You seem to think there is an inherent conflict between producing a device for money (or “ego”) and producing a useful device. There is no such conflict. In fact, a device which was not made profitably could not sustain a business around it, and therefore could not be made in sufficient quantities to help all the people that would need such a device.
…nope.
Then it should not bother you if this is just done to make more money, as long as it works. Which will ultimately be decided by parties other than Neuralink or Musk.
…it’s Elon Musk.
It isn’t going to work.
Musk is all about the grift.
We’ve literally just seen it all play out on the public stage.
He’s gonna lie to the FDA.
He’s gonna go ahead even if he doesn’t get approval.
He’s gonna cut corners, promise plenty and then deliver a boring tunnel.
The man is a liar and this project is going to get people killed.
There is no such conflict, ever?
Here’s an example of something that made money, and worked. And moreover, was touted as a great advance in the pursuit of alleviating human suffering. A painkiller, which actually worked very well to kill pain.
The painkiller was Oxycontin, and the company responsible for it, Purdue Pharma, continued to peddle it in larger and larger doses, aggressively marketing it to physicians as the ideal solution to virtually any of their patients’ pain-related ills, and they did this long after its extremely addictive properties and life-threatening horrors had been well established.
Purdue Pharma was solely responsible for the largest opioid epidemic in history. The company no longer exists, in part due to ruinous lawsuits and other legal actions. But it remains a great example of unbridled capitalism run wild, and the damage that can do. The principals of Purdue have (so far) avoided jail due to complex legal maneuvering and behind-the-scenes plea deals.
I just don’t believe a word of this.
By all accounts their only real accomplishment so far is torturing many animals to death.
There’s no inherent conflict. I didn’t say conflict was impossible.
I’m certainly well aware of the problems with the pharmaceutical industry, including specifically with opioids. The problems aren’t so much with the products themselves–that end of the process works. It’s the entire infrastructure that gets built around it, and in particular the marketing, that ends up being the problem.
No one, even in UHC utopias, has found a way around for-profit development of drugs and otherwise. The key is to have strong oversight and appropriate punishments so that the drive for more profits is funneled into improved products, and not getting people addicted to opioids or other negative outcomes.
Neuralink is still in the very early stages. Perhaps one day it will be so commonplace that it will be pushed in inappropriate situations, and it will be worth having a conversation then about the marketing and use of neural interfaces. Until then, however, I think the drive to create a viable product that works outside the lab is a good thing.
Unfortunately Musk has been stridently opposed to any such regulation. He hates paying taxes with all the shrill caterwauling of the most unhinged “sovereign citizen”. His track record in labour relations is comically inept, and that was even before the Twitter fiasco where he fired the majority of employees – comical, that is, for anyone whose consequences don’t impact themselves or their families …
You (and the person you replied to) are conflating far-off aspirational goals with tech that is here now.
They already have monkeys playing video games and using keyboards. This isn’t exclusive to Neuralink; other groups have shown similar results, though Neuralink may currently be ahead in a few areas like bitrate and channel count.
If you can play video games, then you can at least improve the conditions of the paralyzed, say by making it easier to control a wheelchair or to input messages into a computer.
Getting the paralyzed to walk, the blind to see, etc. is more of a mid-term goal. It will require more advancements in neural stimulation, but probably not a few Nobel Prizes worth of research the way memory replay would.
Has he? I see no evidence that he is opposed to FDA oversight. And he has explicitly called for more regulation of AI:
Don’t confuse “some regulation is bad” with “all regulation is bad”.
Granted that his Twitter takeover has been an absolute disaster, and he’s backed plenty of other ideas that went absolutely nowhere fast… but Tesla and SpaceX have both been huge successes. I don’t think it’s at all justified to say “Musk is involved, therefore it won’t work”.
…yeah, but the thing is, Musk is involved. So it isn’t going to work.
Musk is explicitly an unhinged libertarian. His alleged wish for more regulation of AI is just part of the pseudo-intellectual futuristic schtick that he and a bunch of other prognosticators have bought into, in an attempt to present himself as a visionary futurist. The reality is that AI is no more – and no less – dangerous than all the conventional automation in which we’ve become more and more immersed over many decades. When a customer rep tells you, “I’m sorry, I understand and would love to help you, but the computer won’t let me”, that isn’t a profound statement about computer dominance over humanity, it’s a very simple statement about bad software and bad business processes.
No idea where you get that. I think you’re confusing him with Peter Thiel.
In a September 2021 tweet, Musk claimed he preferred to “stay out of politics” while adding he believes the government “should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness”—a viewpoint which can best be described as libertarian.
By painting himself as a bastion of free speech in his plans to take over Twitter, Musk seems to be expressing a civil libertarianism philosophy in that a person’s individual freedom should outweigh corporate or state rules.
Musk doesn’t seem to be especially ideological, actually, unless you count “Whatever is good for Elon Musk” as an ideology.
That is not remotely libertarian, so it is just the author that is confused. No libertarian would say that government control is ok as long as it makes everyone better off. They value freedom above all, even if there are great costs.
The author is also wrong that Musk thinks free speech should outweigh state rules. He has explicitly said otherwise. He thinks, at least for the US, that Twitter should just follow the First Amendment. His view in this respect is no more “unhinged libertarian” than every single person that has ever sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution.
…will you accept just “unhinged” then?
Wrong. By his own admission, Musk is a free speech absolutist. There is nothing in the First Amendment about unconditional absolutism, and indeed the Supreme Court has so ruled, despite a generally unhealthy leaning towards absolutism in US Constitutional jurisprudence (.e.g- the despicable antics of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, and the Supreme Court protection of KKK cross-burnings). Musk has reinstated virtually every dangerous lunatic who had been banned from Twitter. The only exception I know of is Alex Jones, and I strongly suspect that’s because of advice Musk received about huge potential legal liabilities, and probably against his own personal wishes. Note also that all those reinstatements were apparently done unilaterally by Musk, without any input from the oversight council that he promised to set up, but as far as anyone knows, never did.
“Absolutist” doesn’t mean much by itself. What he has explicitly said however is this:
Alex Jones obviously went far beyond the law in his speech, and so remains banned. Others have not.