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.
As a general rule of thumb, you should trust that a tech bro will con you by taking a normal idea and throwing around a bunch techno jargon to make it seem like cutting edge technology.
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.
Honestly, interface chips in our brains would be a logical step at some point in the future. But hell would need to freeze, then thaw, then freeze over again before I trust anything of elons being inserted in my brain.
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.
Also known as republicans / conservatives
i don’t particularly wish torture on anyone but if any of his techbro dipshit followers want to sign up…
Especially Elon but really any profit-driven, under-regulated entity.
Maybe they need the brains of their patients to have fewer wrinkles and have been playing 5D chess this whole time to ensure that happens
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.”
I think that’s pretty romanticised.
Assuming they leave their home town many end up in sales or similar making really good money.
He buys companies and lets the actually competent people do the work while claiming credit.
Sometimes he actively interferes with those competent people too.
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.
X.com, SpaceX, now changing Twitter to X. Dude has an obsession
Don’t forget his dumbass name for his child.
He was just looking for a reason to use the domain name I’m pretty sure.
To be clear, he did try to make them use his own work instead and it was awful so they pushed him out to protect the company.
@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.
I hear the full self driving mode of the brain chips come out next year.
I’m not well-versed on the subject, but can locked-in patients consent to these risks? How do we know they want to risk getting these life-threatening side effects?
@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.
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
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
unshittable.
What the hell. I feel bad for reading that, holy crap. That’s some nightmare fuel.
Elon fanboys should be lining up to try this, right?
Yeah, the dumbest and worst people will be dying to get this. I don’t see a problem
Which is why I’m totally okay with it being allowed. If you’re stupid enough to get one then maybe we don’t need you around anymore.
Holy shit, please have them sign up in record numbers! This could turn out to be a service to humanity.
is it possible and or legal to sign up maliciously?
Some, perhaps many will, and without a second thought.
Whenever I see these Musk posts, I always think the title can usually be reduced to 3 or 4 words. In this case, “Elon shouldn’t be trusted”.
Whenever I see these Musk posts, I always marvel at how people seem to think one man builds spaceships, programs self-driving cars, pushes all the buttons on Twitter, and does all the research himself on monkeys.
Also true.
‘Elon CAN’T be trusted.’
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Just curious, did this comment originate from mastodon? (Reading this on Lemmy).
The fediverse is beautiful ❤️
It’s beautiful and confusing even though I am a programmer lol
I think Elmo should just volunteer himself.
I feel like this is all a given. How they’re legally able to proceed with human testing is just baffling to me.
Being rich nothing else matters in America.
$$$$$$$$$
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Bond villains are cool. Elon is not.
Rather than admit his crappy submarine wouldn’t work after an expert diver told him, he called them a pedophile.
You’d be insane to listen to a guy who publicly refuses to listen to advice
Elon is already dreaming up ways to blame his human test subjects for his failures after they die horrifically from infections, brain bleeds, seizures, and psychosis.
@ajsadauskas @TrismegistusMx I’m guessing something like: “The human test subjects were always going to die (eventually), with or without the brain implant”
"We were experimenting on the elderly and homeless, so we were statistically bound to lose patients due to their expectant mortality!
I’m starting to get portal 2 vibes here
Doesnt that guy lie about everything?
Everyone needs to start treating him with Bizarro rules.
Elon has a history of lying that’s as rich as he was before he bought Twitter.
@ajsadauskas @technology I was just going to ask the Theranos/Holmes question.
Once he’ll start losing investors’ money his lies will catch up to him. Nobody’s asking questions as long as line goes up.
It depends on how much money he needs. Investors lost faith in Tesla once, and Elon invested in the company himself
SBF, Holmes, that woman that faked having 30m users on her platform, etc. And Trump never fooled most people, he’s been known to be a con man since the 80s to anyone that’s been paying attention.
Theranos went down because Holmes was trying to run the same tired start-up scam all the big boys pull but within the confines of the medical industry. She would have succeeded if she had picked something non medical. The FDA doesn’t fuck around. If Elon thinks he’s smart enough to pull the same shit he’s going to “find out” too.
I really, really hope this is the case. I’d love to see him pay some serious consequences, especially if it’s the result of his own arrogance.
I just hope there aren’t too many consequences for other people along with it.
Supposedly the FAA doesn’t fuck around and yet he managed quite alright with SpaceX, cf https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/186_spacexs_regulatory_evasion_has_consequences_w_eric_roesch
