“We managed to not kill the first subject, but we’re hopeful to succeed in the future”…
Not killing patients is a success.
A success does not include leaving a victim of failed experimental medicine with a non-functional implant. In contrast to how animal subjects are used as test subjects (often conducted with less oversight than there should be), using experimental medicine on volunteering patients should be done not just to collect better data than the chimps before them supplied, but with the genuine expectation that the product in question will benefit the patient beyond their usefulness as a test subject for continued product development.
I’ve seen how they run their rocketry business. Success isn’t always their goal.
SpaceX has a 64% market share in the global commercial rocket launch market for sending satellites, scientific instruments, and other payloads into orbit. In the first six months of 2023, SpaceX handled 21 flights for outside customers, or 64% of the worldwide total. In the first half of 2023, SpaceX handled 88 percent of customer flights from U.S. launch sites.[1]
If success isn’t their goal I’d be amazed at what they accomplished if the decided to try for it someday.
Wake the fuck up
Can we just … not keep going down the brain rot rabbit hole we are going down as a society? 24 hours in a day doesn’t allow enough screen time? We need to just… funnel this shit straight in somehow?
I used to be excited for this kind of stuff, then I saw what we’ve done with the technology we have. People are “auto” driving their cars while they wear their apple vision pros, that’s what we do with it… Pretty soon tiktoc titties will be streamed straight to our frontal cortex.
Maybe I am just old, or maybe it would just be better if it was a different company doing it. But maybe a giant meteor should take us out ASAP.
In my 20’s I was all for it. I understand where the techbros are coming from. Now with over a decade more experience, I see clearly we need to spend so much more of our energy healing from traumas on the societal level: To dispel imperial-colonialist mindsets. Im thinkin of Bo Burningham speaking about how the empires exhausted all physical territory, and then discovered Data, going on to colonize every waking moment of our attention.
We need to shed the subconcious conquistador, with all it’s machismo, all it’s tribalism (most agregiously white supremacist nationalism) and covetous paranoia. It is a poison which will prevent us from making the societal leap from which all tides would rise.
Until we do that, all we’ll get for this tech will be:
- dystopic labor camp colonies on Mars
- advertisements when we are trying to dream
- Military tech developed under the guise of “medical 🌈 disabilities 🌈 quality 🌈 of 🌈 life 🌈 improvement 🌈 research” [1]
And we collectively deserve better
The ultimate goal of this technology is to enable the blind to see, deaf to hear and the paralyzed to walk. Not that you can watch netflix in your mind.
I’m down, if I even remotely believed anything that comes out of Elon Musks mouth. I promise you, that is not where this will go.
I guess they figure anyone who volunteers is already braindead so what’s the harm. 🤷🏻♂️
I’d imagine they’re mostly physically disabled people trying to get control of their limbs or access to the freedom this type of tech is promising. As abhorrent as all of the testing behind this tech is, if I were a quadrapalegic or something similar, I would volunteer because wtf else have I got going for me?
It’s not the tech itself that worries me. It’s who in this case is supplying it along with the fact the previous patient had 85% of the functionality just stop and they haven’t done a damn thing to address that before they want to try it on another patient.
There are other companies working on the same or similar tech that are far less fucked up.
Look we all hate Elon and how neuralink is developing their tech that’s not in question here.
People are taking issue with your referring to desperate people with very very poor quality of life due to injuries or medical conditions as “brain dead”
They aren’t “brain dead”, dumb or stupid, they are reaching for what looks like the only potential light in their life. A life that is probably impossibly difficult for any of us typically healthy people to imagine.
You would have a life and people who care about you, regardless of use of your legs.
I’m pretty sure not everyone has a life and people who cares about them.
Is that exclusive para/quadriplegics in your mind? Only that you are countering a statement that essentially says that losing one or more limbs doesnt make people stop loving you, by saying not everyone has people that love them. Which would be a good point if people not loving you was exclusive to people who have lost a limb or limbs…
Did you just try to angle my comment to be about people with disabilities being less capable and/or of less value?
What I countered was a claim where the first part stated that everyone has a life, which is just not true. For the second part of the claim to have any value in the sentence, the first part has to be true. Which it wasn’t.
Whether I read it wrong or not doesn’t change the fact that I never limited my statement to be about people with disabilities or disabilities automatically taking the life away from people.
So I stand by my claim, that not everyone of the 8 billion living in this planet has a life and people that care about them.
You were responding to a comment about quadriplegics which painted context to your response. If that’s not what you meant, then gine. Im sorry i misunderstood your response. You could have been more clear that you were generalising and not directly responding to the claim being made.
To your point. No not everyone has a life and people that love them but i would argue that a blanket statement that started this thread, that if you were a quadriplegic then you would volunteer to have experimental surgery with unknown side effects and effectiveness because you have nothing else going for you is not inherently true.
You dont need to be quadriplegic to want to volunteer. You dont have to not have anything else going for you, and you dont need to have a life or people that love you.
If all you are saying is not everyone has a life or people that live them, then i fail to see how its relevant to the point made in this thread.
It’s shocking, but not at all surprising, that one of the top comments here is calling desperate sick suffering people “brain dead” for taking a risk to try and get better, or help advance a technology to help people similarly suffering in the future.
I guess our hatred of musk exceeds our compassion for the sick.
Even you think something must be wrong with them if they’re agreeing to this. Just because you lean more toward an ailment that would make someone desperate rather than someone being deficient in congestive function doesn’t mean you’re any better. Like. I get it. It’s hard to imagine a regular person just thinking one day it’s a good idea to sign up to let a company run by Elon Musk implant anything into their body (especially their brain). But this is a bit of a high horse riding comment, isn’t it?
The first implant was in a paraplegic man. The FDA is not approving this experimental procedure for otherwise healthy people.
It’s not hard for me to believe some healthy person would be a dope and want to experiment with this, but it’s not what is being considered.
The top level comment is shitty on severely ill people for being willing to take a risk to improve their life and the lives of others.
It’s either pure trash, or the poster is so blinded by their hatred for musk that they aren’t thinking rationally. I suspect the latter.
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I don’t know that the top comment assumed the people signing up for this trial were sick or medically unwell.
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I am not arguing the why or who of clinical trials. My comment had nothing to do with the why or who. It had to do with the judgements made by both comments about the who.
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I can understand why you’d feel that comment was insensitive if you have the context you provided. But an assumption about the motives without necessary context does not equal guilt on the original commenter. This person may not have considered the health of someone willing to join such a trial at all. It may never have occurred to them that unhealthy people were signing up.
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His hatred for Musk is kind of justifiable in the way Musk has accrued his wealth and the actions of his companies under his direction. And given that track record the logic of not wanting to become the next Hyperloop that is now just an underground tunnel.
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This is the internet. People gonna people.
Pretty much all of the misconceptions you listed could have been solved by simply reading the article, or even being slightly informed about the process of approval of experimental evidence.
Judging from a place of ignorance isn’t really any better.
See number 5. People really are going to people, but compounding that is also not any better.
And when people are mindlessly and unfairly judging people, we shouldn’t call them out? If I see someone being racist should I just throw up my hands and say “well people are going to people”?
And why aren’t you following your own advice and allowing me to people without being challenged?
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Perhaps you should read the other comments where I explain that the company’s track record of ethics and success sucks ass, and isn’t the only one doing this kind of research. They’re just the only ones willing to go through human trials with garbage that falls apart.
Them using desperate people doesn’t help with the ethics here. It actually is much worse, taking advantage of people.
Move fast and break things should never apply towards human trials.
WHAT THE FUCK
I mean it’s not your brain dude, why do you care?
Because it will encroach into everything if we let it be.
There’s always a dumdum like you saying “it doesn’t affect you, so why do you care?”.
Because the company implanting the chip killed a good amount of monkeys for their tests. They’re an unethical company.
Because Elon Musk is a fucking piece of shit and he is clearly disregarding the laws if it makes him money.
Because private, for-profit companies cannot be trusted to not fuck over everyone if it makes them a cent more.
You know what else killed a good amount of monkeys for their tests? Pretty much every single Class 3 medical device out there. Neuralink didn’t do anything far outside the ordinary with their tests, they just got a lot of media attention because “Elon bad”.
Medical device testing goes through animal trials before human ones. Those trials use monkeys. Those monkeys often die. The only unusual thing about Neuralink’s tests is a lot of people pretending like they suddenly give a shit.
Here’s an idea, maybe stop killing animal for medical testing?
Other companies doing the same shit isn’t any better. But with Neuralink, they said that no monkey were killed during their trials, which is false. So it makes it even worst.
And that’s why all those paralyzed people should just sit in their chairs and wait for eventual death, I guess.
Seriously, just don’t get one if you think they’re so awful.
The issue is not the tech, it’s how it is developed and tested, and the terrible track record of the mega corpos.
Just like AI, the tech itself is great, but corpos turn it into a pile of shit for the money.
It won’t be different this time around with daddy Musk.
Yeah, things would be going so much better if garage hobbyists were developing these brain implants instead.
Yeah because it’s either a socipath billionaire or a dusty garage hobbyist. Nothing in between.
At the very least, the garage hobbyist has more chance to be a more ethical person.
One of the common arguments I hear against technological advancement is “but what if some sociopath brews up a pandemic virus in their garage!”
The FDA is monitoring the corporations that are working on this sort of thing. As is mentioned in the title of this thread.
Because it kills everything you put it in? I don’t know how to tell you that you’re supposed to care about other people.
Apart from the only other human it’s been put in, who from all reporting has had no ill side effects.
