Earlier quoted context omitted.
Security researchers have shown they can kill people with peacemakers if they get close enough to them.
Did you mean "pacemakers"?
yes, sorry
The human cost of neurotechnology failure
131–140 of 160 posts
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The older I get the older the age of 'irresponsible youth' becomes. Now it's past the twenties..? I think people deserve to control their own fate, disastrous consequences be damned. That's part of life, and always has been. To pretend that we need to protect against that type of insecurity is absurd.
> The older I get the older the age of 'irresponsible youth' becomes. Now it's past the twenties..? I feel the same way, but with the opposite conclusion. The older I get, the more larval and innocent teenagers and twenty-somethings seem. I mistake 25 year-olds for 17 year olds. When I'm explaining something, sometimes I can't think of a historical or technological analogy that a 25 year old is likely to understand.…
I’d split the difference between the two opinions here. You have to let juniors make some mistakes. Both so that they can learn, and so you can teach anyone else around (wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others).
We don’t do this with gun safety, because the lesson comes too late and at too high a cost. There may be nobody to teach afterward. So we demand that they act a certain way and come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who fucks around.
But a medical implant isn’t just a personal decision, it’s a transactions with several other commercial enterprises, with financial interests in selling more of them. This will be the next heroin epidemic, or the one after that. It’s predatory. And as someone who has survived predators, it’s people like the three of us who have a moral obligation to watch out for predators while the children play. That’s part of the deal of being a pack/tribal mammal. It’s civilization.
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds right. People in desperate situations shouldn't feel forced to make high risk bets that could put them in a worse situation down the road. Especially in the US where financial security and health are so closely tied to each other.
Depriving people of desperate bets is arguably worse than letting them take it. Sure it might not work but you’re not the one who has to live with the consequences either way.
> but you’re not the one who has to live with the consequences either way
There's a 99% all of us will have to live with the consequences of it if we don't die young.
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#134Pain is information. Instead of trying to manipulate the brain into not feeling it, we need to be figuring out the cause and fixing that. These ooh, shiny med tech solutions are likely on such shakey ground in part because the mindset that says "Hey, what can we build and sell to make the pain go away?" (instead of wondering what causes the pain and fixing that) is exactly the kind of thought process that turns a bli…
The information that pain conveys is: something is wrong and the nervous system will fire until it is fixed.
I do some work with animals, and in training the primary edict is to minimize pain.
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#135I really like the proposal from John Scalzi's 'Lock In' series where companies that produce neural implants have to establish a trust or insurance contract with enough assets to pay for the maintenance of any implants for the lifetime of the recipients, regardless of what happens to the company. Governments could provide generous subsidies, tax breaks etc. to such funds to reduce the barrier for entry for companies.…
Of course your proposal is not free, it would greatly increase the cost of these devices…
Sure the price will go up a little, but nowhere near the raw economic damage society at large will pay for people needing to get things like overheating implants removed.
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we were a lot better about not letting your teens and twenties so heavily define your story arc as a human, maybe. But without some sort of insurance and/or escrow program any implant than gives you any kind of edge will be accepted by people too young to really understand the consequences. Especially the sorts of people who think they'll dead by 30 so side effects that show up in your 40's are no big deal.
What kind of consequences are people in their 20s too young to understand? In democracies we generally assume those 21+ can understand all the issues, which is why we let them vote. This seems sorta like not letting 80 year olds have email because they don't understand it and might get scammed.
Career choice. Elective surgeries.
You’re here talking to a group largely composed of people who won the career lottery. Did all of your college friends fare so well? How about high school? Hell in middle school and high school I had people trying to talk me out of software as a career because we were on one of the three AI hype cycles I’ve personally lived through.
It’s the rare, inspirational person who says Fuck It, I’m Starting Over in their thirties or even later. Many of the losers just live lives of quiet desperation. Those are the people I was thinking about above.
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
The software industry is fucked from the get-go - you sjould have the right to inspect all software im your body. After all, you have the right to read all patents. The idea that someone could have code bugs in my body, or a virus running on an implant, or put in functionality I didnt asl for, is basically about as abhorrent as slavery.
Security researchers have shown they can kill people with peacemakers if they get close enough to them.
You can kill anyone if you get close enough.
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're either 20 or haven't met a 20 year old in a looooong time.
Mid 30s but do have one acquaintance who's 20. It's possible I have a biased sample, but I have honestly not noticed a big difference in decision making between 20 year olds and 40 year olds.
You probably do. My mentees are all very biased. I pick the ones who have a good head on their shoulders. We all had that friend who was an “old soul”. I spent a lot of my teens socializing with 30 year olds (bike club) so I’m probably seeing myself in these junior developers.
But not a year has gone by but I wish I had a time machine, not just for myself but for a friend who had big dreams when we were 16-26 and never found their way. Of the dozen smartest kids in our high school, one became a doctor (but married to the slacker in the group), one a lawyer, one a salty cynical programmer. I found one managing a movie theater a year after dropping out. One I imprinted on in college, because I thought she was so world-wise and knew what she wanted to be, ended up becoming a stay at home mom, never really had the writing career she hoped for. Student loans were part of that dynamic, which is another decision we put on children (see also John Mullaney).
Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#139Re: The human cost of neurotechnology failure
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And that's how you get to a 3 trillion ponzi bubble in crypto that solves no problem, while similar investment into medical startups would create thousands of products, treatments and long term wealth. I'm extremely glad that the types of people involved in crypto are in no way incentivised to do the same thing to the medical industry. Theranos was bad enough. I'm not sure why you'd ever want to see crypto's web of…
Flawless in principle, but harmful slogans in practice because it fails to develop those ideas for the particular situation at hand. Sure, medical regulation should exist - I specifically mentioned the "primum non nocere" principle as the basis for that protection. Things like access to source code and right to repair, some guarantee the device can be removed and won't become actively harmful etc. But some of the spe…
That's because you assume that progress comes from millionaires investing cheap central-bank money into start-ups, which isn't how the world works.
When you count on the collusion of gamblers and oligopolists to take socially positive gambles you're already stuck in a dead end.