Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate. Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”
I’m wondering how this got IRB approval. I’ve had to get it before and it’s not easy. From the sounds of everything everyone involved needs to have a lifetime ban on animal or human testing.
Stupid article as it implies that doctors are concerned for a specific reason related to the subject’s health but it’s just background about this shitty experiment and how it can be dangerous. Regardless, I can’t believe someone volunteered for this and am unfortunately expecting documented issues in the future.
I think it would be a lot more reasonable to expect undocumented issues. They have a lot to lose and it’s controlled by a billionaire. As if they’re not going to try to cover it up.
Remember how they couldn’t get the cyber truck to not rust? Or the bullet proof windows to work? Or how the milage for most Tesla’s was impossible, so people thought their cars were broken, and instead of either confessing or fixing the mileage they created an elaborate scheme to cancel appointment so people couldn’t get their batteries looked at? These are the people you trusted to put a chip in your brain…
That’s fine, but this ain’t it. There are many stories of important and heroic acts of medical martyrdom, but they all share one important thread: the scientists involved knew what they were doing. This, this isn’t that. Another dead won’t improve anything here, it’ll just result in unnecessary pain.
I really wonder about the Doctors associated with this. How are they squaring things with their Hippocratic oath? This just seems really close to the ethical line, maybe over it. Nothing about how musk is treating this surprises me. But is everyone working on this also an unethical twat? Kind of scary to think that might be true.
People are still people. Doctors are just as susceptible to compromising their ethics as everyone else, the only difference is that they probably have a higher bribe threshold.
There’s nothing here that would violate it anyway. These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics. Even this article is mostly just “I wish they were more open about their research”, which is true of basically every research hospital in the world.
These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics.
I mean… That’s the claim, but there’s no real explanation on how their implant could help quadriplegics more so than the current computer brain interface we’ve had for +10 years.
Computer brain interfaces have been around for years, the only novel idea is making it into a permanent implant. That being said, novel doesn’t necessarily mean good.
Are other forms of BCI not permanent? I was kinda under the impression that they were, and the only upside of neuralink was the form factor, and maybe trying to bring down the costs by automating it, or whatever the idea was, but it the others aren’t permanent, that would kind of make more sense. Though, I kind think it being temporary would kind of be an upside, for the most part, since that would prevent scar tissue buildup on the brain, and other potential problems like that.
No, typically they’re just sensors on a cranial harness.
Though, I kind think it being temporary would kind of be an upside, for the most part, since that would prevent scar tissue buildup on the brain, and other potential problems like that.
Yes, there’s no real advantage to making it permanent other than convenience. However this convenience is imo massively outweighed by the very real possibility of meningitis. It’s crazy that they got approval to transect the blood brain barrier for an implant. Other implants do this, but that risk is being weighed against things like potentially deadly seizures, not mild convenience.
No, typically they’re just sensors on a cranial harness.
Do you mean EEG stuff, or are you referring to like, inter-cranial implants, which I don’t know shit about?
Yes, there’s no real advantage to making it permanent other than convenience. However this convenience is imo massively outweighed by the very real possibility of meningitis. It’s crazy that they got approval to transect the blood brain barrier for an implant. Other implants do this, but that risk is being weighed against things like potentially deadly seizures, not mild convenience.
Do you mean counteracting potentially deadly seizures, or causing them? Also, there’s probably too many other problems to list about the technology generally, but since you seem like you know what you’re talking about, could you give me like, a kind of general overview on BCI, or your opinion? Maybe like, challenges, what you see as being the most promising stuff, that sort of thing?
For the most part, yes. If we’re just needing enough input to control something like a mouse, then there’s no real reason to go with an invasive implant. You can pull the same data from eeg and ocular tracking.
Do you mean counteracting potentially deadly seizures, or causing them?
It would be counteracting seizures.
BCI, or your opinion? Maybe like, challenges, what you see as being the most promising stuff, that sort of thing?
The problem with BCI is that there’s just not a lot of uses for them. The quadriplegic community is already small, and their range of cognitive ability runs the gamut. So creating a cbi that is useful to the entire patient population is going to be tough. The largest obstacle would be patient education, and training care takers.
This is part of the reason I discount Musks interest in BCI as medical device, there’s just no money in it. I think his only real motivation is to sell it to gullible wealthy people.
Another inherent problem with BCI is that it’s not seamless. It takes a lot more concentration to operate a mouse with your mind than it does with your body. People don’t really understand how much of their movement is handled by their spinal chord instead of the brain.
People have a hard time utilizing interactive spaces when we separate them from physical input. Which is why a lot of people struggle with VR,. When your physical senses like proprioception don’t reflect the interactions the same as our visual senses we can become physically ill.
Another inherent problem with BCI is that it’s not seamless. It takes a lot more concentration to operate a mouse with your mind than it does with your body. People don’t really understand how much of their movement is handled by their spinal chord instead of the brain.
People have a hard time utilizing interactive spaces when we separate them from physical input. Which is why a lot of people struggle with VR,. When your physical senses like proprioception don’t reflect the interactions the same as our visual senses we can become physically ill.
I always got more the sense that musk was looking more for some sort of, mass adoption for this technology. Ghost in the shell, matrix type shit, that we’re still probably like, a century away from. If we don’t boil ourselves first, anyways. But that also might be marketing mumbo jumbo from him, and none of that really kind of solves any of his short term problems that he’d have, which you’ve done a good job pointing out, and are probably more relevant.
The toughness of figuring out use is definitely a good point, and it’s one you see all over the place with all manner of disabilities. It’s sort of unnatural enough to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse already, and those are relatively simple technologies, which is to say nothing of the maybe months of training it would take to learn how to use a prosthetic limb. I think maybe kids, children, could learn and pick up on stuff much faster, but I really don’t think it would be a popular decision to decide to start testing your BCI on kids, even if you were to reach a state where it was benign, useful, and guaranteed to be stable.
I also think musk probably doesn’t understand how BCI probably won’t help much for easing human-computer interface, because it sort of, puts the onus of everything on the person, as being at fault for not being able to interface with the perfect, “flawless” machine, rather than just viewing them as another kind of being, with distinct, even somewhat hardwired limitations. Humans can’t really split their attention and do dual processing, they can only focus on one thing at a time, and that strikes me as a pretty big limitation on the amount of data that you’re going to be able to extract from someone with one of these interfaces, even if it was effortless to use. If you want them to be able to walk around and still be a functional person, anyways, and not be insane and schizophrenic maybe. I think we also have been saying that we can solve a lot of those processing problems much easier on the computer side with these horrible organoids that are stitched to mice and computers and stuff. So that would be pretty neat.
In any case, to me, this would all seem to be a little bit overkill, for those intentions, when you could just get everyone to learn stenotype, if you really wanted to “increase output”. Which, again, I’m not sure would really work.
That’s also all taking musk strictly at face value on his intentions, but I’m pretty sure the guy likes rockets and electric cars because he has a retrofuturist “I’m the great man of history” kind of deal going on, so I don’t think I’d put it past him to think that having a plug that goes into your brain and puts you in the matrix would be a “cool” idea.
The Hippocratic Oath is not a legally binding oath, and many doctors are not required to take this oath or any oath for that matter. Basically, at the end of the day, oaths only matter to the people who have the strength of character to hold to them no matter the cost and most people do not have that strength of character. Oaths mean nothing to those people when it comes down to it, it’s just a thing that you said once, nothing more.
But is everyone working on this also an unethical twat? Kind of scary to think that might be true
People with the Power to do cruel things always find cruel people to do their bidding. Especially when they can justify it with science or it’s “for the better of humanity”. Even if every rational out stander is horrified by their doings.
Ethics only matters when there’s an effort to enforce it. The Hippocratic oath is just a reason your employer can fire you for making risky decisions. It means nothing if nobody holds you to it.
If you’re a doctor working for Neuralink, nobody will expect anything of you but to push the project forward as quickly as possible. For years you only work with monkeys, and when they do finally put a human in the O.R. it’s someone who signed away all their rights and accepted all risks to install experimental brain chips. At that moment, that human patient becomes the single most important subject in the entire experiment.
Of course you do it. You’re getting paid more money than you ever have in your life to do it, and the entire system is designed to protect you so long as you do what the boss says.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want monkeylink in my head if it was done by musk’s people. I’d rather have an expert neurosurgeon and the ones I know, who work in deep brain stimulation, they wrote off neuralink as bad tech a decade ago.
The part about them not issuing regular progress reports since day 1 (a month or so ago) is, how these doctors put it, concerning.
Apart from that, I think jumping from monkeys to human experiments when the success rate is low feels either rush work or some high person in charge decided to go all-or-nothing.
I think it is unethical to test this technology on anyone who does not consent. It is too invasive and damaging. Our testing framework should be revised for brain interfaces.
Imo Musk is going to struggle in this space. He’s no stranger to opening companies in highly regulated industries, but the medical device industry is a whole different level. The government can easily prevent him from selling anything if his company isn’t forthcoming with data, and if he starts mutilating people, civil courts aren’t going to care if they signed a waiver if that waiver was signed based on false expectations built on incomplete or false data by the company
Plus, he likes to pretend he’s an expert on the industries of the companies he runs. That’s already potentially dangerous with Tesla and Space X, but in this case his hubris is very directly dangerous to the people receiving his services.
She exploited and got rich off rich people though, like SBF, so she went down. Musk exploited and got rich off the working class and apartheid exploitation in SA. So that’s ok. He’s one of them.
Elon is a dirty manipulative liar out for power and all the money. It saddens me that there are people stupid enough to trust this guy with their bodies to let them implant a chip whose main purposed is to make him even richer.
The difference is with Tesla and Space X he has actual experts doing the work, with Neuralink he gets the worst of the crop - no successful or ethical medical professional is going to want to work with him on this.
Teslas are already directly dangerous to his customers but our society is numb to traffic violence so people don’t care as much as they should. But “full self-driving” has already killed people.
Edit: removed “a lot” because while I suspect it is true, it remains unproven.
So I hear what you’re saying—what we really want to measure is deaths avoided versus those caused. But it’s a difficult thing to measure how many people the technology saved. So while I’m cognizant of this issue, I’m not sure how to get around that. That said, the article mentions that Tesla drivers are experiencing much higher rates of collisions than other manufacturers. There could be multiple factors at play here, but I suspect the autopilot (and especially Tesla’s misleading claims around it) is among them.
Also, while there may be an unmeasured benefit in reducing collisions, there may also be an unmeasured cost in inducing more driving. This has not been widely discussed in this debate but I think it is a big problem with self-driving technology that only gets worse as the technology improves.
“full self-driving” has already killed a lot of people.
There’s only one death linked to FSD beta and even he was driving drunk.
In a recent interview, Rossiter said he believes that von Ohain was using Full Self-Driving, which — if true — would make his death the first known fatality involving Tesla’s most advanced driver-assistance technology
Von Ohain and Rossiter had been drinking, and an autopsy found that von Ohain died with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 — more than three times the legal limit
However there’s approximately 40 accidents that have led to serious injury or death due to the use of the less advanced driver assist system “autopilot”.
Agreed. Also while it’s impossible to say in any individual case I suspect people might be more likely to drive while inebriated if they believe the autopilot will be driving for them.
This kind of thinking is why these accidents happen. The goal of autonomous driving is for it to one day be better driver than the best human driver, but this technology is still in its infancy and requires an attentive driver behind the wheel. Even Teslas tell you this when you engage these systems.
Because it’s not autonomous, nor “full self driving”. It’s a glorified adaptive cruise control. I don’t think it’s even in the L3 category… (I’m not the biggest fan of the autonomy “levels” classification but it’s an ok reference for this).
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