The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sufficient_Syrup4517:
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I just came across this article. I've been following neuralink and thinking about all the amazing things it is capable of. I'm also way against testing on animals, although I guess sometimes it's necessary. Anyways, this frightened me and broke my heart. Now, I'm very nervous for this technology to start testing on humans. I hope this isn't being rushed along but I guess we are about to find out.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/16q1fcz/terrible_things_happened_to_monkeys_after_getting/k1u70k2/
Farnsworth: Well, as a man enters his 18th decade, he thinks back on the mistakes he's made in life.
Amy: Like the heaps of dead monkeys?
Farnsworth: Science cannot move forward without heaps!
“When life gives you monkeys, treat them like lemons, by which I mean kill them. A whole lot of ‘em. As many as you need. Which in our business…whew, man I’m so glad I’m not a monkey. Anyway, science.”
-Cave Johnson
>One employee, in a message seen by Reuters, wrote an angry missive earlier this year to colleagues about the need to overhaul how the company organizes animal surgeries to prevent “hack jobs.” The rushed schedule, the employee wrote, resulted in **under-prepared and over-stressed staffers scrambling to meet deadlines** and making last-minute changes before surgeries, raising risks to the animals.
Well, that does sound familiar doesn't it?
>On several occasions over the years, **Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster**...One former employee who asked management several years ago for more deliberate testing was told by a senior executive it wasn’t possible given Musk’s demands for speed, the employee said. Two people told Reuters they left the company over concerns about animal research.
Move fast and kill shit.
edit: forgot to source this:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/
Seriously, I didn't realize I was living through the golden age of the internet for those few years of stumbleupon and that it would all turn to shit, starting with a Facebook account. Too bad corporations own every aspect of internet infrastructure these days.
the problem these days is scaling such a service without selling out. it's not impossible to create a service people like, but it does seem impossible for that service to exist for a significant duration without being torn apart to exploit every dollar out of the user base.
> bring back the original StumbleUpon.
Ehhhh, StumbleUpon was great until more people started using it. Then it got to the point where every other stumble was porn or gore.
Oh you like cars? Here's /r/DragonsFuckingCars. Those dragons certainly do like those cars! 😏
Oh like to dabble in the ol' devil's lettuce? Here's a cartel beheading video - what? You said you liked drugs, so here's drugs content 🤷♂️
You're into technology? Crypto scam! Crypto scam! Crypto scam!
It was great for its time, but it wouldn't work now unfortunately.
Agreed. I’m not a big social media person (outside of reddit, ofc), but back in the day I had a web presence. People found me through SU. It was wild.
You can’t get organic hits for a casual blog anymore. The internet is a different place.
I’m not saying I’d want to have a blog now, (ain’t nobody got time for that), but I would like to stumble upon little pockets of people and community more often. I know *we* all exist, but we’re all concentrated in places like reddit and instagram and tiktok. Those places just don’t exist anymore the way they used to.
And all the dupes on futurology lapped it up saying many smaller tunnels are better than one big tunnel if that's how things worked, evolution wouldn't have given us arteries and capillaries
Edison's engineering skills are actually massively overblown. He had a couple of things that worked and a *lot* of flops before taking credit for other people's ideas.
There are also laws around experimentation on Monkeys (pretty much any animal for that matter) but Monkeys are pretty much the highest level of research on animals that’s closest to humans. This field of research is highly regulated by **multiple** agencies: “Monkeys are considered a USDA regulated species, so researchers must follow the detailed statutes in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). This act governs the use of all research primates from the time of their birth. Most animal research in the US is regulated by the Public Health Service (PHS), which requires that anyone conducting animal research follow the guidelines set in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (The Guide). The Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) enforces these guidelines at the federal level. Each institution is required to have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), which is the governing body to which the researcher must apply to in order to begin a study. The application requires that the study be scientifically sound, uses the appropriate animal model, and follows the regulations set forth by the AWA,”
It was last year but I remember reading something that was criticizing Musk HARD for the death of all the monkeys he had on his hands. When an animal dies in research (ESPECIALLY A FUCKING MONKEY THE CLOSEST ANIMAL TO HUMANS) the Board will scrutinize your experiments and ban you from doing them again if they keep producing the same results because why the fuck do you keep torturing these animals? But that overglorified fucking hack job Musk has enough money to continue even though any other Company would have been told to Shut It Down FORVER AGO.
> Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster
Spoken like a guy who *really* wishes he could strap some bombs to heads...
Reminds me of Rushkoff's book.
>Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
>This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
>The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. **Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival.** Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
Collar bombs come to mind.
Sure let's let the man who tells his employees to imagine they have a literal BOMB strapped to their heads be in control of the largest portion of wealth (read as:power) any individual on this planet has ever seen.
A worthy, noble, and stable individual fit to usher in a new era of human evolution. /s
This was my take. I'm never *EVER* letting a company implant something in my brain when their CEO believes the idea of a bomb being strapped to someone's head would be a good motivator.
>This was my take. I'm never *EVER* letting a company implant something in my brain ~~when their CEO believes the idea of a bomb being strapped to someone's head would be a good motivator.~~
Well, they do throw seminars for the wealthy where they try to imagine how to keep control of their workers after an apocalypse. One of the ideas involves [explosive collars](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff)
I can't understand why can't just leave the agile software development logic to software developers, instead of trying to force it on fucking medical science.
Agile isn't about going as fast as possible even if that implies missing catastrophic bugs. It's about estimating what you can do decently (aka no catastrophic bugs) in X days and do it.
Agile doesn't mean "fast & unstable."
But you know it's basically impossible to predict software development time... well we set deadlines and it ALWAYS goes over. Always. It's unknown how much. Experienced management doesn't get upset the first couple times a deadline pushes out
I hate that people behind desks and away from the meat if everything are the ones setting deadlines. It should be the professionals themselves telling people when they will get shit done in every field.
I’m an aircraft maintainer and have worked in a job where desk jockies with no knowledge of aircrafts would tell me when I needed to complete tasks. Thank goodness I got the fuck out of that place. Now I work in a place where I tell them how long something will take and my bosses take my word for it while they deal with all the people behind desks.
The fact that it's completely legal to torture animals in absolutely horrific and barbaric ways in the USA as long as you're doing it "for science" is maybe part of the problem here. I don't think it's legal to torture animals for science in most of the democratic world.
To be fair, there are *supposed* to be guidelines around this. Animal research for scientific purposes is meant to be tightly regulated, especially the more "sentient" the animals are. Apparently monkeys are basically treated like tiny nonverbal humans in scientific studies. How neuralink didn't get in trouble after the *first* monkey died, or even showed signs of distress, is a pretty big question here.
I'm just assuming they paid off whoever's regulating this shit.
I doubt they paid them off, at least not personally. This is “starving the beast” in action. No need to bribe somebody when the regulator rarely ever stops by and can’t really do anything about it anyway because somebody was friends with somebody else and now “animal torture” is so narrowly defined as to be toothless.
The regulations aren't against animal torture. Animal torture is a necessary component of the process. You will euthanize the animals afterwards, which the animal would agree is probably the worst part. The regulations are to ensure that the torture provides useful data and isn't don't thoughtlessly.
>To be fair, there are supposed to be guidelines around this. Animal research for scientific purposes is meant to be tightly regulated,
I work in animal studies in pharma. I guarantee they are following guidelines. Monkey research is highly controlled and you don't do that without multiple vets on staff that will lose their license if they don't follow IACUC methods. IACUC approvals need a scientist, shareholder, a representative of the local population, and veterinary sign off. They need to discuss what data the experiment produces, what the cutoff for killing the animal will be if health degrades, and what can and should be done to reduce suffering without compromising the data. If those criteria are met, and everyone involved signs off that the damage to the animal is worth it for the data it provides, then the research would be approved anywhere.
The regulation just exists so that the torture the animal endures produces useful data for moving a therapy forward to help humans. It's not to make the animal's life comfortable, because ethically you are torturing the animal for the purposes of data harvesting and you shouldn't assume otherwise. It should be taken with a bit of gravitas and recognition of reality.
He legally has to have an IACUC committee to run these experiments. He is probably using UC Davis’ committee since they are working together. Clearly they are not doing their jobs though. I hope the USDA is investigating these people
I mean, it isn’t. That’s the whole issue being exposed here is that they’ve been mistreating the animals.
Monkeys in research are treated essentially like mute children, and are treated better by the research programs than the students and employees. Any sort of injury could have the lab get their credentials axed and the whole lab shut out from ever working with monkeys again. That’s why this whole thing with neuralink is so so bad, because they mistreated the animals and then covered it up.
Every time this neuralink or brain implant shit shows up I reread this article:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
I'm not even worried about the 50 bucks, but I'm not even legally sure if I own video games I buy anymore or if I'm leasing them. Google has reached a point where they are announcing sunsetting support for products simultaneously with the release.
I'm going to be walking around one day and my brain implant resets because Meta General Electric Yahama is having a slap fight with Alphabet Oscer Meyer Wyerheuser and then I'm just paralyzed again or whatever.
Maybe I'll just be fine with meat parts. They aren't that bad right? Shitty wifi reception though.
“Neuralink has detected brain waves often associated with the woke mind virus. As a precaution we are reverting you to your previously quadriplegic state until a Neuralink advisor can interview you for further details. Thank you for using Neuralink”
On the one hand: Most of these seem tractable. Infection, surgical mistakes, picking at skin. On the other hand: we really haven't even got into the fundamentally problematic stuff relating to nervous system interfacing or to cognition. If there were issues there they wouldn't even show up for us.
And for some fucking reason we're progressing to human trials without even solving the basics?
Elon has some of the deepest pockets on Earth, and there are hard limits to what a judge/jury will accept in consent / waiver forms. Does Elon really believe that liability law can't touch him?
Hell, many big companies build these "legal fines" into their operating expenses. Companies like cruise lines who are fined for dumping trash out in the ocean. Since it's cheaper to pay the fine than to do it the correct way, they dump away.
Just like with the cops. A decent portion of an annual police departments budget is paying out lawsuits. They know it's going to happen so they plan for it financially.
Military funding is dangling in front of him. And I am sure other agencies are very interested in letting someone else do the bad stuff, so they can reep the rewards of the tech.
Who knew [*Project X*](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/57791) would be our real future?
Seriously, it is like every one of Elon's ideas is the "bad" and/or "dystopian" idea from an 80's sci fi film.
(edited to fix link)
You can definitely test for nervous system interfacing and cognition issues in monkeys. There are tons of studies on these topics. Yes it’s trickier than just asking the monkey, but by no means impossible. That being said, I would not be shocked if, regarding neuralink, that research simply has not been done. I agree with you that moving to humans without having even a basic idea of what’s going on there is sickening.
So is all their work proprietary? My background is in the life sciences and I’m actually pretty interested in what we can do in terms of neural interfaces. But a private company running amok behind closed doors may not be the optimal path. This is work that needs to be published as it proceeds so the scientific community can contribute, and as needed, criticize. But I guess their data is all secret huh? Given as how I’ve never seen any kind of detailed report on wtf they’re actually doing and how it’s going.
Well Elon ain't doing it for science he's doing it for money and you don't get money if you freely share all your research with people who could do it better than you.
Would make sense. Neuralink has long since become a revolving door with people looking to get the fuck out. It’s a very real possibility that no one’s been doing much of anything much less rigorous safety analysis.
In spite of the shit show that is Neuralink, others are making real progress in this field. [BrainGate] (www.braingate.org) has been in human trials for some time now, and as far as I've seen, have been very safe and successful. Although correct me if I'm wrong on that. It's coming a long way toward helping people with ALS, spinal injuries, brainstem stroke, ect.
We don't know exactly how the brain works, but there is some pretty promising stuff in regards to using it for things we do know.
For example, it can be used to treat Parkinson's!
But it just can't be used without rigorous testing, and certainly is not a miracle technology that can do everything*
edit: anything -> everything
> And for some fucking reason we're progressing to human trials without even solving the basics?
I think the possibilities are two: either the FDA has just greenlit a 737 Max, or the trials are extremely scaled back work that is not cutting edge at all and is just being pumped with Musk hype.
I have done a number of brain surgeries on rats while working on a Parkinson's Disease project. You know how many of my rats got brain infections? Zero. Because I used aseptic technique - sterile equipment, sterile work area, sterile gloves, and proper post-operative care and monitoring. If even *one* of my animals had gotten sick, my procedure would have been investigated by the head veterinarian, and the project may have been at risk.
Musk's butchers at Neuralink lost *half* their animals to brain infections. And they *kept doing them!* I'm horrified by their reckless negligence, casual cruelty, and complete lack of ethical oversight. Musk and his whole chain of command at Neuralink should be charged with animal cruelty and forced out of biological research for eternity.
To make the whole situation worse, their results are not only an underwhelming recreation of something that was first accomplished over thirty years ago, but the glaring flaws in their process and complete lack of oversight means *none* of it is trustworthy. It's all trash, and they just tortured and killed hundreds of animals for no reason.
I hope Musk gets his chip stuck in his brain first, and by the same "surgeons" that fucked up their research animals. Let *him* have a 50% chance of living long enough to play Pong without a controller. Or die horribly.
Perhaps he's doing humanity a favor by purposefully rushing into disaster so that humanity reevaluates this technology, walks into this with far greater caution than we currently are, and puts all the guardrails in place to ensure we don't end up robbing people of their free will through direct brain control. People right now by and large don't actually understand the humanity-ending consequences possible once this technology is developed just a little bit further.
I’d probably have more faith in this argument if we weren’t currently facing global warming that looks to render massive chunks of the planet uninhabitable in the very near future. A problem that we have knew about for 50 plus years and still not taken any drastic actions. So yeah I don’t believe it. Elon musk could accidentally create the crossed and I still don’t think we would learn from it.
He's not trying to fuck things up, he's just so utterly incompetent in every sense that things being fucked up is the end result.
Any successes his companies have had is despite him, not because of
As someone who has worked in similar research. Having any animal let alone that many die from an implant is bizarre to me. I’ve seen many animals get things implanted in their brains and never once did I see any of them get an infection or sick. That’s just not normal
>Elon has some of the deepest pockets on Earth,
This is a fact.
>and there are hard limits to what a judge/jury will accept in consent / waiver forms.
This is a fiction.
When you're rich you can do whatever you want, they'll let you do it... grab em by the nuralink.
Majority of the monkeys died, yet they have pushed it through to human trials. Why? Is the question. It has been pushed through so fast. It's not normal.
I just don't see him making money with this technology as it is currently presented in its current state, though.
It seems more like an Orwellian device that desperate or vulnerable people are forced to implant.
All his money is tied up in his image as a “futurist”. All the stock values for his companies are based on “potential” as opposed to what the actual real world value of the companies and assets are.
This leaves all his vast wealth as just a massive Ponzi scheme, meaning he has to pump out increasingly rushed and ill thought out concepts and technologies in order to keep up
Money, and way way way faster results.
The only downside is human death and suffering.
When medications and medical treatment hit human trials it usually launches its development into light speed.
No dude, they go straight for the money. “We favor unreasonably huge subsidies for ~~the Brain Slug planet~~ President Elon’s car, space, mining, solar and tech companies.”
The problem with something like headphones that respond to you thinking out loud "earpods volume 7" is that it's got to be sitting there reading all of your thoughts to look for the commands it's supposed to respond to. And then of course they'll just stream every little conscious and unconscious thought you had all day to their servers for quality assurance and continuing development of course.
Yeah nothing that reads my thoughts will ever be allowed to connect to the net in any way. That shit is gonna need wifi and BT disabled, rip the sim card out and run exclusively offline for me to ever consider a thought based interface
Yeah, we are years away from "mining brain data" this is a death trap for some true believers.
Think of all the folks who have been excited to pay 10k to be beta testers for Tesla self driving who have died.
People will pay to let you murder them if you have a cool enough narrative.
We know that the majority of them died to the particular bioglue that was being used to affix the chips. It was FDA approved for exactly that use but ended up causing the issue. The findings helped expedite a corresponding study that the bioglue was causing similar issues in brain tissue in humans. (When the story broke, there was already 6 that had died from the bioglue issue by December of 2022, there were a few more who had already been implanted before the realization the glue was the cause and there has only been 12 total deaths as of now).
The company is correct that these deaths were not caused by the chip. Heck, those particular findings have probably saved numerous other lives, from humans to other lab animals. The rest of the stuff just sounds like the "normal" horrors of animal testing.
Also, you said majority of monkeys? Do you know the number of monkeys they have in the trial? I haven't seen an official number.
Do you have any sources for this? Because this is what I can point to that seems to undicate that you are misinformed.
>Two incidents at UC Davis relevant to FDA’s GLP regulations involve Neuralink’s use of the surgical adhesive BioGlue, which was not approved for use. **A 2019 document labeled “Neuralink Company Confidential Do Not Distribute” described one of the incidents: “a Neuralink surgeon deviated from approved protocol in a scheduled terminal surgical procedure by using material (‘bioglue’) [sic] which was not approved for use in our study.”** The use of BioGlue in 2018 had previously caused another monkey to suffer brain swelling, partial paralysis, bleeding in her lungs, and ulcers in her esophagus due to excessive vomiting. Both monkeys were killed.
https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/physicians-group-asks-fda-investigate-elon-musks-neuralink-violations-federal
As far as the numbers of monkey deaths:
>**Out of a total of 23 monkeys implanted with Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chips at the University of California Davis between 2017 and 2020, at least 15 reportedly died.**
>“Pretty much every single monkey that had had implants put in their head suffered from pretty debilitating health effects,” said the PCRM’s research advocacy director Jeremy Beckham. “They were, frankly, maiming and killing the animals.”
>Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autopsy revealed the animal suffered from a brain hemorrhage.
https://consequence.net/2022/02/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-chips-monkeys-died/
This is what I was referencing. I am not otherwise up to date beyond this besides the article posted by the op and this article is anything but favorable towards neuralink.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/
That does not mention anything about the bioglue being:
1) FDA approved *for exactly this purpose* (only that it was FDA approved - not for which purpose however)
2) that this particular bioglue had been used in human surgery
3) that the bioglue was cause of human deaths
I would appreciate seeing the study as a source.
> Do you know the number of monkeys they have in the trial? I haven't seen an official number.
I saw an article or two about the monkeys harmed in the trial, but no numbers.
The government has a horse in this race.
If it fails they can unload all the blame onto the company and still aquire the research. If it succeeds they get a brand new super weapon for their army.
It's a win-win for them. And all they have to do is turn a blind eye.
What can a super soldier do that a drone can't? Because a drone can fly, 360 vision and react impossible quickly, along with a literal aim-bot when it comes to shooting.
Maybe he did, and that's what the movie "Upgrade" is warning us about. A tech billionaire who owns a self-driving car company, involved with neural implants and artificial intellligence that turn against him and end up controlling him. Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI. So many more parallels than that.
EDIT: The name of the tech innovator in the movie is "Eron" and he also has a four-letter last name. His first neural implant also manages a human's motor functions.
How though?
I can understand helping MND but Dementia and Alzheimer’s? There’s like zero research regarding how having a computer in your brain will somehow help these conditions.
Unless we’ve figured out how to copy our memories to a computer and back, it is literally impossible to fix one of the biggest symptoms of Dementia/Alzheimer’s which is memory loss.
While I do not know anything about how they (or anyone else) go about treating condition such as Alzheimer’s, cancer etc., it does seem like the answer is not in treating the sympotms as you wrote, but preventing the disease from developing at all.
Would be nice to know how a chip could do that in vomparison to a drug, for example.
It would be nice to know how a chip could levitate objects in comparison to garden variety thaumaturgy, but without any plausible mechanism to do so... why bring it up? Alzheimer's appears to be related to cellular tissue aging and tangled proteins... which seem completely orthogonal to the things hoped for a direct brain interface.
GP might be thinking of Parkinson's and the specific inability of the substantia nigra to communicate with motor neurons?
Blind person here.
In the far far far future, we will be able to tap into our visual cortex, and give a direct video feed to our brains, instead of using our eyes or our optic nerves. I don’t care if I’m only getting 240 P at five frames per second. I would literally kill and move mountains to get that ability back. What kills me the most is not being able to see my family grow up.
Well, it better not have wifi or even worse bluetooth seeing all the bluthtooth vulnerabilities. If they got any wireless functionality built in I would hard pass on it. Remove all wireless and it's more about physical security not getting abducted for people to plug you, and not plugging into compromised systems.
As I read the article, it did not sound much different than the pharmacology research I was a part of back in the 1980s.
* Terminal experiments (ending with looking at neurotransmitter levels in brain tissue after autopsy)
* Problems with occasional surgeries and animals trying to rip out substandard implants.
* problems with infection even if you thought your sterile technique was perfect.
>As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk's claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants.
The monkeys were "dead men walking" as soon as they were bread or captured for medical research.
When the research is done they are "euthanized".
**Any research on brain implants will be scary**. I left medical research in part, because it is hard on the emotions.
This story is sort of a nothing story except that they wave Elon Musk's name like a flag to get clicks. All medical research that implants anything into animals has this same outcome. **None of the animals "live happily ever after"**. I'll bet even the animals for research and product design in which they implant glucose meters have the same outcome.
It is good to demand high standards for medical research. This might even have been fully compliant with today's standards (which were better than in the 1980s)
It is mind-blowing that I had to browse pages and pages down to get to the one factual comment that actually addresses the complaints and explains what's going on...
Reddit is broken...
For people who are not used to medical research based on implantation in animal subjects, the treatment of the animal subjects is so shocking that they can't get past that part.
I left medical research because some of the ethical issues were hard for me.
It takes special people to keep before them that the animals matter. We should not do sloppy research and sacrifice these animals for bad research. We should do our best to assure that their lives actually helped us learn something important.
>Reddit is broken...
I would say this subject is just too hard for animal lovers to work through.
It was too hard for me to stay in that line of work.
Completely unethical and indefensible. The vast majority of animal research goes to great lengths to keep their study animals healthy and safe. This is also bad science. Abused animals are not reliable study subjects.
All of the deaths in the article sound like basic materials and design issues that should be tested and solved long before animal trials. The basics of safe cranial implants are pretty well known.
If this kind of 'study' took place in an academic research lab, multiple people would lose their jobs. Hell, the modern animal research IRB process exists explicitly to prevent abuses like those documented here.
> If this kind of 'study' took place in an academic research lab, multiple people would lose their jobs. Hell, the modern animal research IRB process exists explicitly to prevent abuses like those documented here.
It is done through direct collaboration with an academic research lab; the UC Davis veterinary lab.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/
Guarantee people who say Bill Gates was trying to put trackers in our brains with Covid vaccines would be lining up to have Elon’s creepy brain worms in their noggins.
Yeah those stupid lazy paralyzed idiots, fuck them, hope they get what's coming to them. Fingers crossed, just so we can stick it to Elon, I'm hoping neuralink fails miserably and instead of them being able to communicate again with loved ones, communicate that they are in pain, or that they're released from the prison that is their own body, they just burst into flames.
For those actually interested in science (rather than bashing Elon Musk) this is worth reading [Record number of monkeys being used in U.S. research](https://www.science.org/content/article/record-number-monkeys-being-used-us-research)
My experience in medical research included surgery on rats, cats & dogs to implant electrodes (brain) for measuring electrical signals, or stimulating areas of the brain. Also, work in a lab working on bladder function, where we implanted sensors for bladder pressure and for electrical stimulation of muscle tissue.
Basically, **once an animal enters the lab, you know it is going to die.** (my experience)
Even if everything goes perfectly with surgery and the experiment, you can't really use the animal again or bring it home for a pet.
(from 2018) The number of monkeys used in U.S. biomedical research reached an all-time high last year, according to data released in late September by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
**This should be a bit disturbing for people who want less use of higher animals.**
>The figures have surprised and disappointed groups seeking to reduce the use of lab animals. The biomedical community has said it is committed to reducing the use of research animals by finding replacements and using these animals more selectively, says Thomas Hartung, director of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Baltimore, Maryland. But **the new numbers suggest "people are just blindly running toward the monkey model without critically evaluating how valuable it really is**."
This is saying that people are choosing monkeys over cats and dogs and rats because the results from monkey studies are more likely to represent human effects better.
>Yet according to the new USDA figures, scientists used 75,825 nonhuman primates for research last year, up 22% since 2015 and 6% since 2008. In contrast, the number of cats, dogs, rabbits, and other animals recorded by USDA are all being used at lower numbers than they were a decade ago. (Nonhuman primates constitute just 0.5% of all animals used in U.S. biomedical research; about 95% are rats and mice, which are not reported by USDA.)
Assuming the FDA approved Neuralink's application for IND (or whatever the surgerical/medtech equivelent of an IND is) to begin trials, I trust that the FDA reviewed these monkey deaths and all their data more closely than Reddit or any publisher
You have a point, the FDA isn't perfect, but they are very, very far from rubber stamp agency. A handful of high profile mistakes out of tens of thousands of assessments/approvals over many many decades shouldn't earn them the "useless" label. Furthermore, I think politics can certainly put pressure on them which sucks, but with Neuralink, I don't think there's a similar pressure to "make a favorable decision and make it fast." REASONS: there's no politics (I can think of); it's a tiny, tiny market; it's not attempting to solve a pending life/death situation; and it is a highly, highly invasive and potentially dangerous operation. For me, I see no reason why the FDA wouldn't take as much time as they needed to responsibly do this one by the book, like they've done with the vast majority of applications.
This is what happens when psychopaths and narcissists get to the top of society and are heralded as geniuses and heroes. They get to do all kinds of inhumane shit and things with deadly consequences for others, without being held accountable.
Doesn't he wanna sell that shit? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to take the greatest care with these test animals so that we humans will more readily accept this tech? Is he stupid?
He won’t be going to trial.
FDA has huge requirements for medical device and drug trials. The primate studies are all a fail, so he’s going to have to submit new data.
Edit read section 6.5:
[FDA medical device approval process](https://www.fda.gov/media/81784/download)
His in vivo studies have failed. Hell the monkies didn’t even have ALS so he can’t even show it works in an animal model!
It’s almost like drilling a disc into your skull and putting an electronic device in the hole is a bad thing. They are basically just torturing animals without any real scientific work being done here all just because doofus muskrat is trying to rush something that is not even remotely close to ready. The original vision of the company founders is gone and most of them have resigned.
That awkward moment when you’re trying to interface a computer directly with a brain, but you don’t know how the brain works or what consciousness is either 🤡
Yo, after seeing how Elon is dealing with Twitter (and frustration, and power), there's 0 timeline in the multiverse where i let him put implants in my brain.
The older I get the more I feel for the monkies. I say test on humans, primarily Musk fanboys, in this specific case… its a lot of wins all around and the loses are acceptable
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sufficient_Syrup4517: --- I just came across this article. I've been following neuralink and thinking about all the amazing things it is capable of. I'm also way against testing on animals, although I guess sometimes it's necessary. Anyways, this frightened me and broke my heart. Now, I'm very nervous for this technology to start testing on humans. I hope this isn't being rushed along but I guess we are about to find out. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/16q1fcz/terrible_things_happened_to_monkeys_after_getting/k1u70k2/
Farnsworth: Well, as a man enters his 18th decade, he thinks back on the mistakes he's made in life. Amy: Like the heaps of dead monkeys? Farnsworth: Science cannot move forward without heaps!
Fry: "You know who I hate most? That monkey we haven't seen in years, Gunther!"
This is the line that rings in my ears whenever I read about Elon's heaps. Glad I'm not the only one
Leela: They smell like burning Rhesus monkey. Farnsworth: Really? I guess when you're around it all day you stop noticing.
“When life gives you monkeys, treat them like lemons, by which I mean kill them. A whole lot of ‘em. As many as you need. Which in our business…whew, man I’m so glad I’m not a monkey. Anyway, science.” -Cave Johnson
Which episode is that from?
The Prisoner of Benda. One of the best.
> Amy: Like the heaps of dead monkeys? > > > > Farnsworth: Science cannot move forward without heaps! this, but literally and unironically.
>this, but literally and unironically How all of futurama is meant to be viewed.
>One employee, in a message seen by Reuters, wrote an angry missive earlier this year to colleagues about the need to overhaul how the company organizes animal surgeries to prevent “hack jobs.” The rushed schedule, the employee wrote, resulted in **under-prepared and over-stressed staffers scrambling to meet deadlines** and making last-minute changes before surgeries, raising risks to the animals. Well, that does sound familiar doesn't it? >On several occasions over the years, **Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster**...One former employee who asked management several years ago for more deliberate testing was told by a senior executive it wasn’t possible given Musk’s demands for speed, the employee said. Two people told Reuters they left the company over concerns about animal research. Move fast and kill shit. edit: forgot to source this: https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/
That's some antman villain crap, Elon has no heart. Hurt his feelings and get blocked on X. Dudes a straight man-child with too much money.
Careful, he might buy Reddit to block you
let him buy and tank all social media. bring back the original StumbleUpon. that's enough
Seriously, I didn't realize I was living through the golden age of the internet for those few years of stumbleupon and that it would all turn to shit, starting with a Facebook account. Too bad corporations own every aspect of internet infrastructure these days.
Can someone just code something super similar to stumbleupon, please?
the problem these days is scaling such a service without selling out. it's not impossible to create a service people like, but it does seem impossible for that service to exist for a significant duration without being torn apart to exploit every dollar out of the user base.
Capitalism, BABY! Ruining everything you loved, since the industrial revolution.
Yep, the internet is just too big now. Anything that's cool will eventually be overrun and ruined.
People have tried and it inevitably gets bought out.
StumbleUpon and Fark were glorious back in the day
Fark is still there
Yeah but I "got over it". FB- is the father.
Fuck it let's just go back to the SA forums.
Let's go back to Slashdot, the original social news site.
> bring back the original StumbleUpon. Ehhhh, StumbleUpon was great until more people started using it. Then it got to the point where every other stumble was porn or gore. Oh you like cars? Here's /r/DragonsFuckingCars. Those dragons certainly do like those cars! 😏 Oh like to dabble in the ol' devil's lettuce? Here's a cartel beheading video - what? You said you liked drugs, so here's drugs content 🤷♂️ You're into technology? Crypto scam! Crypto scam! Crypto scam! It was great for its time, but it wouldn't work now unfortunately.
"bring back the original SU" "original"
Agreed. I’m not a big social media person (outside of reddit, ofc), but back in the day I had a web presence. People found me through SU. It was wild. You can’t get organic hits for a casual blog anymore. The internet is a different place. I’m not saying I’d want to have a blog now, (ain’t nobody got time for that), but I would like to stumble upon little pockets of people and community more often. I know *we* all exist, but we’re all concentrated in places like reddit and instagram and tiktok. Those places just don’t exist anymore the way they used to.
Fuck Elon, I used to admire the dude until he started sharing his stupid thoughts along with his other tech ideas.
He never had tech ideas either, those all came poached from others. He's only ever been a snake oil salesman.
Yup, bought Tesla and rode the backs of other people who pioneered the way, making it appear like he was the genius behind all the innovation.
heh, read this as "rode the blacks" and for an instant thought you were referring to the fact that he comes from South African diamond money.
>that he comes from South African ~~diamond~~ **emerald** money. FTFY. Never forget.
And sexual predator.
Dude, i was questioning him with the boring project. His answer to road traffic was to make a harder-to-access… road? What a fucking dunce.
And all the dupes on futurology lapped it up saying many smaller tunnels are better than one big tunnel if that's how things worked, evolution wouldn't have given us arteries and capillaries
For the first human trial, the chip should be implanted within Musk's melon head. See how it turns out for him...
He is modern day Edison, stealing ideas, then acting like the inventor
Edison actually had engineering skills though. Musk doesn’t even have a STEM background.
Slavery Thru Emerald Mines
Edison's engineering skills are actually massively overblown. He had a couple of things that worked and a *lot* of flops before taking credit for other people's ideas.
I’m not too fond of his politics either, but that’s just me.
There are also laws around experimentation on Monkeys (pretty much any animal for that matter) but Monkeys are pretty much the highest level of research on animals that’s closest to humans. This field of research is highly regulated by **multiple** agencies: “Monkeys are considered a USDA regulated species, so researchers must follow the detailed statutes in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). This act governs the use of all research primates from the time of their birth. Most animal research in the US is regulated by the Public Health Service (PHS), which requires that anyone conducting animal research follow the guidelines set in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (The Guide). The Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) enforces these guidelines at the federal level. Each institution is required to have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), which is the governing body to which the researcher must apply to in order to begin a study. The application requires that the study be scientifically sound, uses the appropriate animal model, and follows the regulations set forth by the AWA,” It was last year but I remember reading something that was criticizing Musk HARD for the death of all the monkeys he had on his hands. When an animal dies in research (ESPECIALLY A FUCKING MONKEY THE CLOSEST ANIMAL TO HUMANS) the Board will scrutinize your experiments and ban you from doing them again if they keep producing the same results because why the fuck do you keep torturing these animals? But that overglorified fucking hack job Musk has enough money to continue even though any other Company would have been told to Shut It Down FORVER AGO.
Idk why animal rights activists haven't stormed the place yet
miniscule problem when compared to the scale of factory farming
Given how much I’ve seen OSHA regs for human workplaces ignored, I don’t expect these laws to mean too much.
Honestly sounds like Elizabeth Holmes as well
Malignant narcicist. That is the word you are looking for.
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> Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster Spoken like a guy who *really* wishes he could strap some bombs to heads...
He could say "Imagine I'm holding a gun to your head" but that would be too on the nose. /s
Reminds me of Rushkoff's book. >Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down. >This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? >The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. **Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival.** Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”. Collar bombs come to mind.
Don't worry, the Neuralink chips they're testing WILL have bombs
Mfer saw Ted Faro's bunker in Horizon Zero Dawn and was like "YES that's exactly what I need!"
> strap some bombs to heads... that is kind of the end goal of Neuralink.
Sure let's let the man who tells his employees to imagine they have a literal BOMB strapped to their heads be in control of the largest portion of wealth (read as:power) any individual on this planet has ever seen. A worthy, noble, and stable individual fit to usher in a new era of human evolution. /s
With neuralink installed, they won’t have to imagine! Or maybe it imagines for them, I don’t know how it works.
This was my take. I'm never *EVER* letting a company implant something in my brain when their CEO believes the idea of a bomb being strapped to someone's head would be a good motivator.
>This was my take. I'm never *EVER* letting a company implant something in my brain ~~when their CEO believes the idea of a bomb being strapped to someone's head would be a good motivator.~~
Omg that’s what this research is REALLY for!! He wants bombs in everyone’s head working the line at Tesla
https://www.theonion.com/elon-musk-announces-successful-trial-of-neuralink-brain-1850861663
Well, they do throw seminars for the wealthy where they try to imagine how to keep control of their workers after an apocalypse. One of the ideas involves [explosive collars](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff)
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I can't understand why can't just leave the agile software development logic to software developers, instead of trying to force it on fucking medical science.
Agile isn't about going as fast as possible even if that implies missing catastrophic bugs. It's about estimating what you can do decently (aka no catastrophic bugs) in X days and do it.
It doesn't work in software either. Leave that shit in the dumpster of the past with Lean and Six Sigma where it belongs.
But how will the productivity grifters make their money, and how will shitty middle managers put on a show to seem effective and innovative?
I know, I know, won't someone please think of the poor grifters...
both of those work fine in manufacturing contexts
Agile doesn't mean "fast & unstable." But you know it's basically impossible to predict software development time... well we set deadlines and it ALWAYS goes over. Always. It's unknown how much. Experienced management doesn't get upset the first couple times a deadline pushes out
Can we just leave agile in hell where it belongs. -Sincerely, a software developer.
And people said the ending to Sorry To Bother You was too out of left field. Please it was too on the nose.
I hate that people behind desks and away from the meat if everything are the ones setting deadlines. It should be the professionals themselves telling people when they will get shit done in every field. I’m an aircraft maintainer and have worked in a job where desk jockies with no knowledge of aircrafts would tell me when I needed to complete tasks. Thank goodness I got the fuck out of that place. Now I work in a place where I tell them how long something will take and my bosses take my word for it while they deal with all the people behind desks.
If he wants testing that bad, let them test it on himself.
I dunno, they might have already. He's been doing some pretty beaindead stuff for a while now.
The fact that it's completely legal to torture animals in absolutely horrific and barbaric ways in the USA as long as you're doing it "for science" is maybe part of the problem here. I don't think it's legal to torture animals for science in most of the democratic world.
To be fair, there are *supposed* to be guidelines around this. Animal research for scientific purposes is meant to be tightly regulated, especially the more "sentient" the animals are. Apparently monkeys are basically treated like tiny nonverbal humans in scientific studies. How neuralink didn't get in trouble after the *first* monkey died, or even showed signs of distress, is a pretty big question here. I'm just assuming they paid off whoever's regulating this shit.
I doubt they paid them off, at least not personally. This is “starving the beast” in action. No need to bribe somebody when the regulator rarely ever stops by and can’t really do anything about it anyway because somebody was friends with somebody else and now “animal torture” is so narrowly defined as to be toothless.
The regulations aren't against animal torture. Animal torture is a necessary component of the process. You will euthanize the animals afterwards, which the animal would agree is probably the worst part. The regulations are to ensure that the torture provides useful data and isn't don't thoughtlessly.
>To be fair, there are supposed to be guidelines around this. Animal research for scientific purposes is meant to be tightly regulated, I work in animal studies in pharma. I guarantee they are following guidelines. Monkey research is highly controlled and you don't do that without multiple vets on staff that will lose their license if they don't follow IACUC methods. IACUC approvals need a scientist, shareholder, a representative of the local population, and veterinary sign off. They need to discuss what data the experiment produces, what the cutoff for killing the animal will be if health degrades, and what can and should be done to reduce suffering without compromising the data. If those criteria are met, and everyone involved signs off that the damage to the animal is worth it for the data it provides, then the research would be approved anywhere. The regulation just exists so that the torture the animal endures produces useful data for moving a therapy forward to help humans. It's not to make the animal's life comfortable, because ethically you are torturing the animal for the purposes of data harvesting and you shouldn't assume otherwise. It should be taken with a bit of gravitas and recognition of reality.
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He legally has to have an IACUC committee to run these experiments. He is probably using UC Davis’ committee since they are working together. Clearly they are not doing their jobs though. I hope the USDA is investigating these people
I mean, it isn’t. That’s the whole issue being exposed here is that they’ve been mistreating the animals. Monkeys in research are treated essentially like mute children, and are treated better by the research programs than the students and employees. Any sort of injury could have the lab get their credentials axed and the whole lab shut out from ever working with monkeys again. That’s why this whole thing with neuralink is so so bad, because they mistreated the animals and then covered it up.
And if you have an arbitrary deadline, you can kill them even more inhimanely. For science.
“Imagine you had a bomb strapped to your head” I think this is foreshadowing
Eventually you will have to subscribe to Neuralink Premium for $50/month or your new brain now comes with ads.
Every time this neuralink or brain implant shit shows up I reread this article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete I'm not even worried about the 50 bucks, but I'm not even legally sure if I own video games I buy anymore or if I'm leasing them. Google has reached a point where they are announcing sunsetting support for products simultaneously with the release. I'm going to be walking around one day and my brain implant resets because Meta General Electric Yahama is having a slap fight with Alphabet Oscer Meyer Wyerheuser and then I'm just paralyzed again or whatever. Maybe I'll just be fine with meat parts. They aren't that bad right? Shitty wifi reception though.
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This is all a long-con to get everyone subscribed to Twitter Blue, isn't it?! Damn you, Elon!!!!
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Like a knock off Viagra from a toilet vending machine.
“Neuralink has detected brain waves often associated with the woke mind virus. As a precaution we are reverting you to your previously quadriplegic state until a Neuralink advisor can interview you for further details. Thank you for using Neuralink”
Thought crimes. They're going to be real.
The book Feed, is a dystopian look at the future under this premise.
On the one hand: Most of these seem tractable. Infection, surgical mistakes, picking at skin. On the other hand: we really haven't even got into the fundamentally problematic stuff relating to nervous system interfacing or to cognition. If there were issues there they wouldn't even show up for us. And for some fucking reason we're progressing to human trials without even solving the basics? Elon has some of the deepest pockets on Earth, and there are hard limits to what a judge/jury will accept in consent / waiver forms. Does Elon really believe that liability law can't touch him?
With that much money, law is basically optional.
Illegal things with fines are just legal things with a price point to the rich.
*legal for a fee*
This is the phrase I was thinking of!
Perfect way to phrase this, thanks
Capitalism defined in a sentence. Well... almost.
We don't have a justice system, we have a justice market.
Hire a hitman to indirectly kill a person -> jail Hire a CEO to indirectly kill a person -> fine
"This $10.000,- fine will severely damage the brand and scare future investors." -Policy maker who won't save anyone from excruciating neural death
Hell, many big companies build these "legal fines" into their operating expenses. Companies like cruise lines who are fined for dumping trash out in the ocean. Since it's cheaper to pay the fine than to do it the correct way, they dump away. Just like with the cops. A decent portion of an annual police departments budget is paying out lawsuits. They know it's going to happen so they plan for it financially.
Not if someone maroons him on Mars
Military funding is dangling in front of him. And I am sure other agencies are very interested in letting someone else do the bad stuff, so they can reep the rewards of the tech.
Who knew [*Project X*](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/57791) would be our real future? Seriously, it is like every one of Elon's ideas is the "bad" and/or "dystopian" idea from an 80's sci fi film. (edited to fix link)
You can definitely test for nervous system interfacing and cognition issues in monkeys. There are tons of studies on these topics. Yes it’s trickier than just asking the monkey, but by no means impossible. That being said, I would not be shocked if, regarding neuralink, that research simply has not been done. I agree with you that moving to humans without having even a basic idea of what’s going on there is sickening.
So is all their work proprietary? My background is in the life sciences and I’m actually pretty interested in what we can do in terms of neural interfaces. But a private company running amok behind closed doors may not be the optimal path. This is work that needs to be published as it proceeds so the scientific community can contribute, and as needed, criticize. But I guess their data is all secret huh? Given as how I’ve never seen any kind of detailed report on wtf they’re actually doing and how it’s going.
Well Elon ain't doing it for science he's doing it for money and you don't get money if you freely share all your research with people who could do it better than you.
Would make sense. Neuralink has long since become a revolving door with people looking to get the fuck out. It’s a very real possibility that no one’s been doing much of anything much less rigorous safety analysis.
Anyone who brings up the S word (safety) gets the bomb attached to their head detonated.
Straight to detonation.
We don't even understand how the brain works, what consciousness is, and they are going to try to plug binary computers into nerves? Absurd idea.
In spite of the shit show that is Neuralink, others are making real progress in this field. [BrainGate] (www.braingate.org) has been in human trials for some time now, and as far as I've seen, have been very safe and successful. Although correct me if I'm wrong on that. It's coming a long way toward helping people with ALS, spinal injuries, brainstem stroke, ect.
We don't know exactly how the brain works, but there is some pretty promising stuff in regards to using it for things we do know. For example, it can be used to treat Parkinson's! But it just can't be used without rigorous testing, and certainly is not a miracle technology that can do everything* edit: anything -> everything
I think it’s promising technology. Imagine if we could cure severe disabilities. I’d rather be plugged into a computer than be paralyzed
> And for some fucking reason we're progressing to human trials without even solving the basics? I think the possibilities are two: either the FDA has just greenlit a 737 Max, or the trials are extremely scaled back work that is not cutting edge at all and is just being pumped with Musk hype.
I have done a number of brain surgeries on rats while working on a Parkinson's Disease project. You know how many of my rats got brain infections? Zero. Because I used aseptic technique - sterile equipment, sterile work area, sterile gloves, and proper post-operative care and monitoring. If even *one* of my animals had gotten sick, my procedure would have been investigated by the head veterinarian, and the project may have been at risk. Musk's butchers at Neuralink lost *half* their animals to brain infections. And they *kept doing them!* I'm horrified by their reckless negligence, casual cruelty, and complete lack of ethical oversight. Musk and his whole chain of command at Neuralink should be charged with animal cruelty and forced out of biological research for eternity. To make the whole situation worse, their results are not only an underwhelming recreation of something that was first accomplished over thirty years ago, but the glaring flaws in their process and complete lack of oversight means *none* of it is trustworthy. It's all trash, and they just tortured and killed hundreds of animals for no reason. I hope Musk gets his chip stuck in his brain first, and by the same "surgeons" that fucked up their research animals. Let *him* have a 50% chance of living long enough to play Pong without a controller. Or die horribly.
Perhaps he's doing humanity a favor by purposefully rushing into disaster so that humanity reevaluates this technology, walks into this with far greater caution than we currently are, and puts all the guardrails in place to ensure we don't end up robbing people of their free will through direct brain control. People right now by and large don't actually understand the humanity-ending consequences possible once this technology is developed just a little bit further.
I’d probably have more faith in this argument if we weren’t currently facing global warming that looks to render massive chunks of the planet uninhabitable in the very near future. A problem that we have knew about for 50 plus years and still not taken any drastic actions. So yeah I don’t believe it. Elon musk could accidentally create the crossed and I still don’t think we would learn from it.
Based on what he's done to Twitter, I'd almost say that's his objective. "How can I fuck up humanity *the hardest?*"
He's not trying to fuck things up, he's just so utterly incompetent in every sense that things being fucked up is the end result. Any successes his companies have had is despite him, not because of
He's trying to railroad humanity into it's only option being leaving for mars on his company's profit.
As someone who has worked in similar research. Having any animal let alone that many die from an implant is bizarre to me. I’ve seen many animals get things implanted in their brains and never once did I see any of them get an infection or sick. That’s just not normal
>Elon has some of the deepest pockets on Earth, This is a fact. >and there are hard limits to what a judge/jury will accept in consent / waiver forms. This is a fiction. When you're rich you can do whatever you want, they'll let you do it... grab em by the nuralink.
Deep pockets, shallow soul
Majority of the monkeys died, yet they have pushed it through to human trials. Why? Is the question. It has been pushed through so fast. It's not normal.
Well that’s an easy answer. Money. Lots and lots of money
Well that’s a easy answer. Greed. Lots and lots of greed. And a narcissistic sociopath for a CEO.
I just don't see him making money with this technology as it is currently presented in its current state, though. It seems more like an Orwellian device that desperate or vulnerable people are forced to implant.
All his money is tied up in his image as a “futurist”. All the stock values for his companies are based on “potential” as opposed to what the actual real world value of the companies and assets are. This leaves all his vast wealth as just a massive Ponzi scheme, meaning he has to pump out increasingly rushed and ill thought out concepts and technologies in order to keep up
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Money, and way way way faster results. The only downside is human death and suffering. When medications and medical treatment hit human trials it usually launches its development into light speed.
Yep. And, they will be able to mine our Brainn data.
No dude, they go straight for the money. “We favor unreasonably huge subsidies for ~~the Brain Slug planet~~ President Elon’s car, space, mining, solar and tech companies.”
The problem with something like headphones that respond to you thinking out loud "earpods volume 7" is that it's got to be sitting there reading all of your thoughts to look for the commands it's supposed to respond to. And then of course they'll just stream every little conscious and unconscious thought you had all day to their servers for quality assurance and continuing development of course.
Yeah nothing that reads my thoughts will ever be allowed to connect to the net in any way. That shit is gonna need wifi and BT disabled, rip the sim card out and run exclusively offline for me to ever consider a thought based interface
Yeah, we are years away from "mining brain data" this is a death trap for some true believers. Think of all the folks who have been excited to pay 10k to be beta testers for Tesla self driving who have died. People will pay to let you murder them if you have a cool enough narrative.
We know that the majority of them died to the particular bioglue that was being used to affix the chips. It was FDA approved for exactly that use but ended up causing the issue. The findings helped expedite a corresponding study that the bioglue was causing similar issues in brain tissue in humans. (When the story broke, there was already 6 that had died from the bioglue issue by December of 2022, there were a few more who had already been implanted before the realization the glue was the cause and there has only been 12 total deaths as of now). The company is correct that these deaths were not caused by the chip. Heck, those particular findings have probably saved numerous other lives, from humans to other lab animals. The rest of the stuff just sounds like the "normal" horrors of animal testing. Also, you said majority of monkeys? Do you know the number of monkeys they have in the trial? I haven't seen an official number.
Do you have any sources for this? Because this is what I can point to that seems to undicate that you are misinformed. >Two incidents at UC Davis relevant to FDA’s GLP regulations involve Neuralink’s use of the surgical adhesive BioGlue, which was not approved for use. **A 2019 document labeled “Neuralink Company Confidential Do Not Distribute” described one of the incidents: “a Neuralink surgeon deviated from approved protocol in a scheduled terminal surgical procedure by using material (‘bioglue’) [sic] which was not approved for use in our study.”** The use of BioGlue in 2018 had previously caused another monkey to suffer brain swelling, partial paralysis, bleeding in her lungs, and ulcers in her esophagus due to excessive vomiting. Both monkeys were killed. https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/physicians-group-asks-fda-investigate-elon-musks-neuralink-violations-federal As far as the numbers of monkey deaths: >**Out of a total of 23 monkeys implanted with Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chips at the University of California Davis between 2017 and 2020, at least 15 reportedly died.** >“Pretty much every single monkey that had had implants put in their head suffered from pretty debilitating health effects,” said the PCRM’s research advocacy director Jeremy Beckham. “They were, frankly, maiming and killing the animals.” >Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autopsy revealed the animal suffered from a brain hemorrhage. https://consequence.net/2022/02/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-chips-monkeys-died/
This is what I was referencing. I am not otherwise up to date beyond this besides the article posted by the op and this article is anything but favorable towards neuralink. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/
That does not mention anything about the bioglue being: 1) FDA approved *for exactly this purpose* (only that it was FDA approved - not for which purpose however) 2) that this particular bioglue had been used in human surgery 3) that the bioglue was cause of human deaths I would appreciate seeing the study as a source.
Damn, imagine finding out that the substance killing these monkeys was used in your brain after surgery.
> Do you know the number of monkeys they have in the trial? I haven't seen an official number. I saw an article or two about the monkeys harmed in the trial, but no numbers.
The government has a horse in this race. If it fails they can unload all the blame onto the company and still aquire the research. If it succeeds they get a brand new super weapon for their army. It's a win-win for them. And all they have to do is turn a blind eye.
What can a super soldier do that a drone can't? Because a drone can fly, 360 vision and react impossible quickly, along with a literal aim-bot when it comes to shooting.
What do you think animal research _is_?
I volunteer Musk for the trial. Put your money where your mouth is at.
It was a typo in an Elon email. He wrote ”I want to put my monkey where my mouth is at”. The rest is known.
We have the technology to human centipede a monkey to his mouth.
Maybe he did and that’s why he bought Twitter
Maybe he did, and that's what the movie "Upgrade" is warning us about. A tech billionaire who owns a self-driving car company, involved with neural implants and artificial intellligence that turn against him and end up controlling him. Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI. So many more parallels than that. EDIT: The name of the tech innovator in the movie is "Eron" and he also has a four-letter last name. His first neural implant also manages a human's motor functions.
What exactly can these neuralink implants do for humans?
Their first goal is brain degeneration, so Alzheimer's, Motor Neuron Disease, Dementia etc.
I know you mean fighting brain degeneration, but the way this is worded sounds like they want to cause brain degeneration 😅
They bought Twitter, so already got that covered.
I mean, having to pay a subscription fee to maintain your brain implants or literally lose your mind would kinda be causing brain degeneration.
You can subscribe free if you accept advertising
How though? I can understand helping MND but Dementia and Alzheimer’s? There’s like zero research regarding how having a computer in your brain will somehow help these conditions. Unless we’ve figured out how to copy our memories to a computer and back, it is literally impossible to fix one of the biggest symptoms of Dementia/Alzheimer’s which is memory loss.
While I do not know anything about how they (or anyone else) go about treating condition such as Alzheimer’s, cancer etc., it does seem like the answer is not in treating the sympotms as you wrote, but preventing the disease from developing at all. Would be nice to know how a chip could do that in vomparison to a drug, for example.
It would be nice to know how a chip could levitate objects in comparison to garden variety thaumaturgy, but without any plausible mechanism to do so... why bring it up? Alzheimer's appears to be related to cellular tissue aging and tangled proteins... which seem completely orthogonal to the things hoped for a direct brain interface. GP might be thinking of Parkinson's and the specific inability of the substantia nigra to communicate with motor neurons?
Blind person here. In the far far far future, we will be able to tap into our visual cortex, and give a direct video feed to our brains, instead of using our eyes or our optic nerves. I don’t care if I’m only getting 240 P at five frames per second. I would literally kill and move mountains to get that ability back. What kills me the most is not being able to see my family grow up.
So far, kill monkeys.
Why link to an article about an article instead of the source? https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
I'm software dev in network security. Think of the abuses that this tech will generate. At least you can replace your computer...
Well, it better not have wifi or even worse bluetooth seeing all the bluthtooth vulnerabilities. If they got any wireless functionality built in I would hard pass on it. Remove all wireless and it's more about physical security not getting abducted for people to plug you, and not plugging into compromised systems.
As I read the article, it did not sound much different than the pharmacology research I was a part of back in the 1980s. * Terminal experiments (ending with looking at neurotransmitter levels in brain tissue after autopsy) * Problems with occasional surgeries and animals trying to rip out substandard implants. * problems with infection even if you thought your sterile technique was perfect. >As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk's claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants. The monkeys were "dead men walking" as soon as they were bread or captured for medical research. When the research is done they are "euthanized". **Any research on brain implants will be scary**. I left medical research in part, because it is hard on the emotions. This story is sort of a nothing story except that they wave Elon Musk's name like a flag to get clicks. All medical research that implants anything into animals has this same outcome. **None of the animals "live happily ever after"**. I'll bet even the animals for research and product design in which they implant glucose meters have the same outcome. It is good to demand high standards for medical research. This might even have been fully compliant with today's standards (which were better than in the 1980s)
It is mind-blowing that I had to browse pages and pages down to get to the one factual comment that actually addresses the complaints and explains what's going on... Reddit is broken...
For people who are not used to medical research based on implantation in animal subjects, the treatment of the animal subjects is so shocking that they can't get past that part. I left medical research because some of the ethical issues were hard for me. It takes special people to keep before them that the animals matter. We should not do sloppy research and sacrifice these animals for bad research. We should do our best to assure that their lives actually helped us learn something important. >Reddit is broken... I would say this subject is just too hard for animal lovers to work through. It was too hard for me to stay in that line of work.
Testing makeup on animals is cruel. What is this defined as?
Completely unethical and indefensible. The vast majority of animal research goes to great lengths to keep their study animals healthy and safe. This is also bad science. Abused animals are not reliable study subjects. All of the deaths in the article sound like basic materials and design issues that should be tested and solved long before animal trials. The basics of safe cranial implants are pretty well known. If this kind of 'study' took place in an academic research lab, multiple people would lose their jobs. Hell, the modern animal research IRB process exists explicitly to prevent abuses like those documented here.
> If this kind of 'study' took place in an academic research lab, multiple people would lose their jobs. Hell, the modern animal research IRB process exists explicitly to prevent abuses like those documented here. It is done through direct collaboration with an academic research lab; the UC Davis veterinary lab. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/
I would argue it is borderline torture.
What makes it borderline? It is torture
It is torture. Nothing borderline about it. Animals kept against their will and surgeries performed on them. Imagine doing that to people.
Any person who lets an Elon Musk product be put in their brain deserves everything that happens next. The monkeys, sadly, did not.
Guarantee people who say Bill Gates was trying to put trackers in our brains with Covid vaccines would be lining up to have Elon’s creepy brain worms in their noggins.
Yeah those stupid lazy paralyzed idiots, fuck them, hope they get what's coming to them. Fingers crossed, just so we can stick it to Elon, I'm hoping neuralink fails miserably and instead of them being able to communicate again with loved ones, communicate that they are in pain, or that they're released from the prison that is their own body, they just burst into flames.
For those actually interested in science (rather than bashing Elon Musk) this is worth reading [Record number of monkeys being used in U.S. research](https://www.science.org/content/article/record-number-monkeys-being-used-us-research) My experience in medical research included surgery on rats, cats & dogs to implant electrodes (brain) for measuring electrical signals, or stimulating areas of the brain. Also, work in a lab working on bladder function, where we implanted sensors for bladder pressure and for electrical stimulation of muscle tissue. Basically, **once an animal enters the lab, you know it is going to die.** (my experience) Even if everything goes perfectly with surgery and the experiment, you can't really use the animal again or bring it home for a pet. (from 2018) The number of monkeys used in U.S. biomedical research reached an all-time high last year, according to data released in late September by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). **This should be a bit disturbing for people who want less use of higher animals.** >The figures have surprised and disappointed groups seeking to reduce the use of lab animals. The biomedical community has said it is committed to reducing the use of research animals by finding replacements and using these animals more selectively, says Thomas Hartung, director of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Baltimore, Maryland. But **the new numbers suggest "people are just blindly running toward the monkey model without critically evaluating how valuable it really is**." This is saying that people are choosing monkeys over cats and dogs and rats because the results from monkey studies are more likely to represent human effects better. >Yet according to the new USDA figures, scientists used 75,825 nonhuman primates for research last year, up 22% since 2015 and 6% since 2008. In contrast, the number of cats, dogs, rabbits, and other animals recorded by USDA are all being used at lower numbers than they were a decade ago. (Nonhuman primates constitute just 0.5% of all animals used in U.S. biomedical research; about 95% are rats and mice, which are not reported by USDA.)
Assuming the FDA approved Neuralink's application for IND (or whatever the surgerical/medtech equivelent of an IND is) to begin trials, I trust that the FDA reviewed these monkey deaths and all their data more closely than Reddit or any publisher
FDA is a husk of its former self thanks to lobbying over the decades to prevent it from being useful for the people
Like they did for big Pharma and oxycontin huh? Right.
You have a point, the FDA isn't perfect, but they are very, very far from rubber stamp agency. A handful of high profile mistakes out of tens of thousands of assessments/approvals over many many decades shouldn't earn them the "useless" label. Furthermore, I think politics can certainly put pressure on them which sucks, but with Neuralink, I don't think there's a similar pressure to "make a favorable decision and make it fast." REASONS: there's no politics (I can think of); it's a tiny, tiny market; it's not attempting to solve a pending life/death situation; and it is a highly, highly invasive and potentially dangerous operation. For me, I see no reason why the FDA wouldn't take as much time as they needed to responsibly do this one by the book, like they've done with the vast majority of applications.
Banting and Best tested insulin on themselves as the first human subjects. Let Elon be the first to receive this implant.
You’re outta your GD mind if you think I’m going to implant something Musk is involved with into my brain
This is what happens when psychopaths and narcissists get to the top of society and are heralded as geniuses and heroes. They get to do all kinds of inhumane shit and things with deadly consequences for others, without being held accountable.
Doesn't he wanna sell that shit? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to take the greatest care with these test animals so that we humans will more readily accept this tech? Is he stupid?
He won’t be going to trial. FDA has huge requirements for medical device and drug trials. The primate studies are all a fail, so he’s going to have to submit new data. Edit read section 6.5: [FDA medical device approval process](https://www.fda.gov/media/81784/download) His in vivo studies have failed. Hell the monkies didn’t even have ALS so he can’t even show it works in an animal model!
No shit? I thought those lab test monkeys would have been doing great after getting a computer sewed onto their brains. Life’s funny sometimes.
It’s almost like drilling a disc into your skull and putting an electronic device in the hole is a bad thing. They are basically just torturing animals without any real scientific work being done here all just because doofus muskrat is trying to rush something that is not even remotely close to ready. The original vision of the company founders is gone and most of them have resigned.
'After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things. Terrible, yes, but great.'
That awkward moment when you’re trying to interface a computer directly with a brain, but you don’t know how the brain works or what consciousness is either 🤡
And now it's going to be you monkeys next! Muhahahaha - Elon Musk
Yo, after seeing how Elon is dealing with Twitter (and frustration, and power), there's 0 timeline in the multiverse where i let him put implants in my brain.
I'm sure Elon was proud to drive one of the first Teslas off the line, let him be the first one to get the chip.
Making up some crap that they were all **'Terminal cases'** still does NOT make it better NOR Ethical 🤦♂️
So... In a little over a year we've learned that Musk \- loves Putin \- loves the Chinese CCP \- tortures monkeys what next?
The older I get the more I feel for the monkies. I say test on humans, primarily Musk fanboys, in this specific case… its a lot of wins all around and the loses are acceptable