Musk is a dipshit.
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I get that Elon Musk is not a very agreeable guy, but the amount of naysaying and uninformed technology bashing in this thread is nothing short of comical, especially in the context of the kind of website that Boingboing is.
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You Musk be joking: A mind-reading Neuralink chip in a pig’s brain? Downloadable memories? Telepathy? Watch and judge for yourself
The inclusion of pigs raised some questions. Musk explained that pigs are a good substitute for humans, with a similar dura membrane and skull shape, and will have to do until trials can begin on humanity. “It’s easy to keep pigs happy, they love food, it’s a true thing about pigs,” he said. “Give them some food and some friends and they’re happy. Pigs are quite similar to people.”
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Pigs are quite similar to people.
George Orwell would agree with him.
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Sounds like about an ounce of news and fifty pounds of speculation
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I was able to snag a copy of that a few months ago, so far ahead of its time. Really cool.
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The Final Cut, with Robin Williams.
Remember for Yourself!
I’M VERY DISAPPOINTED IN HOW DISAPPOINTED EVERYBODY IS
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So, Cypork?
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Can the chip be modified so that you don’t see bloodstains? Like the ones on your hands you can never wash off because you know what you did and nothing can ever make it better?
Uh… asking for a friend.
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As long as it’s super-low-power (i.e. it doesn’t do much), it should be fine. But that means all the, ah, overheated rhetoric about what it could do isn’t terribly realistic.
Or engage in sports or any number of things that cause the head to move sharply and the brains to move around even the tiniest bit in the skull. I mean, there’s this huge gulf between “this chip will allow people with serious health problems to engage in basic activities” and “everyone will have one!”
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Good point. This isn’t a medical device company or university. Do they even have a medical ethics board?
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The original cyberpunk generation, writing fantasies on manual typewriters, could be forgiven for imagining that social media projected directly into peoples’ brains would be a good thing. In the real world, if meatspace isn’t good enough it should be improved, not abandoned.
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Honestly, yes, he is. Say what you will of Elon Musk, but he is frantically sounding the alarm bells as he runs down this path screaming with his pants off. Elon Musk is of the techno-fatalist school of thought. He is convinced that this technology will exist, there is nothing you can do to stop it, and so the only option is to get there first so the good guys can build a non-terrifying way to use and defend against this stuff. In Elon Musk’s mind, it’s World War II and the Nazis are chasing the bomb, so you damn well better do it too, because if they get it first, you are fucked, no matter how noble your intentions.
Elon Musk is terrified of someone else getting this technology first, and he is terrified that AI will eat us if we don’t gain their capabilities before before they do.
A sci-fi writer would would suspect that Elon Musk’s home planet had an AI revolt, he fled, stashes something super important on Mars, and is now trying to bootstrapping humanity to fight his old foes, the evil AI that are coming, and probably have already thrown a rock at Earth.
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Elon Musk’s magic isn’t in revolutionary breakthroughs. His magic is industrializing it and scaling it up until it becomes cheap and good. That’s what all of his companies end up doing, and that is how they all become successful.
SpaceX in particular is a solid example of simply approaching space with an industrialist mindset. Everything was about being able to build quickly, cheaply, and to not be so incredibly wasteful. He didn’t make novel rockets, he just made a lot of them quickly so that the price to make them dropped and they got good at making rockets. They eventually learned the land them because they had so many chances to practice and test. Everything was built with a mindset that you are going to build more, and you can are going to build them better, quicker, and cheaper than the last one you built. They spend as much time making their own robotics to build stuff as they do building stuff. Even as they are working on Spaceship and just learning how to keep it from blowing up, they are building a manufacturing line to build more, rapidly.
So, I wouldn’t sneer at Elon Musk’s latest endeavor just because it isn’t some wild breakthrough that no one has ever seen. The breakthrough wasn’t the technology, it was someone figuring out how to seriously scale it up. In this case, it was the robots that implanted the chip.
It’s pretty foolish at this point to write off something Elon Musk is doing after Tesla and SpaceX. You can dislike the guy, but you really shouldn’t under estimate him or assume he is a fool.
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He’s a capitalist and an asshole. There is no magic there.
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If you really need to boil everything down into a fight between good versus evil, and deny all any sort of nuance to reality, then sure, Elon Musk is nothing but a capitalist and and asshole, and absolutely nothing else, and has made no contributions to society. Is that black and white thinking enough for you?
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A very large part of that “magic” is really just a basic disregard for the health and safety of his employees.
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…no. SpaceX doesn’t have some terrifying safety record, and their low cost doesn’t come because they use humans as guidance computers or something. The magic really was industrialization of the process and working on bringing the cost down through through mass production, and the elimination of waste. You can argue with reality, but SpaceX is the pretty compelling counter argument. They are cheaper because they build them quickly using industrial methods, and they don’t throw them away after each use.
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