Elon Musk implants Neuralink brain chip into a human person

I particularly enjoyed this bit, in the classic Muskian practice of “overpromise, underdeliver”:

The first product from Neuralink would be called Telepathy, Musk said in a separate post

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When I first moved back to Portland, Oregon after college, I stopped into a nearby coffee shop I was hoping would become a regular haunt. I was having a really engaging conversation with a customer and the owner when the latter started talking about the computer chips Obama was going to put in our brains. This was 2011. My mouth fell open, and I sputtered out something incomprehensible and left abruptly. It had started pouring down rain while I was in there and I just power walked up the hill back to my apartment.

I just can’t help but wonder where that guy is now when I read stuff like this.

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In fairness, I’m a big fan of “non-human persons” to describe animals with high degrees of sapience, like cetaceans and great apes.

Although I doubt that’s what they were thinking of here.

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What happens if one wears a tinfoil hat over the implant? :thinking:

Also:

Humans are controlled from age 13 by implants called “Caps,” which suppress individuality and free will and makes them docile. Some people’s minds are broken by the Caps; they become so-called vagrants.

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I feel like no one knows what I’m talking about when I make this reference. Look around you (the very funny British parody of educational school films that you should totally watch if you haven’t seen it) might be too obscure. But I’m gonna keep saying it anyway. Go easy on Your EBEs

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Gotcha. Agreed.

I just looked at the phrase and thought maybe I had smoked too much “drug weed.”

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“Elon Musk implants Neuralink brain chip into a human person”

I can only assume Buckaroo Banzai was busy.

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But some of them wish that they had.

Well, with an infinite number of them, you can get the works of Shakespeare.


@Brainspore

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I hope they asked for more than a horse.

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Wait wait WTF? The brain stem is where all the systems-maintenance software runs. Nothing to do with the sensorium.

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Elonzi watched this movie as a youngling.

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Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

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The idea is very exciting. My understanding, though, is that the brain basically has the consistency of Jell-O and anything implanted is likely to shift over time. So, will the thing be working fine after, say, 6 months and could Elmo have been bothered to ensure that it would? 0_o

There’s an app for that

Given the guy’s propensity for self-serving lies, it seems kinda reckless for y’all to just turn an unsubstantiated blather of his into a headline, no? I don’t know if choosing the phrase “human person” is intended to poke fun at Musk, somehow, but given that it implies personhood for non-humans, I’m inclined to think it exaggerates the level of respect he holds for much of the rest of humanity.

I defer to your erstwhile co-editor, Cory Doctorow:

"I’m perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else’s life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn’t see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he’s also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam’s Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

“The odds that there’s a human being beta-testing Musk’s neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren’t zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians’ claim to have cloned a human being.”

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

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It’s not new tech. It’s been tried before by legitimate scientists. Musk’s antics are dangerous, setting the research back years, and stealing funding from people who could actually make this work. Utter shame on the FDA for approving this.

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Given enough time, all monkeys are terminal…

Maybe he just forgot he was supposed to keep up the pretense of not being an alien bent on civilization’s destruction
8e7bkp

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