Originally published at: A lawsuit alleges Musk's Neuralink and UC Davis are mistreating the monkeys they experiment on | Boing Boing
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“How dare you criticise God-King Elon. Like everything else he does, it’s for the betterment of humanity.”
Now that I’ve saved the fanbois some keystrokes…
Musk looks forward to putting chips in humans this year.
I can guarantee you that none of those humans will be Musk or any of his friends or family. As with social media, techbro tycoons don’t dogfood brain-altering digital tech on anyone they care about.
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He’s disrupting brain function!
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Elon Mush, no thanks…
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Can we just try turning him off…but not on again?
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Scientists have been recording from monkey’s brains for decades. There are labs around the world (although thankfully fewer than 10 years ago) that implant brain electrodes and could train a monkey to play pong without a controller if that was the goal. The monkeys in other labs aren’t dropping dead.
For instance, a monkey that was in the lab next to me for over a decade recently moved to the Retirement Sanctuary for Laboratory Animals to finally live outside (near Gonzalez, TX). Lab animals have pretty lousy lives, but it is healthy and cared for by people who wanted to minimize the shittiness.
Neuralink differs in 2 main ways; they have an untested power supply that they seal inside the skull and they don’t give a shit about the monkeys. Musk imagines an implant in humans that stimulates your brain like in scifi movies, and doesn’t care about having monkeys die to troubleshoot problems with the stimulator.
Also, clinical trials of chronic stimulation of visual cortex for humans with retinal blindness is progressing well. The (obviously non-neuralink) implants don’t cause infections and patients gain crude image formation. If we just remove Musk from the equation the future won’t be so dystopian that we have to flee to Mars
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Who will be the lucky Tesla owner who signed up for full self driving which will actually be a monkey with an implant.
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Musk looks forward to putting chips in humans this year.
With a 35% survival rate, who wouldn’t want one?
Yeah, nothing I’ve heard indicates Musk’s labs are doing anything new in terms of scientific advancements - just that they’re particularly reckless and, well, bad at it. Musk himself makes all sorts of promises about the tech that are completely and utterly divorced from reality, however…
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Yeah, nothing I’ve heard indicates Musk’s labs are doing anything new in terms of scientific advancements - just that they’re particularly reckless and, well, bad at it.
Wasn’t that the business model behind SpaceX? Using cheap, off-the-shelf equipment and using a near-unlimited budget to test to failure over and over again, with no fear of being held accountable for the damage it causes, until they stumble on an acceptable answer?
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Can’t he just smuggle them in vaccines like Bill Gates and the rest of the reptilian illuminati overlords?
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The original plan was to use a small child in a hidden compartment.
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I read that as chimps. Probably not wrong though
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Things happen after banana daiquiris.
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I read something about some original work on automating the implant surgery, but yes, the actual tech they are implanting is nothing new and definitely is not a “brain computer interface” in any real sense. It’s the kind of thing we have had for decades
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Seems like there was some innovation going on with SpaceX (though Musk had absolutely nothing to do with it). E.g. they used existing technologies, but some of the tech apparently hadn’t been used in rockets before. From what I’ve read, some of what they used was apparently fairly expensive - it hadn’t been used before because it was seen as over-engineered for purpose, but it allowed SpaceX to make the rockets robust enough for reuse.
But yeah, that too.
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My take has always been that Musk is a modern day Edison.
A fantastic self-publicist, who also has a talent for hiring gifted engineers and scientists, and making money off their work.
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UCD has one of the best vet schools on the planet. If the chimps weren’t getting good vet care, I wonder if the vet school researchers were intentionally not brought in.
That said, the PCRM seems to be a slightly strange organization, founded by a guy who has written a whole bunch of popular diet books of the “eat right to cure disease” variety and who has promoted a vegetarian diet for fighting Covid. I hope they win the lawsuit (the goal of which is to get internal documentation of the treatment and of the deal with Musk), but I’m not so sure I trust them to then release the documents unedited.
This is news? Where else did you think all those bored apes are coming from?
