• Concerns rise as Neuralink fails to provide evidence of brain implant success, raising safety and transparency questions.

• Controversy surrounds Neuralink’s lack of data on surgical capabilities and alarming treatment of monkeys with brain implants.

• While Neuralink touts achievements, experts question true innovation and highlight developments in other brain implant projects.

229 points

Imo Musk is going to struggle in this space. He’s no stranger to opening companies in highly regulated industries, but the medical device industry is a whole different level. The government can easily prevent him from selling anything if his company isn’t forthcoming with data, and if he starts mutilating people, civil courts aren’t going to care if they signed a waiver if that waiver was signed based on false expectations built on incomplete or false data by the company

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171 points

Plus, he likes to pretend he’s an expert on the industries of the companies he runs. That’s already potentially dangerous with Tesla and Space X, but in this case his hubris is very directly dangerous to the people receiving his services.

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95 points

The difference is with Tesla and Space X he has actual experts doing the work, with Neuralink he gets the worst of the crop - no successful or ethical medical professional is going to want to work with him on this.

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62 points
*

Teslas are already directly dangerous to his customers but our society is numb to traffic violence so people don’t care as much as they should. But “full self-driving” has already killed people.

Edit: removed “a lot” because while I suspect it is true, it remains unproven.

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28 points

But “full self-driving” false advertising has already killed a lot of people.

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19 points
*

“full self-driving” has already killed a lot of people.

There’s only one death linked to FSD beta and even he was driving drunk.

In a recent interview, Rossiter said he believes that von Ohain was using Full Self-Driving, which — if true — would make his death the first known fatality involving Tesla’s most advanced driver-assistance technology

Von Ohain and Rossiter had been drinking, and an autopsy found that von Ohain died with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 — more than three times the legal limit

Source

However there’s approximately 40 accidents that have led to serious injury or death due to the use of the less advanced driver assist system “autopilot”.

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2 points

Source, please.

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18 points

That didn’t work out for Elizabeth Holmes either.

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30 points

She exploited and got rich off rich people though, like SBF, so she went down. Musk exploited and got rich off the working class and apartheid exploitation in SA. So that’s ok. He’s one of them.

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2 points

Elon is a dirty manipulative liar out for power and all the money. It saddens me that there are people stupid enough to trust this guy with their bodies to let them implant a chip whose main purposed is to make him even richer.

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1 point
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-13 points

I think the government will be on his side

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188 points

Finally some news about the first human trial.

The part about them not issuing regular progress reports since day 1 (a month or so ago) is, how these doctors put it, concerning.

Apart from that, I think jumping from monkeys to human experiments when the success rate is low feels either rush work or some high person in charge decided to go all-or-nothing.

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128 points

or some high person in charge decided to go all-or-nothing

I don’t see what Elon’s drug use and increasingly irratic decision-making have to to with this.

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19 points

Hahahaha

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44 points

“move fast and break things people”

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37 points

Agreed. And seems wild to allow that kind of coercion from powerful people to move into the human body stage without air tight everything.

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1 point

I think it is unethical to test this technology on anyone who does not consent. It is too invasive and damaging. Our testing framework should be revised for brain interfaces.

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148 points

We and our 1314 technology partners ask you to consent to the use of cookies to store and access personal data on your device.

Damn, and no.

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87 points

I love how no one is ever going to start calling it “X” because it’s just dumb. It will forever be “X-formerly-Twitter”.

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8 points

I like “Elon’s Twitter”

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7 points

That was my thought when I started reading the piece. “Are we just going to call it XFT?”

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12 points

The platform formerly called Prince

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-2 points
Deleted by creator
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-3 points

You know you can just use twitter anyway, right?

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20 points

Nobody wants to use Twitter.

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6 points

I’ve been online since the days of dialup and never signed up for a Twitter account. It’s just not worthy of my time

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5 points

Sure, but that disregards the fact that it’s owned by a fascist prick.

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78 points

I really wonder about the Doctors associated with this. How are they squaring things with their Hippocratic oath? This just seems really close to the ethical line, maybe over it. Nothing about how musk is treating this surprises me. But is everyone working on this also an unethical twat? Kind of scary to think that might be true.

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52 points
*

In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Hippocratic Oath saying it didn’t cover the latest developments in medical practice.

I’m just… gonna go scream into a pillow in the corner now.

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29 points

The Helsinki declaration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki

Is the reference for health sciences these days.

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14 points

This appears to be more geared towards experimentation. Super interesting and more relevant to the article for sure though!

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-10 points

There’s nothing here that would violate it anyway. These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics. Even this article is mostly just “I wish they were more open about their research”, which is true of basically every research hospital in the world.

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11 points

These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics.

I mean… That’s the claim, but there’s no real explanation on how their implant could help quadriplegics more so than the current computer brain interface we’ve had for +10 years.

Computer brain interfaces have been around for years, the only novel idea is making it into a permanent implant. That being said, novel doesn’t necessarily mean good.

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4 points

Ah yes, the classic “unless you think it will have a long-term benefit to someone else” exception to “do no harm”. I always forget about that part. /s

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1 point
*
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38 points

The Hippocratic Oath is not a legally binding oath, and many doctors are not required to take this oath or any oath for that matter. Basically, at the end of the day, oaths only matter to the people who have the strength of character to hold to them no matter the cost and most people do not have that strength of character. Oaths mean nothing to those people when it comes down to it, it’s just a thing that you said once, nothing more.

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5 points

Oh I know all that, but still…

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3 points

Can’t wait to see the medical drama where one doctor says “you took an oath, god dammt!” And for the other to reply “nope”

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22 points

There are way less extreme example of doctors just fucking things up for a bag of money.

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5 points

And more in general, humans. Imagine if Clarence Thomas had taken medicine instead of law when he was young

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17 points

But is everyone working on this also an unethical twat? Kind of scary to think that might be true

People with the Power to do cruel things always find cruel people to do their bidding. Especially when they can justify it with science or it’s “for the better of humanity”. Even if every rational out stander is horrified by their doings.

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6 points

Ethics only matters when there’s an effort to enforce it. The Hippocratic oath is just a reason your employer can fire you for making risky decisions. It means nothing if nobody holds you to it.

If you’re a doctor working for Neuralink, nobody will expect anything of you but to push the project forward as quickly as possible. For years you only work with monkeys, and when they do finally put a human in the O.R. it’s someone who signed away all their rights and accepted all risks to install experimental brain chips. At that moment, that human patient becomes the single most important subject in the entire experiment.

Of course you do it. You’re getting paid more money than you ever have in your life to do it, and the entire system is designed to protect you so long as you do what the boss says.

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6 points

I wouldn’t be surprised if there somehow were a cover-up of safety and efficacy of these devices.

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6 points

People are still people. Doctors are just as susceptible to compromising their ethics as everyone else, the only difference is that they probably have a higher bribe threshold.

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1 point

Well, it’s possible that it was a robot doctor, kinda doubt they took a Hippocratic oath

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1 point
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