The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Died
wired.com
wired.com
Infections, wounds bleeding, broken devices, complications from brain implants like bleeding or brain damage. These are certainly bad outcomes, but I wouldn't say unexpected or something you wouldn't see with other animal tests for medical devices.
Keep in mind this description comes from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine which seeks to abolish animal testing entirely. Not an unbiased source.
If Musk's company were doing this alone, I might assume something bad is happening, but it's not, the tests are done in partnership with "California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), a federally funded bioresearch facility at UC Davis".
I'd find it hard to believe a government run, non-profit center which are experts in primate research (and operating within a public university) aren't follow laws around animal testing and appropriate care and effort to prevent suffering.
Also, what do you mean by "this description"? It's an investigation by WIRED, there are many sources in this article, and quite a lot of "this description" is simply quoting staff notes.
There are barely any laws around this for animals
I get to read comments like this - definitive statements that are 100% false.
There are a ton of laws around animal testing. If you want to run an experiment like this you need to go through hundreds of pages of regulations to make sure you follow all of them. Then you need to go in front of a board who will make you justify the work (only allowed if there is no alternative), and discuss at length exactly what you will do to the animals, what you will do if things go wrong, how you will monitor their health, what you will do with the animal once the experiment is done. All the while you need to show you are doing you best to alleviate any suffering, including administration of anesthetics and pain killers.
This is also false.
There is a very comprehensive law outlining the laws around animal testing along with hundreds of pages of regulations that go into exquisite detail on what animal testing is allowed and what efforts have to be put forth to minimize pain and suffering.
Besides that, the central argument of the article is it disputes the Neuralink/Musk’s claim that “the monkeys died due to unforeseen complications”. Instead, what seems more likely is Neuralink experiments were directly responsible for the gruesome deaths of their test subjects. None of what you wrote addresses or refutes the evidence presented in the article.
It seems that you value the lives of monkeys very highly, which is understandable. Is there an amount of human suffering which could be avoided which could justify the loss of macaques?
I don't know if there's a definite answer. I think the moral question of accepting the deaths of animals for purposes of humanity's comfort is one we've debated for millennia now.
I think a lot of the rage here stems from the assumption that these brain implants will be less about restoring abilities to the disabled and more about giving people the ability to post in social media at the speed of light. The frivolity of the potential applications seems short of justification for animal abuse, even if saving lives is sufficient justification.
(Edit: I figure there will be some frivolity, but truly useful medical advances will be made. Are they worth the lives of monkeys? I sure am glad I’m not a bioethicist because I dunno).
Maybe they value informed consent. Something which humans could give in this situation but other primates can’t. Maybe the issue is that the experiments were done on someone who cannot say “no” (though we can argue they are doing just that by exhibiting fear). Had the experiments been done on humans, this would be the equivalent of doing them on slaves instead of consenting adults.
> Is there an amount of human suffering which could be avoided which could justify the loss of macaques?
We can flip the question: “is there an amount of macaque suffering which could be avoided which could justify the loss of humans”? Why not? Is avoiding our suffering more important because we ended at the top of the food chain? Maybe if we in turn did a great deal to protect other species we could argue that saving humans benefitted everyone, but the status quo is that making another species suffer for our benefit will only lead to other species suffering even more.
I'm not unfamiliar and I'm not sure what you think a layperson wouldn't understand about an unnecessary, unconsented, experimental medical procedure.
Or is it okay because it's a monkey?
Some people think that means we shouldn’t experiment on animals at all.
Some people think that the potential gains in relieving human suffering make it worthwhile.
Most people on both camps think we shouldn’t allow the animals to suffer more than is necessary.
> Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers.
your guess seems anything but wild.
the interpretation is the conversation.
the argument is your construction. end it whenever you wish.
>> Musk’s promise was to revolutionize prostheses and engineer an implant that would allow human brains to communicate wirelessly with artificial devices, and even each other.
And from wikipedia:
>> In April 2017, Neuralink announced that it was aiming to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short-term, with the eventual goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism.[16][7][17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink
It seems that while there might be medical applications of the developed technology it is not primarily developed for medical purposes. Plugging your brain to your iPhone doesn't sound like a great justification for animal experimentation.
And what exactly is not humane here ? /s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_cam...
and so on and so forth..
What I also wanted to communicate is that shaking uncontrollably isn't necessarily connected to some terrible, unbearable trauma, which I think is something implied by people using the quote.
Unless your dog used to be fine with fireworks and then one day started shaking uncontrollably whenever they go off. Then you might reasonably conclude that something happened to instil that fear.
A loud continuous noise at irregular intervals from which you do not understand the source is a reasonable thing to be scared of. Being frightened of a particular person, especially one that regularly experiments on you is a strong indicator that you were treated some way you don’t like.
> Unless your dog used to be fine with fireworks and then one day started shaking uncontrollably whenever they go off. Then you might reasonably conclude that something happened to instil that fear.
Sure, you can argue that, and I would have some counterarguments. But please notice how I didn't say "What I also wanted to communicate is that shaking uncontrollably isn't necessarily connected to fear", I said something different, didn't I? Strawmaning will lead us nowhere.
I'm trying not to strawman, but the OP of this thread pasted a quote, without any clarification what he means, so I can only guess. It wasn't even the only time he did that in this comment section - as if this quote was the most significant aspect of the article, proving the "gruesomeness" mentioned in the title. Of course maybe it was just a random quote, we will never know if the OP doesn't care to clarify.
So what I point out is: "uncontrollable shaking" can be easily over-interpreted. Probably everyone here shivered at least once. Yes, in that case the mechanism is clear and not related to any kind of fear, but we don't even now if it was in case of the macaque. The shaking could as well be caused by the damage to the brain, which should be the first explanation that comes to mind in the context of operations on the brain.
I understand the outrage, but outrage doesn't justify bad arguments, and bad arguments don't help the cause. We could have an interesting conversation on the morality of testing on animals, instead of comparing a single sentence of a monkey shaking uncontrollably, to 4 Wikipedia articles about forced experiments on humans.
Neither will assuming a straw man which isn’t there. Had I used your exact words, I would have made the exact same point. I did not answer a different argument (the definition of a straw man) but the same argument with different words.
But I do believe you’re arguing in good faith, so if you agree we can chalk that up to miscommunication and move the point along.
> So what I point out is: "uncontrollable shaking" can be easily over-interpreted. Probably everyone here shivered at least once.
The key is that the animal would shake uncontrollably when seeing lab workers. We cannot discard that context. Shaking uncontrollably in response to specific stimuli should make us consider if the latter is causing the former.
> The shaking could as well be caused by the damage to the brain
That makes it worse.
> We could have an interesting conversation on the morality of testing on animals, instead of comparing a single sentence of a monkey shaking uncontrollably
Then let’s add more sentences about that specific animal:
> she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. (…) she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage (…) A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered”.
There are more animals described in the article, we can could pull quote from those too. It’s not like the original comment quoted the only problem in the article, they chose one of many. Like yourself, I don’t know why they picked that specific sentence, but focusing on that quote alone is missing the forest for the trees.
>> The shaking could as well be caused by the damage to the brain > That makes it worse.
Does it? I can see how an argument could be made along the lines of: the animal testing (rather than human testing) is there because of a theoretical risk of suffering, and so as soon as it happens in practice, the research should be stopped, the strategy changed etc. But does anyone here really think this is the case? I'd think everyone here knows animal suffering is inevitable on this stage of the research (obviously there could be less or more of it depending on competence and good will to invest in more humane procedures - neither can be evaluated based on such a note). What the quote does, I think, is that it implies some kind of sadism on the side of the researchers. Meanwhile I think the "uncontrollable shaking" could as well happen after a placebo procedure, just because the macaque doesn't know what is being done to it. Such a strong response to this particular quote seems to me purely emotional, which the OP confirms with his further line(s) of argumentation.
> It’s not like the original comment quoted the only problem in the article, they chose one of many.
Exactly! Why that one? After several requests, the OP refuses to explain why he thought it's such an important quote.
in that case, why don’t you eat meat? society is fine with it.
seems like uneven application.
How should I understand this question? What choices do I have? What are the possible answers and what would they mean? I'm obviously not happy about the fireworks, but what would it mean that I don't accept them?
> in that case, why don’t you eat meat? society is fine with it.
I also don't shoot fireworks. And the society is fine with meat eating as well.
> seems like uneven application.
Some people would rather see hypocrisy than nuance.
fascinating!
some like to passively claim nuance and ascribe motive than to take a real, hard look at it all, including the self.
but that’s none of my business.
Aren't there published guidelines for what constitutes too much discomfort/pain for animal testing? Rules?
Evidently Elon did not understand that "terminal" meant the test animals would likely or certainly be euthanized if they did not perish due to the experiments being run: https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-neuralink-terminally...
That said, there are standards for animal suffering in research, and that should be checked as well.