• Concerns rise as Neuralink fails to provide evidence of brain implant success, raising safety and transparency questions.
• Controversy surrounds Neuralink’s lack of data on surgical capabilities and alarming treatment of monkeys with brain implants.
• While Neuralink touts achievements, experts question true innovation and highlight developments in other brain implant projects.
There is no such thing as too quickly. People went from shitting in wooden outhouses with no electricity to man landing on the moon and harnessing the power of atoms in one life time, things have slowed down considerably since.
And you don’t have to get a brain implant, nor will such a thing realistically even be available for decades still.
Of course there’s such a thing as too quickly. Plenty of railroad workers died because people didn’t realize that there’s a huge difference between falling off a horse running ten miles an hour and a train going thirty. How many people got sick because someone thought putting lead in gas was a swell idea? What about Thalidomide? Heck, people thought heroin would cure opium addiction.
Just because people are reckless doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing.
I’m sure we’ll keep racing ahead, but don’t confuse activity with progress.
Falling from a horse at 10mph is dangers, falling from any height is dangerous.
We knew lead was poisonous before it was put into petrol, it was chosen because GM could patent it whereas they couldn’t the already known superior additive, ethanol.
We knew about man made climate change over a hundred years ago, it was buried and suppressed for profit.
Thalidomide wasn’t tested and sold freely.
Heroine was a good drug for many uses, lack of regulation and care about addiction was the problem. Even today many medications can have adverse effects or cause addiction if not properly used.
These things have nothing to do with the speed of advancement and all to do with deliberate failures. You can advance rapidly and still test and regulate, but obviously thats less likely in a capitalist system that values money over everything.
Those weren’t about speed of technology, it was capitalism being capitalism without being held back by regulation or worker protection.
How many people died designing the Internet? How many died to figure out how to land a rocket booster on a barge? How many people died figuring out mRNA vaccines?
So the gov wants to claim the FDA did not regulate mifepristone hard enough, but this is perfectly fine. What a world.
Claiming the schizophrenic US govt WANTS anything is dubious. Most of their attention is focused on fighting each other
I really wonder about the Doctors associated with this. How are they squaring things with their Hippocratic oath? This just seems really close to the ethical line, maybe over it. Nothing about how musk is treating this surprises me. But is everyone working on this also an unethical twat? Kind of scary to think that might be true.
Ethics only matters when there’s an effort to enforce it. The Hippocratic oath is just a reason your employer can fire you for making risky decisions. It means nothing if nobody holds you to it.
If you’re a doctor working for Neuralink, nobody will expect anything of you but to push the project forward as quickly as possible. For years you only work with monkeys, and when they do finally put a human in the O.R. it’s someone who signed away all their rights and accepted all risks to install experimental brain chips. At that moment, that human patient becomes the single most important subject in the entire experiment.
Of course you do it. You’re getting paid more money than you ever have in your life to do it, and the entire system is designed to protect you so long as you do what the boss says.
But is everyone working on this also an unethical twat? Kind of scary to think that might be true
People with the Power to do cruel things always find cruel people to do their bidding. Especially when they can justify it with science or it’s “for the better of humanity”. Even if every rational out stander is horrified by their doings.
In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Hippocratic Oath saying it didn’t cover the latest developments in medical practice.
I’m just… gonna go scream into a pillow in the corner now.
There’s nothing here that would violate it anyway. These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics. Even this article is mostly just “I wish they were more open about their research”, which is true of basically every research hospital in the world.
These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics.
I mean… That’s the claim, but there’s no real explanation on how their implant could help quadriplegics more so than the current computer brain interface we’ve had for +10 years.
Computer brain interfaces have been around for years, the only novel idea is making it into a permanent implant. That being said, novel doesn’t necessarily mean good.
The Helsinki declaration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki
Is the reference for health sciences these days.
The Hippocratic Oath is not a legally binding oath, and many doctors are not required to take this oath or any oath for that matter. Basically, at the end of the day, oaths only matter to the people who have the strength of character to hold to them no matter the cost and most people do not have that strength of character. Oaths mean nothing to those people when it comes down to it, it’s just a thing that you said once, nothing more.
There are way less extreme example of doctors just fucking things up for a bag of money.
Oh no shit.
Anyway
Stupid article as it implies that doctors are concerned for a specific reason related to the subject’s health but it’s just background about this shitty experiment and how it can be dangerous. Regardless, I can’t believe someone volunteered for this and am unfortunately expecting documented issues in the future.
If my option was never move again and this would let me control a computer then I wouldn’t care about the risk
Remember how they couldn’t get the cyber truck to not rust? Or the bullet proof windows to work? Or how the milage for most Tesla’s was impossible, so people thought their cars were broken, and instead of either confessing or fixing the mileage they created an elaborate scheme to cancel appointment so people couldn’t get their batteries looked at? These are the people you trusted to put a chip in your brain…
That’s fine, but this ain’t it. There are many stories of important and heroic acts of medical martyrdom, but they all share one important thread: the scientists involved knew what they were doing. This, this isn’t that. Another dead won’t improve anything here, it’ll just result in unnecessary pain.
I think it would be a lot more reasonable to expect undocumented issues. They have a lot to lose and it’s controlled by a billionaire. As if they’re not going to try to cover it up.
