Neuralink’s human trials volunteers ‘should have serious concerns,’ say medical experts::A medical ethics committee responded to Elon Musk’s brain-interface startup issuing an open call for patients yesterday.

  • TallonMetroid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Didn’t Neuralink fail animal testing? Something about most of their monkeys dying from the trials? How did this get to human testing?

    • Zron@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Kinda like how Elon promised a mars colony by 3 years ago, and his big rocket exploded on its first flight a few months ago.

      Or how full self driving has been ready “next year” for the passed 5 years.

      Hyperloop was going to revolutionize transportation, by having a train in a vacuum tunnel, and is currently an abandoned tube in the desert.

      The boring company was going to create high speed car tunnels under cities, and it’s test track is a 30mph traffic jam, but now underground.

      Solar city was going to put solar tiles in place of your shingles and offset your power usage, but the demo musk showed was an actual fraud, and there were no solar panels.

      Last but not least, spaceX promised “rapidly reusable rockets” with a 10x decrease in cost to low earth orbit. The fastest turn around they’ve ever had was a month or so, about as long as the space shuttles’ fastest turn around. The falcon 9 still costs between 50 to 60 million per launch, even if it’s a reused booster or not, and the space shuttle was capable of taking crew and cargo/payload at the same time, while the falcon can only take one or the other.

      Musk companies have a long history of promising the moon and delivering playground sand. Don’t buy any of his products and don’t fall for his “saving humanity” bullshit. He’s just a conman who’s defrauding investors for billions.

      • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Musk has since come out and all but stated Hyperloop was specifically funded and hyped ONLY to kill mass transit initiatives in the area. It was a total vaporware project, they never intended to solve anything.

      • romkube@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, SpaceX cost of 50-60 million per launch is almost a 10x drop in price, ULA is around 400-500 million per rocket. And since they have next to no competition on price, they have no incentive to lower it. It’s just business.

        And don’t bring the broken vehicle the shuttle turned out to be into this. A great vehicle on paper, but with to many cooks. The shuttle era gave us the ISS, but is cost us almost all activity outside of LEO.

        • Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn’t deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.

          Dozens of Falcon 9’s exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it’d be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.

    • garretble@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There an article in Wired just this week I think about how horrid the experiments on the animal were.

      Musk, of course, lied again saying the monkeys were old and going to be euthanized anyway. They were young, and the experiments were terrible for them — where they were clawing at their heads trying to remove the devices. Some had literal screws coming loose.

      • Bagel5941@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Reading this story I decided to boycott everything related to Elon Musk.

        Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate.

        Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”

        • frickineh@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t understand how researchers could see that and allow it to continue. What kind of sociopath do you have to be to knowingly, continually torture an animal like that, especially for something this fucking stupid?

    • Zetta@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Neural link did not “fail” animal testing. It got FDA approval which actually means animal testing was a success.