Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?

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then they'll become subscriptions with ads

The credit card on file has expired, please update your payment information within 72 hours or you will lose access to your brain function.

The function of an ad is to manipulate your behavior. If an implant can do this directly ads aren't needed anymore.

It'll just be WallE all over again!

Unfortunately the damage has been on the animals. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

Funny that the very long vox article doesn't mention the wired investigation

and it worked like a charm..

Just try be clear, you're saying this article that suggests Elon musk will literally physically destroy people's actual real brains in search of profit after similarly murdering hundreds of monkeys is promoting him?

I'm all for promoting the shit out of this. The more idiots that kill themselves signing up, the better off we all are.

Downvote Elon Musk spam spam.

The billionaire doesn't need a PR team to downplay his outright foolishness. Don't be a useful idiot.

I'm all for it. Let any idiot that wants to allow that asshole to put a chip in their head get it. They can all speedrun themselves out of society.

I read it somewhere that these monkeys are bred for testing purpose just like chickens and cows are bred for human consumption but not sure how true it is.

Could?? No, not could. Will.

I mean, the high likelihood of developing an infection in your brain seems maybe a bit more concerning, but to each their own I guess.

Even if it was medically safe that's still your least concern when it comes to IoT devices and network security.

Desperate poor being offered a few dollars

Seems like a better use of my brain at least.

Great! Most people feel the same way!

The problem is that most of us who go into scientific research involving human subjects have about a decade’s worth of increasingly specialized education on a specific subject, have worked in a junior capacity in study design, execution, and analysis, and were generally not billionaires trying to become the first trillionaire.

There’s a reason why academic research works the way it does - because we learned the hard way.

The Tuskegee experiment carried out by the US Public Health Service and the CDC was a program in which black American males were deliberately infected with syphilis and left untreated, so that researchers could watch the profession of the disease. The program didn’t officially end until 1972. Just yesterday I read a news story about a doctor successfully being sued for giving prisoners, without their consent, high doses of Ivermectin to treat Covid, going off of his intuition and the idea that he was qualified to do medical research.

When I was doing this kind of work, I had to go through something called a Human Studies Board. Every university has one. The HSB is a team of senior researchers which will review your proposal to make sure what you’re asking to do is both justified and does no harm to your subjects. If they say “no,” you’re going back to the drawing board. I have had PhD students whose thesis research had to go through multiple revisions because the HSB felt that they weren’t properly controlling for potential harm. Bit there were not billions of dollars on the line, and I didn’t have billions in personal wealth and the ability to influence the HSB.

Another example: About ten or so years ago, Facebook decided to run an experiment in which they promoted sad news stories to some people, and happy news stories to others. They then followed up on those individuals’ posts to see if the former group became noticeably depressed. They did. Facebook did this without the users’ consent, and didn’t make provisions for followup with any human subjects who did become depressed. Some of their subjects may have committed acts of violence or self-harm because of pre-existing psychological states. They have no idea. They just came up with the hypothesis that sad news might make people sad, and ran with it. It was unethical. I do not believe they faced any consequences other than the researchers and the company being universally berated in the academic community.

We are researching brain implants. That’s already underway in universities around the world. Elon wants to move fast and break things to make it go faster, but in this case the “things” are people.

So you have Elon, who is legendary in the industry for thinking he’s very much smarter than he is and pushing his experts into screwing things up. You have his vast wealth as well as a drive to create more wealth (academic researchers very rarely grow wealthy from their discoveries and rarely have wealth as a driving factor).

We are already doing what you’re asking for. I have a colleague at one of the top US university that’s specifically researching telomere repair and other aspects of DNA-focused methods to prevent some of the effects of aging, and I’ve personally done modeling on the molecular biology associated with deregulation and cancer in grad school.

We would be better off if the government would just take Elon’s money and use it to fund actual scientific research.

They will sell you biochips with expiration dates and the updates will be increasingly expensive. If you don't pay they'll dissolve and you'll end as a drooling idiot at 50.

We're all living in the times before consciousness can be preserved

It makes no sense.

Nobody knows if that is going to happen at all. We only know that it has not happened yet.

In the same way you can say that we're all living in the times before our colony on Alpha Centauri takes us over.

Or you're living in the times after it already was, with the tech later being used to replicate the earlier state of the world, and just aren't aware of it.

Time isn't necessarily linear.

Especially when we're discussing a local future involving merging human consciousness and AI.

Technically that kind of thing existed as far back as today in their universe.