Tesla certainly has had a lot of run-ins with OSHA. And this was before reopening the plant during the pandemic against local health guidelines:
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One thing which it might make possible is teleoperation with a high degree of fidelity. Covid case in our nursing homes killed a lot of patients, and were largely spread by casual employees, many of them probably cleaners who work at different places.
I would like to replace those in house workers with remotely operated cleaning machines, controlled by the same people sitting at home.
Likewise, my mother lives several hours drive away from me. as she ages, she will need more care, and I don’t want to put her in a nursing home, so a robotic helper seems possible.
He’s a Wharton School product- his contribution to any project is the financial end of whatever business he’s involved in.
Privatizing NASA isn’t a new or innovative trick - it’s standard toolbox for finance guys. Get the gov to give you money while taking a valuable asset from them and milk that asset for your other private business ventures.
Yes - he got the gov to hand it to him on a silver platter- but that’s just more of the same over the last few decades.
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Glad to know things went well. Hopefully your second kidney is ticking along just fine. The body has some amazing redundancy (except for the heart and brain for some reason).
Yeah, nephrology is one of the special areas I have heard that some doctors exclusively use robots. But I haven’t seen any data supporting the clinical outcomes one way or another in that one. Not to worry, the differences are just a few percent for most procedures.
There are a few other reasons that robots end up at hospitals. One is due to grants/donations. Who’s going to turn down a free million dollar robot? Another is a powerful clinician or administrator that pushes the purchase through.
There’s also a very interesting reason some surgeons use it: it extends their career. Surgery can be physically demanding requiring someone to stand for hours and have very precise hand-eye coordination. Both of which become more difficult with age. Being able to sit down, look at things up close, and let the robot remove hand tremors is a boon to someone who has accumulated decades of experience and knowledge, but is declining physically.
It’s still expensive. Unless someone figures out how to reduce cost dramatically, surgical robotics in general is more sizzle than steak.
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Elon Musk isn’t one of the good guys. He’s an egotistical capitalist prick who loves framing his projects as “for the good of humanity” and his cult of personality laps up every word of it. Everything he says and does points to how he wants to create a world where the rich never have to rub shoulders with anybody else.
My favorite tweet about Musk is probably this one, which sums up Musk, the people like him, and the cult that wants to be like him. The Vice article that it links to is also a plus:
Musk is going to mandate a Neuralink in every single indentured servant that goes up to Mars to help build his precious colony where he and the rest of the uber-rich will be able to live it up while Earth burns. He’ll have them all dancing to his tune.
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Do you also get that Musk knows jack shit about neuroscience and is completely talking out of his ass? Neuroscientist with actual BMI experience here, and while most opinions in this thread are uninformed, they’re no more so than the opinions expressed by Musk.
Agree completely.
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our lives are all so much better because of, um, … that thing he did 
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IMHO, one needs to be careful to separate the person from his corporations. SpaceX has done an incredible job making space cool again and exciting a whole new generation of folks in exploration in a way that nothing had up to that point. Tesla made electric vehicles “cool” in a way that no Prius was ever going to. And both ventures have caused unmistakeable changes to their industries. If Neuralink can build excitement for Neural interfaces that could one day help those living with disability overcome them, or research on autonomous cars means my elderly parents might be able to one day get around town without risking the lives of others or giving up their autonomy, then the effort is worthwhile, entirely independent of the person at the top of these companies.
I feel the same way about blue origin and virgin galactic - if these ultra-luxury, billionaire-funded corporations eventually pave the way for anyone to give me a chance to go visit space in my lifetime, or other such corporations help to make the idea of an electric vehicle fleet move from quaint fantasy to reality, or give the next generation of something to want to be a part of, or invigorate their imaginations about what sort of a world could come after our generations are done fucking up the present, then I am 100% for the efforts of the thousands of very smart people who are working their asses off because they want to make society better, regardless of the influence of one person.
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Reading the responses of actual neuroscientists who specifically do this kind of work, the summation was: “even if Neuralink has done everything Musk says, they’ve achieved zero.” To be fair, it was a promotional event to state goals and try to attract researchers, rather than a revealing of new technologies, and should be viewed as such.
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I’m not convinced that this is the sort of game we should want society to be playing. Nothing good ever comes from that sort of thing in any of the sci-fi novels I’ve read.
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Have you ever seen someone have a seizure? I am not going to lie, I want a data jack, but the medical applications are real. Same with paralysis and people who have lost limbs. Better implants with less invasive surgery that makes this available for more people who have real medical needs would be amazing. And that is exactly what neuralink says their first applications are. If the hope of elective implants for people enamored with cyberpunk aesthetic can push more user friendly devices for people with real medical needs how can that be anything but helpful?
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How?
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He’s a Wharton School product- his contribution to any project is the financial end of whatever business he’s involved in.
Yes bachelor’s in economics from Wharton, but also bachelor’s in physics from UPenn. He’s the chief engineer at SpaceX (self-taught), and was a key programmer at Zip2 and Xdotcom before that. Misrepresenting someone’s abilities doesn’t bolster whatever argument you’re trying to make.
Privatizing NASA isn’t a new or innovative trick - it’s standard toolbox for finance guys. Get the gov to give you money while taking a valuable asset from them and milk that asset for your other private business ventures.
What valuable asset is SpaceX taking from government? Falcon development was privately funded as is Starship, and the NASA space station resupply and commercial crew contracts save government money.
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I am not defending Musk here. I do not know him and he does not need my defence. But I do feel as an engineer that some defence for something is needed here. He is transferring technology from the bespoke one-off to the mass-produced. Cars used to be expensive bespoke items before Henry Ford. NASA can make single-use rockets, but someone must make them cheaper and reusable before going to space is more than flag-waving. Someone must make not one experimental battery-powered car for a millionaire, but lots of them.
If you are with me so far, then his weirder stuff makes sense. Why does every tunnel project start from scratch and make a one-off boring machine? In general it is not a large part of a tunnel budget. But we could re-use the machine and develop it as we go, and holes in the ground should become cheap. Cranial implants are not new, but the ground-breaking innovations were often one-off developments using bits and pieces scrounged off the semiconductor industry. Suppose we designed a brain implant from scratch. How small and light can we get it? How do we get the power in and out, so we do not have cats with wires coming out of their heads? You don’t have to be a neurosurgeon to see that something needs doing better. In fact, maybe not being a neurosurgeon gives you a fresh outlook.
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You’re saying he’s not a Wharton grad?
He’s also terrible in bed.
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Runs out of charge?
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Who has room for him, his ego and the PR department?
Where I grew up - that’s just trash talk - like calling someone a pedo.
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