Bill Gates: A tech billionaire that MAGAs hate because they falsely believe he’s putting tracking chips in them.
Elon Musk: A tech billionaire that MAGAs love who is actually trying to put tracking chips in them.
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So the same people whose paranoid fantasies include Bill Gates’ microchips in vaccines are lining up to have Elon Musk’s megachip pounded directly into their brains.
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Dude can’t even dig a tunnel.
On the other hand, I’m fine with Musk’s fanboys getting surgery that’ll probably kill them.
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everything I have seen about Neurolink indicates that the are not really doing much at all original with the implants themselves - they are using technology that we have had for decades (I am assuming long enough for patents to have expired, in fact).
Where Neurolink has been focused is not even on the chips, but on a robot that you are sedated and strapped to which automates the installation of the chip.
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So, a Black and Decker drill? /s
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I was imagining more like this:
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Musk said he plans to get one of the chips himself.
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Great. So once everyone has one, he’ll institute a $1,000 a month subscription fee. If you don’t sign up, they knock 50 points off your IQ.
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And if you’re the sort who would sign up, you don’t have much to spare…
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I’d say that this is how you get your mindless zombie apocalypse, but Elon already seems to be raising the mindless zombie army without any chips at all.
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I suspect that their tolerance for risk will be…less to the liking…of anyone with one stuck in their skull; but neural interfaces are really one of those things where ones that do work are even more threatening than ones that don’t.
One would think that observing what happens to everything else you connect to the internet would be enough to make a case for leaving your brain safely airgapped. I don’t doubt that it will be essential for creating immersive sensory experiences after we create the metaverse torment nexus; but that’s exactly the point.
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I think the actual quote was that they were “aiming” for human trials in six months. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That could have been true from day 1 - and not actually mean that they’re in any position to make it happen. Medical devices have to jump through all sorts of regulatory hoops that take fixed amounts of time - they may not have gone through any of those requirements, yet, for all we know, and it might be impossible to do anything in six months. I suspect this is a situation where Musk’s tendency to bullshit could actually be revealed as an outright lie by the regulatory realities at play.
That would be good news! Why? Two words: bacterial meningitis.
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Just read Glasshouse and you will not go near any of this brainshit
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I mean, all the talk of zombies and losing your identity and so on is fun sci fi, but let’s be clear what this technology really does. It possibly enables you some vague interaction with a simple electronic device, and definitely gives you a high chance of dying from a brain infection.
I’m sorry we’re so used to having armies of microscopic creatures devouring people that it doesn’t sound so interesting any more but that’s what this is.
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Direct brain : digital interfaces are going to be a significant quality of life improvement for a lot of folks with disabilities, if we want to consider the greatest good outcome of this.
I don’t trust Elon Musk to deliver on that promise, but someone’s going to eventually, the positive outcomes are just too high to ignore, and that ignores the actual transhumanists who believe this is an inherent good. But as for me, I’m going to hold off until I can trust the hardware itself, which is likely to be quite a while.
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And for a very small subset of individuals that could be useful and life-changing, but even most severely disabled folks already have better options. Folks with ALS or severe paralysis generally retain the function of their eyeballs, and we’ve had commercially-available eye-tracking communication devices for a couple of decades now. Current and near-term brain implant technology is something that you’d pretty much need to have locked-in syndrome to rationally consider.
But I don’t think any of us believes that Musk is investing in this primarily to help the severely disabled.
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Oh yeah - what they are actually doing is like in labs 20-30 years ago stuff (as far as the actual implants go) , but the software on the computer side of things interpreting signals is slightly better.
This is something that I have said before about Elon’s efforts - he makes a big deal out of getting something up to the point where others were 10-15 years ago in a very short time (think his dumb robot) and then thinks that because he was able to “do 20 years of work in 2 years” that he can continue “developing” at that rate. Of course, he can’t really because all he has done up to this point is stand on the shoulders of those before him - He can’t actually advance anything at that rate.
I am not sure that he even understands that situation, which is why he is always making and walking back obviously over eager “in 6 months” announcements
Right now he wants to put a chip in your brain to do this:
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Musk isn’t talking to people, he’s talking to rich idiots that keep being bullish on his ideas because… well… diamond hands straight to the mars?
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Since even the preliminary animal trials are incomplete (not to mention not positive) I wonder what the IRB is going to say?
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