Elon lied about the monkeys — and he shouldn’t be trusted to put his Neuralink chips in human brains.
“They are claiming they are going to put a safe device on the market, and that’s why you should invest,” Ryan Merkley at the Physicians Committee, told Wired. “And we see his lie as a way to whitewash what happened in these exploratory studies.”
Really heartbreaking reading what happened to the monkeys.
People quite rightly think of Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud for making false medical claims about what the Theranos machines could do. So why aren’t Elon’s claims at Neuralink being held to the same level of scrutiny?
https://futurism.com/neoscope/terrible-things-monkeys-neuralink-implants
anyone letting elon put a chip in their brain is a moron.
Or desperate. Forget the investors, Elon lied to those who saw it as a last ditch effort to beat their diseases.
Ah damn I didn’t think of that. I feel for them, but elon is the last person they should trust for that. I don’t honestly know who they should trust these days. But techbros aren’t one of them.
Yup. You have to be a special kind of trusting to allow a company to modify your brain.
Banal attempts at mind control, crude as they are, are bad enough already.
It’s easy to say as someone with a healthy brain. A blind, deaf or a paralyzed person might feel different once there truly is a way to get your sight back with this technology.
“Truly” is the whole catch here. The problem is that Elon could very well prey on the people who have no other options. We are far from having evidence that it truly works.
This is definitely one of those procedures that should need solid proof to be legal. It would be tragic for these people to die over some guy’s “trust me bro”.
I don’t have a healthy brain? Could be better could be worse but no fucking way would I let a private company with a shady safety record run by an insane megalomaniac fuck with it.
Anything that’s plugging into your brain just can’t be controlled by a small group of people with the sole motive of line goes up. Open research and public ownership are required. The consequences are just too terrible otherwise.
It’s the same people who think the covid vaccine puts a microchip in them. Go figure.
Let’s not pretend Musk has fucking clue what’s going on or the science behind it.
He isn’t down in trenches making discoveries. That’s just the image he presents.
He buys companies and lets the actually competent people do the work while claiming credit.
He’s been doing it since PayPal.
He’s not a genius, he just has enough money to get actual geniuses to work for him.
Someone put it well, if insensitively, about Sam Bankman Fried (FTX etc):
Not actually smart but just LARP-ing the “Aspy genius” persona.
However accurate that take is or offensive, I think it captures something about how nerd culture has gone mainstream and how it’s perceived.
‘nerd’ has disappeared as an insult now that we’re all on the computer all the time
As The Boys lovingly put it so many years ago, “nerds is cool now and jocks is pumping our gas.”
He buys companies and lets the actually competent people do the work while claiming credit.
No he doesn’t. He meddles and interferes constantly and convinces himself that he’s adding value by doing so. That’s why Neuralink is dangerous. Meta or Alphabet or Microsoft or whoever can be trusted to let the scientists and the legal team ensure there’s very little risk of everything blowing up in their face horribly. Elon’s little empire is constantly on the verge of an absolute disaster. I would not be remotely surprised if Neuralink messes everything up so much that it sets back brain implants and BCI’s in general by decades. Purely because Elon can’t just supply the people at his businesses with the tools they need then get out of their way.
I’m hoping this becomes another Chernobyl type incident where instead of people being against nuclear energy, it’s people against brain implants over the fear of how dangerous they are. At least for the implants that are not made specifically as medical devices that help instead of dumb people down with forced ads and memes.
@Lmaydev @ajsadauskas
Peter Thiel sacked him as a PayPal boss?
He didn’t “invent” Paypal.
It was formed by merging his company X with Confinity. All he did was profit off it but many people seem to think he created it.
LMFAO, I had no idea this wasn’t even the first time he called his dumb company X. He really is obsessed with that letter.
Remember that time Elon said he totally was not going to ban a single specific person when he bought Twitter and then turned around and did exactly that just a few days later?
@HughJanus @ajsadauskas and I adore your name, Hugh
@ajsadauskas @technology
I was astounded to read Neuralink is to be permitted to experiment on humans. Instead they should have any animal experiment licences revoked.
Why? We already have brain interface links that do similar damage to neuralink, this isnt unusual or unexpected. In its current form it is rightfully used on terminal patients with locked-in syndom. In other words, people before it damaged their brain in a meaningful way and whom cant be further paralyzed.
It would give these people a chance at someinteraction with the real world… What happened with the monkeys was about in line with other neural interfaces, its a consequence of the limits of the tech not negligence.
@freemo @ajsadauskas @technology
If there are already such implants why licence a company that seems less than, um, straight.
Point is what happened the monkeys is perfectly normal and expected… so nothing “not straight” about that (other than the sadness of animal testing)…
That said I dont like them as a companya nd wouldnt buy an implant off of them if I needed one, sure… but you’d need a pretty solid objective reason to actually block them.
Headline:
TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED TO MONKEYS AFTER GETTING NEURALINK IMPLANTS, ACCORDING TO VETERINARY RECORDS
What are these terrible things?
Up to a dozen monkeys suffered grisly fates after receiving a Neuralink implant, including brain swelling and partial paralysis.
First is the case of the monkey “Animal 20.” In December 2019, an internal part of the brain implant being inserted into the primate “broke off” during surgery. Later that night, the monkey scratched at the implant site, drawing blood, and yanked on the implant, partially dislodging it. Follow-up surgery discovered that the wound was infected, but that the placement of the implant prevented treatment. The monkey was euthanized the next month.
Before that, a female monkey designated “Animal 15” began to press her head against the ground after receiving the brain implant, pick at the site until it bled, and eventually lost coordination, shivering when personnel entered the room. Scientists discovered she had brain bleeding, and in March 2019, she too was euthanized.
The following year, a primate called “Animal 22” was put down in March 2020 after its brain implant became so loose that the screws attaching it to the skull “could easily be lifted out,” according to a necropsy report.
“The failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection,” the necropsy states.
As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk’s claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants.
And so would the account of an ex-Neuralink employee, who told Wired that Musk’s claims that the monkeys were already terminally ill are “ridiculous,” even a “straight-up fabrication.”
“We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” the ex-employee said.
The testimony of an anonymous scientist conducting research at CNPRC seems to corroborate the ex-employee’s allegations.
“These are pretty young monkeys,” they told the magazine. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”
Not only are monkeys as intelligent as small kids. All monkey species are at least a thousand times as rare as humans.
These experiments sound like they’ve been done by people who don’t know what they’re doing?
Unfortunately, these experiments are being performed by people who know EXACTLY what they’re doing. We’re not in the 1940s any more. Fucking hell. If I had the personal power, I’d gladly rain holy hellfire upon these wholly inexcusable, inexorable, inexcrimentinable human fecal chunks.
Yeah those people suck… Um, listen… I kinda just need to know what inexcrimentinable is supposed to mean