal testing where their reporting is peppered with totally unrelated images of animal abuse, just to be inflammatory.
The goals of Neuralink are some of the most important being undertaken. It might seem abstract or wishful to some, but should they succeed we will have a plausible way to escape our mortality. It's a long shot, but we should absolutely take it.
If you try to rush research, you don’t necessarily get the same research but faster, you might just get bad research instead.
We already know that BCIs work and bring enormous benefits to people with epilepsy, ADHD, etc. There's no question about that. The only problem is, and that's what Neuralink aims to solve, that it's a very invasive procedure, so it's not being done often. But we know it works.
It can be "fixed" but almost nobody wants that "fix". Politicians are here to enact the will of the people. That's democracy. I don't think it's nice to talk about your differing political opinions as a "fix". This is not something that's broken, we want it this way - we wouldn't have spend so much time making regulations about it if we didn't.
If you find developing technologies that could fix epilepsy and ADHD (and potentially many more neurological issues) as well as help locked-in people communicate as unnecessary, I really don't know what to tell you...
No, it sounds like you completely misunderstand my position. I guess I haven’t explained my position very well, because that’s completely incorrect. (I’m honestly a bit baffled by this.)
When I say “unnecessary suffering” I am not talking in some kind of mathematical sense of necessity, but I’m using the term colloquially, as it works in ordinary conversation. It means something like this—the suffering could be avoided without undue burden.
> This is not something that's broken, we want it this way - we wouldn't have spend so much time making regulations about it if we didn't.
I’m not sure I understand the logic for why you say we want it this way—politicians are here to enact the will of the people is a nice theoretical foundation for understanding the political process, but the actual behavior of representative democracies diverges from the will of the people, and it’s also not a moralistic argument—part of the reason that we have a constitutional government in the US is exactly because we recognize that we shouldn’t do whatever the people will.
The idea that I’m not supposed to “fix” the will of the people is kind of absurd anyway—all I’m doing is making moral arguments about what should be done, and the “will of the people” itself is an end product of people making arguments about what should or should not be done.
> If you find developing technologies that could fix epilepsy and ADHD (and potentially many more neurological issues) as well as help locked-in people communicate as unnecessary, I really don't know what to tell you...
You seem to be arguing that the behavior of Neuralink is necessary to achieve its goals, but the testimony I’ve heard seems to contradict this—the experiments are being done hastily, which results in bad data, unnecessary suffering, and then you have to redo the experiments.
There’s a simple formula you can use to get people to do immoral unethical things, if you desire. Create pressure to get results, then create an organizational structure that shields people from seeing the consequences. This is how we have industrial farms the way we do, this is how clothing companies based in the US end up using child labor overseas, and this is how Neuralink appears to be working.
When a clothing company gets caught using child labor overseas, you find some contractor to blame. You terminate the contract and hire another contractor to manage the manufacturing for you. This creates the façade of moral behavior on the part of individuals, while preserving the economic and organizational systems which encouraged immoral behavior in the first place. Neuralink isn’t out there with the goal of causing suffering just like clothing companies aren’t—and the best way I know to counteract it is with regulations.
The basic summary is this: Neuralink is Theranos, except with animal cruelty.
The improvements that Neuralink advertises aren’t there, scientists in the field don’t believe that they will materialize in the foreseeable future, and there are a ton of problems you need to solve first which you could probably solve by first working with organisms like worms or whatnot, instead of pigs and monkeys.
Adding a jet engine to your car won’t shave twenty minutes off your commute to the office, it will just kill you and spread your body across the pavement. Sticking one of those Neuralink interfaces in a monkey won’t give us insight into brain-computer interfaces, it will just make the monkey suffer and die.
Any advances that Neuralink is actually making could probably be made with less suffering.
... and without the fraud? You can't get Neuralink installed at wallgreens, for example.
At least, at first.
The innovation of Neuralink is not the idea of BCI itself nor the benefits it can bring - that's old news. Neuralink is about the surgery procedure and bringing it to mass market.
Neuralink is most importantly about the surgery procedure, not about BCI itself, that's really nothing new at this point. They're building their own BCI because of their specific idea about the surgery (they don't want to need to remove the upper half of your skull like it's done today), but the tech itself is already proven.
Do you even watch the news of this field? This was tried like 5-10 years ago already, and is now steadily improving. I don't understand how you can make claims about Neuralink or Musk when you don't know the basics about the state of this field.
Imagine trying to get government permission to drive a car, but you don’t want to talk to anyone who has ever driven a car, or engage with the “overly burocratic” process for getting a drivers license. You might end up feeling like the system is biased against you, but it should be obvious that you are just being intentionally difficult at every step. Musk should have brought on people with experience rather than try to sidestep the system. This isn’t like his self driving cars where he can just put it out I beta and blame end users for getting killed or killing others.