Regardless of where the news was reported in the original post, the only thing of importance is whether or not it's true. Did you check some of the original sources? https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/extreme-suffering-15-23-... https://nypost.com/2022/02/10/elon-musks-neuralink-allegedly... This is worth looking into. First, it's using Tesla drivers as guinea pigs for automation. Then some strange experiments with…
"Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autops…
The justification will be a consequentialist argument, we sacrificed/tortured animals and in exchange we gave this to humanity; the overall calculus is a net positive. This post shows the very worst of the equation, and they will bring up the best, maybe some people that couldn't walk that now can, or some psychological disease for which this contributed to the cure. They will probably bring up numbers like, this dam…
What if it don't? How can we valuate an uncertainty? Where is the systematic evidence?
Personally I don't thinks these questions have good answers and thus I think we (as society) should adopt a values first mode while critically reflecting about where our values will lead us. I understand the consequentialist appeal but it's deeply flawed as expectations are made up and it's just too easy to justify anything.
What worries me about Neuralink is that I don't think the experiments are motivated by base research or will benefit humankind or any kind besides Musk and his partners. It's a private company based on hype. Best case scenario it's just propaganda.
If you'd like to remind yourself of the original demonstration video of a monkey with Neuralink, playing a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXrGH52aoM
We've been able to get a one- or two-dimensional control signal from average brain activity for a long time. This is infinitely more simple than actual "mind-reading" and "mind-writing" which, as any neuroscientist will tell you, we don't have clue how to do.
All good and dandy until the egg is you or someone you love. To put ourselves in the shoes of the monkeys that died a pointless death for who knows what (a chip that will allow broadcasting ads directly into the brain?) is a thing that we call "empathy". Try having some one day.
I wonder why is it pointless? As for the empathy, this is a classic trolley problem - on one hand you have a pack of monkeys, on the other you have many people and pets (and may be even animals) with certain conditions which could be (potentially) fixed by neuralink. On which side will you guide a trolley, where will you apply your empathy?
It's pointless because Neuralink solves literally none of mankind's problems (like in "our life sucks mightily without that thing") that would warrant someone, let alone someone from a different species, dying in any shape or form. Not even mentioning that those devices would primarily serve us approaching the most grim cyberpunk dystopia ever.
The description also hints that those surgeries were botched as fuck. Likely because who would care, it's just a monkey after all. I'd expect higher standards, and here they seem to have no standards at all. This is really the "forgot a meter of gauze inside someone's skull" level of botching things, I thought we'd left those in the early XX century.
The justification will be a consequentialist argument, we sacrificed/tortured animals and in exchange we gave this to humanity; the overall calculus is a net positive. This post shows the very worst of the equation, and they will bring up the best, maybe some people that couldn't walk that now can, or some psychological disease for which this contributed to the cure. They will probably bring up numbers like, this dam…
What if it don't? How can we valuate an uncertainty? Where is the systematic evidence? Most Nazi human experiments were just atrocities without scientific value but the Dachau hypothermia valuable data. Is that justified? https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005173222006 Personally I don't thinks these questions have good answers and thus I think we (as society) should adopt a values first mode while critical…
I agree with you these arguments can be used to justify atrocities. Actually they can be used to justify atrocities arbitrarily large as long as you find enough people that you think are being benefitted.
However I don't think they should be entirely dismissed. Specially if at some point the weight on each side of the balance differs by enough orders of magnitude.
Even assuming what they're reporting is true (which having read IIAOPSW's comment above now seems rather unlikely) I don't see the situation as terrible. "15 of 23 monkeys died" is in itself meaningless. We don't know how long they intended to keep them alive anyways - a reasonable protocol in this kind of studies is "have procedure, observe for X weeks, then have an autopsy to take a closer look at what actually hap…
> They're also using monkeys - which yes, look cute, but are not primates. Monkeys are primates. Perhaps you mean they're not apes?
"Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autops…
We allow poor people to mine tiny bits of gold by burning (boiling?) off mercury, poisoning themselves, their family, and the whole ecosystem, as their nervous systems degenerate like a slow form of torture. This is tame. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/climate/amazon-forest-mer...
Well "illegal gold mining" is banned kind of by definition. Admittedly it seems Peru and places aren't enforcing the laws as well as they could but it's kind of a different category of problem. And I'm not sure you can regard the US as responsible for making gold valuable as it was for thousands of years before the US existed.
Yes everyone is aware of what happens if you completely do away with ethics in science. Moderation is key here, the pendulum has swung too far to the other extreme from your example.
Yikes. Nope. The more we learn about other species, the more we realise that they are thinking and emotional creatures. I would no more want to see these experiments done on a human than on a chimp. Do the ends justify the means? That's ethically extremely dubious, to say the least. Why conduct brain surgery on primates for neuralink ? Where are we going with this, exactly? As for comparing neuralink brain surgery to…
Where are we going with this? In the best case scenario the complete decoding of how brain signals work meaning true telepathy, flawless alternate reality generation, human distributed computing, instantaneous knowledge transfer, cure for persistent mental illness, consciousness transfer, immortality, intelligence argumentation etc. The list is pretty much endless.
And died in the most gruesome ways imaginable. One of them appears to have chewed off its own toe. Elon's folks tortured them to death for a goal I cannot properly articulate, tbh.
The ones where they specify the cause of death they were put down, presumably by a vet. I can imagine dying more gruesomely.
I'm kinda biased since I like his balls but I find people kinda set Elon's bar way too high. From what I see he's just a workaholic chasing his interests/dreams although at times naively.
That doesn't excuse the generic assholenes he exudes ( remember the "pedo guy" insults?) nor the arrogance ( submarine for that cave?!) nor his tunnel vision ( let's build a lot of tunnels for my Teslas, that will fix traffic congestion!). He speaks too much, and way too often it's complete bullshit. If he didn't talk publicly, he'd be a commendable workaholic chasing wild dreams and achieving some of them.