I think that the negativity here is unfortunate. The reality is that it’s very hard to see a normal VC level return on the $100M+ Elon and friends have invested here. And don’t let anyone fool you - this is the fundamental reason the BCI field has moved slowly.
If Neuralink proceeds to a scenario where quadriplegic patients can get reliable (ie lifelong) control of their computers for less than $100k that will be a huge win for them for a cost that no one else was willing to pay.
To be clear, at that order of magnitude they might make back their investment, but it won’t be 10x or 100x, and the potential healthy-brain-connected-to-the-AI play is much less rooted in reality than Teslas all becoming taxis.
Worst case scenario is that Elon loses interest and pulls the plug and Mr Arbaugh loses continued tech support a la a google product. I think that’s the one question I wish the author had asked…
The unfortunate part is that your first thought went to return on investment rather than the humanitarian angle, which I think is the common perspective; optics and money.
Then there's the pessimists, like me, wondering how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up.
> how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up
It's really hard for me to imagine that making more logistic sense than the current state of affairs - which is hiring armies of poor able-bodied people in developing countries.
The point is the scale of poor people vastly outweighs the scale of Neuralink users.
It's not worth both the setup cost, nor the backlash to convert the relatively small number of Neuralink users into forced labour. Especially since they would still need the poor workforce as well.
Agreeing to data collection and sharing of your brain activity while concerning for it's own reasons, is not the same as forcing them to complete Mechanical Turk like tasks.
> unfortunate part is that your first thought went to return on investment rather than the humanitarian angle
It’s just a pragmatic take on sustainability of innovation. If nobody—no person or government or non-profit—would find value in the future of the work, it merits questioning why do it versus something else.
There's a spectrum here, though. There's a difference between "nobody would find value in the work" and "nobody can figure out how to get VC-level returns from the work on VC timescales."
I don't think it's unfortunate - in principle, return on investment today can achieve greater humanitarian impact tomorrow vs humanitarian impact today.
Of course, this creates a perverse situation where choosing humanitarian impact today over investment is always irrational, but this is the fundamental tension in charity vs investment, and aside from relying on governments and guilt, I'm not sure we have discovered a great model to solve it
Problem is, when people start to analyse things like this, even apart from falling into utilitarian traps, they don’t apply regular business reasoning.
There’s a bunch of effects to consider 1) improving lives right now may well improve subsequent generations lives directly 2) your future project may have a higher failure rate than your current one 3) the problems you are trying to solve may no longer be relevant in the future 4) you could be very wrong about future population growth.
All of this boils down to: you should be risk-discounting future benefits just the same way as you do future cash flows.
It's the people thinking about the bottom line who will push for the gradual enshittification of the product until it's beaming ads into people's brain, preventing them from saying anything bad about elon, forcing them to sing his praises against their will, or charging them a monthly fee for "continued autonomous breathing as a service".
Taking a good thing and fucking people over with it in every way possible is "regular business reasoning"
At a certain point it's smart to say "We have the technology to do something good, let's be extremely cautious about concerns over what's profitable and focus on doing what's right with it"
If something cannot stand on its own two legs, then it can be the most awesome stuff in the world but it will die nonetheless. Being self-sustainable (i.e. profitable) greatly helps with keeping the show going. The alternative is either becoming publicly owned (i.e. paid with your taxes whether you want it or not) or to fail miserably and have all your technology and talent scattered.
It does kinda feel like there's an accidental attempt to LARP the plot of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan (if you squint hard enough) - richest man in the world, brain control, Mars colony, attempted coup on Earth... all the plot points are there!
To me that's the greatest part. Probably everyone working on this is interested in the humanitarian angle, and they know this can benefit potentially millions. But ROI is partly what's required to make it sustainable long term. And that's a great thing to me. It motivates business people to put money into it.
The supposedly cynical comment above talks about giving quadriplegic people a reliable way to control computers for <$100k, something that was science fiction before. Is this what you call exploitation of the poor and desperate by the wealthy? You have to finance things somehow, or they won't be done at all.
As much as I dislike (current) Musk, the comment I'm responding to clearly wasn't about that. Do you see this work being done by anyone else? I don't. And yes, it has the potential to turn dystopian, sure. Don't let it. I don't know how some people manage to see everything as strictly black and white.
Being called a bot was unexpected, to put it mildly.
Exploiting? I’m lefty, but this dude volunteered for the procedure and was fully reimbursed. I’m having a really hard time seeing “exploited” on this one.
> this dude volunteered for the procedure and was fully reimbursed
And it worked! The animal subjects were exploited. This man was not.
The only way I can square this circle is with the hypothesis that everything a billionaire does must be exploitative of the poor. (Which holds about as much water as its balancing hypothesis on the far right about leftists being good for nothing more than whining.)
According to the left exploitation can occur when people choose and are paid for it.
For example demeaning work. Also much of slavery, indentured servitude in the past was chosen and fully reimbursed. Most classic lefties would say all work is exploitation under capitalism.
It's the idea of individualism mostly seen on the right wing and the modern/American democratic left that says that people make free and rational choices in an amoral economic model. When money sets the rules there is no exploitation. I think the reality isn't so black and white and people can make good and bad decisions.
So while I agree he probably wasn't exploited it doesn't mean that others in the same place doing the same things will not be.
Have you ever thought of "choosing slavery" for yourself and your children? No, because given a choice, nobody would choose to be a slave. The fact that people "choose" to be slaves is evidence that they had Hobson's choice. Probably because the wealthy and powerful arranged the system and laws to give people no choice because they wanted slaves.
> "When money sets the rules there is no exploitation
People didn't freely choose to migrate from their ancestral homeland, farming and hunting and grazing animals on common ground, to go and "find their fortune" in the slums and workhouses of the growing urban areas; the land was taken by force, the laws were set by the wealthy to kick the commoners off, to make wild grazing and hunting illegal, to shift the taxes away from land and onto trade, and the commoners were forced into it or "choose" starvation. William the 'Conqueror' in 1066 in Britain started it and set the model for the British colonies and British Empire which pushed it out around the world. From[1]:
"the Anglo-Saxon period as the system of law know as ‘folkland’, whereby land was held in allodial title by the group or regional community .. 1066-7 Norman invasion displaces Anglo-Saxon commons/land ownership model. William the Bastard declares that all land, animals and people in the country belong to him personally. .. We go from a country in which >90% of people owned land, to a country of landless serfs, themselves owned by foreign lords. .. The intended effect was precisely the result: the dispossession of the ‘common folk’ (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a Latin speaking Norman aristocrat) of their ancestral lands and rights."
"Commons Act 1236 allowed Lords to enclose common land .. Statutes of Westminster 1275/85/90 restrict subtenure/sale of parcels of land other than to the direct heirs of the landlord. These restrictions gave rise to .. the retention and control by the nobility of land, money, soldiers and servants via salaries, land sales and rent. In-effect, this was the start of modern wage-slavery"
"1536 to 1541 Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, who privatises church lands (then 1/5th of the country). As these lands were often used by commoners, for grazing – this dispossesses people further from essential access to the land and generates yet more landless people who are wholly dependent upon the emerging model of selling their labour to survive i.e. wage-slavery. 1671 Game Act made it illegal to hunt wild animals, considered a common right since time immemorial. 1700-1850 Parliamentary Enclosures, now no longer held back by the sections of the Church, nor by the power of the (heavily indebted) nobility and Monarchy, land enclosures increase exponentially in both speed and size, and the new urban slums grew correspondingly"
"By 1700 half all arable lands are enclosed, and by 1815 nearly all farm land was enclosed; hunting, grazing, pannage, foraging, wood collection and gleaning rights, are all but lost. From 1750 to 1820 desperate poachers were ‘hanged en-mass’. 1800-1850 the Highland Clearances led to the displacement of up to 500,000 Highlanders and crofters, tens of thousands of which died in the early-mid 19th century, their settlements and economies replaced by Sheep. An esteemed member of the ‘British’ aristocracy noted: ‘It is time to make way for the grand-improvement of mutton over man.’. 1790-1830 a third of the rural population migrates to urban slums. Where they are put to work in early forms of factories, workhouses"
I’m familiar with those applications of exploitation, too, but they also wouldn’t apply here. This wasn’t demeaning work and wasn’t predicated on necessity, past their disability.
And of course, all work is exploitation under capitalism (from a true lefty point of view) but I didn’t perceive the original comment as referring to that level of exploitation. Just saying that this isn’t the hill to die on if one wants a case for capitalist exploitation.
I do understand the dangers of others being exploited down the line but again, that wasn’t what OP was saying either.
Really, if this is exploitative it’s only an indictment of profit incentives in healthcare, which are abhorrent.
Far too often I see someone stepping in to stop some "exploitation" and thereby making the poor/desperate people they were supposedly helping worse off.
The problem here is what is the best use of our resources? Neurolink has raised a total of $1.29B USD.
Is funding a high risk project the right allocation of $1.29B that supports a tiny fraction of humanity or would $1.29B be better spent on cancer research, addressing childhood food insecurities (free school lunches), etc?
This is the forum for a VC-funded startup accelerator, so yes, the implicit belief you hold if you're posting here is supposed to be "VCs deserve money, i.e. the wealthy deserve more wealth, and I will help them get there".
It's not exactly the same as "so we should exploit the poor and desperate", but that is one of the pitches VCs like the most.
I want to say the answer to this is "not all lurkers/posters", because at this point I'm more treating this place as an early warning system for how the hellhole dystopia will come about.
The amount of self-censoring I've ramped up to to keep anything useful from amoral VC's though does appear to prove your point though.
One of the biggest unsolved issues with BCI and neural implants is the immune response to implanted electrodes. The tissue buildup and fluid that encapsulates the probe or stimulator drastically increases the impedance of the device and causes all sorts of hard to solve problems for longevity of the implant and whatever therapy or recording it's trying to accomplish.
The endgame for Neuralink here, and most other competitors in the field is to use these transplants on healthy people as well to "enhance" human function.
> Worst case scenario is that Elon loses interest and pulls the plug and Mr Arbaugh loses continued tech support a la a google product.
That’s not even close to the worst case scenario. There are many worse outcomes than the product becoming inoperative, such as it malfunctioning in a way that significantly worsens the person’s quality of life, or its creator deliberately holding functionality hostage. Musk is known for being incredibly petty and thin skinned, I wonder how he’d react to Neuralink users doing or saying things he doesn‘t agree with.
I am genuinely glad this participant and presumably others have a new chance at quality of life, but it would be better if the one in control of the technology weren’t a private individual with such a history, and that the process to reach this milestone had been handled more responsibly and respectfully.
Probably a decent reason that all such augmentations need to be built on open technologies. If no provider can guarantee future support, only open strategies are even viable for users.
> decent reason that all such augmentations need to be built on open technologies
Open is a red herring. Mandate documentation and bonding for long-term support. If the cheapest way to provide those are through an open-source platform, great. If not, that’s also fine. Patient outcomes outweigh ideological preferences.
Open Source Accessibility isn't sustainable right now. How on earth do you imagine open medical hardware to ever reach a level where it is generally useful to people with disabilities?
In general, I find the negativity in this whole thread very sad. If I were in the situation were I was looking forward for technology like this, and I'd read the comments here, they would make me very sad. Because in essence, I would learn that politics is more important to some SV people than actual progress.
Frankly, if Elon ended up creating a technology that helps people, I wouldn't care about his politics at all. I'd be damn grateful for someone investing in something that ended up helping me. But obviously, politics trumps empathy here, which is very very sad.
I am still a magnitude off regarding 100k for assistive technologies, but sufficiently large braille displays cost 10k$ to 15k$ in Europe. That is a plain display of 80!!! characters in a single line. No 1080p, mind you. This has been the case since I am alive. The costs are mostly driven by redistriibutors, who usually add around 70% when importing from the US. Do I feel exploited? No, I am glad the technology exists. And frankly, if you have any empathy left, you should as well.
By commercializing open source technology development so that the paying non-programmer and the ecosystem dependent SME's and Fortune 500's can meaningfully drive development of what they need.
You can see my gloriously broken prototype at PrizeForge. Currently between iterations and still not quite viable enough to properly operate.
Well, Sun Accessibility Office already did great work from roughly 2003 to 2008. Then came 2008. And Sun AND IBM terminated their Accessibility work. From then on, Orca was basically kept alive by a single developer for roughly a decade. I am not 100% sure if she has given up by now, but I'd be surprised if she didn'.t
So, giving this job to Fortune500 companies is demonstratably not sustainable. A single higher up can terminate such projects with the wink of an eye.
I was more hopeful 20 years ago. Then I watched how all the good work on GNOME2 was basically trashed because of DBus transition, GTK3, and now Wayland. Fact is, hoping for the corporate world to do the work is no guarantee they will continue. And for "scratch your own itch"-philosophy to work, there are not enough disabled OSS devs. Maybe after WWIII there will be a surge in Open Source Accessibility.
You read my comment, but you are missing that I'm building to tools to bundle the work together, which is the way to make a strong enough open foundation that things like open accessibility technologies can have more ground to stand on.
Scratching our own itch works better when coordination means we can bundle together a whole lot of itch. There is no such thing as individual incentive to cooperate without a means of coordination. Anything else is just the volunteer's dilemma, and so only small itches get scratched.
Not everything can be handled using death by a thousand cuts. In the Rust in 2021 blog [1], the importance of depth versus breadth was pointed out. Depth comes from dedicated, full-time, paid work.
From a capitalist point of view, Neuralink will only become profitable and valuable if they go full sci-fi and offer a brain/computer interface that anyone can use, AND that there's systems and applications that use it, AND that it becomes popular and "better" than e.g. smartphones.
But that last one is the kicker. AR never became mainstream. Unless a brain interface is faster and more intuitive than e.g. a physical keyboard, it will never become mainstream either.
Exactly. AR is still extremely early days, limited by hardware and software. I have no doubt that it has a future, there are just some impediments that have yet to be remedied (but I have no doubt that they will)
> If Neuralink proceeds to a scenario where quadriplegic patients can get reliable (ie lifelong) control of their computers for less than $100k that will be a huge win for them for a cost that no one else was willing to pay.
After nearly two decades of flat out lying about Tesla's capabilities and then the last year of insane lies, I literally don't believe anything that comes out of any of his companies. Perhaps you do.
It's not really a lie, it's so-called "make-belief", which entrepreneurs exude in order to justify their own time and money investment, as well as spreading it to the army of employees. This sort of delusion is necessary for the inaugural period of concept development, until you prove whether the concept is viable or not. Some people call it vision. It is an entirely fictional concept, of course.
Sometimes you stumble onto something working that gets traction. Then this lie turns into reality, and the entrepreneur is raised to the rank of prophets.
In other words, he doesn't do it out of malice. These are the rules of the game.
> The reality is that it’s very hard to see a normal VC level return on the $100M+
Nobody gives a shit about the iNvEsToR rEtUrN on iNveStMeNt. This is a humanitarian project which should be owned by the people, not a select few billionaires or investors to license out and dangle yet another expense, subscription, or ad model.
Nothing is stopping them from doing it. You sound mad that he's actually out there making it happen because some theoretical humanitarian project should. Why not be happy he's actually out there solving this for people and the fact that real people are materially benefitting?
Companies like this going under is a horror story for the patients I've seen playing out a few times. But I honestly can't see something as public and well-funded having the same fate. "Elon Musk losing interest" isn't really something I see likely as he doesn't function in the money-oriented ways pretty much almost all other billionaire-types do. He loves the tech and the ideals, and Neuralink is past the point of ever being potentially a dud
Ah yes he just became a billionnaire because he isn't money motivated and just loves tech. If only we all loved tech as much as Elon and money as little as Elon does.
I’m not the biggest Elon fan, but “man sues to receive the thing he earned over several years of accomplishment that made a lot of people a lot more money than they originally agreed to pay him” is something a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to.
> man sues to receive the thing he earned over several years of accomplishment that made a lot of people a lot more money than they originally agreed to pay him
Do you have a source for this?
As far as I understand, the bonus package represents a large part of revenue of all Teslas sold since the beginning.
> is something a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to.
Does he also need to pay back stocks when he does a nazi salute, thus tarnishing the brand's image and stock value?
At the time of the original pay package award (3/21/2018), with primary performance conditions being the growth of Tesla market cap (making money for Tesla shareholders), Tesla had a market cap of $53.5B.
At the time the lawsuit against Musk set aside that pay package in January 2024, Tesla's market cap had expanded under Musk's leadership to around $600B.
$600B - $55B = $545 billion in market cap increase (making money for shareholders), which dwarfs both the $29B he agreed to take as well as the larger amount he would have been due under the 2018 agreement.
> Is that why he sued to obtain his $29B package from Tesla shareholders?
I think you're confused on two sort-of-related things: one is the $56B package agreed to and approved in 2018 that a judge decided to revoke, for that he's suing.
The other one is the relatively recent (July/August) $29B package that was created by two indipendent board advisors to give him a "salary" (he did not participate or vote on the creation of this package), since apparently he received nothing from Tesla for the past 6-7 years. This comes as a result of him expressing that if he wants more control over the company, or he's going to build things (AI, robotics) outside of it. Part of the deal is that he's to forfeit this if the ruling on the 2018 package is in his favor.
> he doesn't function in the money-oriented ways pretty much almost all other billionaire-types do
I'm pretty sure he does, his actions in government and his lobbying were specifically so he made more money. He does love the tech, though I'm not as optimistic about his love of the ideals (but that might be the socialist in me talking).
I'm am wary about how brain implants could be abused further down the line, but for now it's not the main thing I'm looking at with Neuralink. It seems to be a positive change for the patient, and if costs can be reduced to make it affordable to the masses, it can be a great thing.a
Sorry what? You couldn't have picked a better example of someone who is going get bored, walk off and leave customers screwed. Tesla customers bought a full self-driving car about a decade ago. Where is it? Oh yes, that's right. Elon Musk lost interest and now he's over at neuralink sticking electrodes in this guys head. This guy better hope that Elon doesn't get bored again.
I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave. I do not know much of anything about medical science, but my impression is that we are still very, very far from having a deep grasp of how both the brain and the immune system work. Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.
Many tech professionals work on projects that effect people's lives in very serious ways. But a lot of folk seem to feel a bit of meaninglessness in this career and the threshold of making a mistake isn't very high. If it's an off day, sloppy work yesterday can be fixed with another PR.
Building something that is meant to attach to someone's brain would be quite the burden to carry.
The kind of amount of regulation around this makes me think they are not in that big of a danger, especially as previous devices in this class are way more invasive than Neuralink. I remember that even in their earliest own presentations the width of the "wires" is fraction to previous solutions
> Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.
I get your point but, there's a lot of foreign objects going in by the way of various pores and openings. Biological beings are surprisingly resilient & fragile at the same time.
Those openings lead to spaces that are not "inside" the body, though. For deuterostomes like humans, the digestive tract is still "outside" in a lot of important ways.
Pesticides and micro plastics are equally foreign even if not absorbed/ingested in as one big unit. Besides, in modern medicine, implanting devices in organs (ex: pacemakers, valves, electrodes) isn't unheard of?
I'll let other blind people go first, but I'm definitely some one that would love, love, love to be able to see. Driving, knowing body language, playing any and every video game out there, shoot yeah!
From what I've read, if you are blind from birth, but visual signals were suddenly restored, your brain wouldn't know how to process them. Blind from birth = blind forever. I'm not certain though.
I lack stereoscopic vision, due to eye surgery in infancy & wildly different focal lengths in each eye (one is very nearsighted, the other farsighted).
I can still see in 3D because my brain uses tricks like relative object size, shadows, and sometimes I move my head laterally so my farsighted eye gets different angles on an object (“faking” stereoscopic vision with one eye).
Nonetheless, catching a ball thrown straight at me is very difficult— I have to judge the size at which the circle is getting larger, and know the actual size of the ball. It often hits me in the hand and I try to grab it before it bounces away.
And I can never see those stereogram images where it looks like static unless you focus both eyes at some distance. I never see the world with both eyes simultaneously.
I once got glasses that corrected my vision “perfectly” but got major headaches and couldn’t wear them. Objects were in focus in both eyes, but were wildly different sizes!
I went to an ophthalmologist who basically told me they can correct my lenses but in my brain “the wiring is shot”.
I mostly work in front of a computer screen. I now use reading glasses so that when my nearsighted eye gets tired, I can put them on and continue working with my farsighted eye. These glasses have only a minor correction on the nearsighted eye so they don’t give me headaches.
Do you notice any difference in thinking when you are “left eye active” vs “right eye active” in front of the screen or reading ? Asking because I have a much milder version of the situation that you describe (still within the boundaries to make it work without the glasses almost all the time), but I notice a weird “not the same” feeling when I am using not the eye I am used to.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, and I haven’t noticed different thinking. But I switch back and forth all the time. Like writing this I’m using my nearsighted eye, but if I look across the room my vision switches to my farsighted eye (more or less instantly).
The thing other people notice is after I’ve had a long day of screen time and am physically tired (long day, late night), and I’m out with friends, my farsighted eye does all the work and my nearsighted eye gets lazy and wanders. It’s got nothing to do and can take a break! I’ve heard many a good-natured joke about it over the years.
"Blind" has way more of a wide definition than we usually appreciate.
I volunteer at a food pantry. There is one old lady who is sometimes rude in the line, shoving through saying "move it, I'm blind!!" She sometimes informs me that produce I hand her has black spots and she doesn't want it.
I have family like this. They can see enough 'shape' to play something like Tetris extremely well but anything that relies on colors is usually a no. When we were young they had color but that went away first. My understanding is that as they get older the resolution of the shapes gets lower and lower, so they have to make things bigger and be as close as possible.
It was beyond the point of glasses being able to do anything useful for them just as they finished college.
That's a good point. I'm fairly certain that lady has said that to me before touching the food. I think some legally blind people are good with shapes and big contrasts. She may also be relying on smell and not expressing it.
If they have any sight at all, their ability to cope with that limited sight would also be greatly increased; that is, if their resolution is significantly lower, their relative contrast may be much higher, even if what the object is is much less clear, without context.
According to research impaired structural brain development due to visual deprivation from birth is not fully reversible and limits functional recovery. So even if eye sight is fully restored, cortical function will not be able to fully take advantage of that.
Experiments and studies have shown that this might be due to the fact that the visual cortex will take over a similar role in blind people as it does for people with intact eye sight. The brain uses different sensory inputs in that case and the visual brain structure is not restored after eye sight recovery.
This is still an ongoing field of research of course, but so far congenital blindless seems to be incurable, regardless of whether the sensory apparatus could be restored or replaced. Note that this only means seeing like a non-blind person. Some limited visual perception is still possible, just not "normal" sight.
Do you have some links handy? I'd be very much interested in the description of experience from people that have gained sight after congenital blindness.
You might be interested in searching up "strong critical periods" in brain development - this phenomenon has been studied for decades and has interesting implications for lots of aspects of brain development: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period
If you are young enough, yes. But after a while, the neuroplasticity is simply not enough. Seeing is a complex enough process, if you miss learning it in your childhood, the train is gone. This is a very common error people make, announcing implant technologies to grown blind people as if the cure was just around the corner. It isn't. You will never adapt to a point where the vision you just gained is actually useful. Imagine trying to learn to read print, at 30, with a pixelated implant? It is a naiv pixie dream of sighted people.
Calling them desperate seems rude. Why judge the participants? Not everyone has access to other SOTA solutions and if this is the next best thing for them, why not.
The rhetoric in this thread is generally laden with patronisation. I know that phenomenon as a person with a disability. Left leaning people are quick to speak for me and try to patronize on my situation. It is, frankly, plain virtue signaling. I could do without that, thank you very much.
Why would you not go first? If you are blind it cannot be worse (well it can, but there are always risks).
My wife went through semi-expetimental therapy (at that time) for her MS. It was tough but ultimately a net benefit.
It all depends on what is at stake - I would consider Ozempic for some weight loss but prefer, for now, go for no sugar and moderate portions. This is not life changing for me so I indeed prefer people who will benefit way more from it to go first.
It's a brain chip. How do you feel about being blind and paralyzed? Or comatose? Or dead? How about never-ending pain or constant bright flashes? What if they go bankrupt, and something happens to the implant?
Brain surgery isn't exactly an industry where "move fast and break things" is an acceptable approach - especially when you are the patient. Considering Neuralink's historical record, going first sounds like a horrible idea to me.
Also seizures, personality changes and myriad forms of cognitive impairment.
The 20 years of US adventures in Iraq & Afghanistan led to many traumatic brain injury cases analyzed by modern medicine, and the chronic symptoms are worse than one might think.
How do you feel about not having THE sense that defines your whole life? This is a matter of personal choice and weighing risks vs your life as it is.
Nobody is forcing anybody to have the chip - my question was about the reasons behind not taking it for someone who is blind, as a matter of curiosity. It is obvious that everyone will react differently.
As I mentioned, my wife went for that and it was quite a ride initially. You do not want to be on the witnessing side of such treatments but I respect her choice despite the risks.
They had a rocky path to that first human patient, and even the first human participant has had a rocky journey with it, with many electrodes failing soon after implanted.
It's a lifelong change and whatever the state of the first release is, chances are in 5 years time there'll be a better version and everything is safer.
I guess I don't have a similar thought process as someone who thinks going no sugar is the right way to achieve weight loss.
The reason you might think twice about going first is for that exact reason, there are risks. Plenty of blind people would prefer to stay as they are than be left worse off to a greater degree after undergoing the implant.
How would you go for weight loss then? This is calories in - calories out.
And as for which state one wants to be in, this is a matter of personal choice. I know that I will commit suicide right after I get a diagnosis of, say, Alzheimer's (after cleaning up my stuff). If I went blind and had a reasonable chance to get back to sight, then I would also go for it, weighing the risks.
It all boils down to what someone perceives as "better"
One cannot measure calories out (other than deducing it from calories in and weight change), which is a complex function of diet, metabolism, and a host of other factors.
As for the rest--your other posts implicitly assume that everyone else shares your choices and priorities--and if not then they aren't relevant. (BTW, there is strong evidence showing neither you nor anyone else knows what they would do after receiving such diagnoses.)
> One cannot measure calories out (other than deducing it from calories in and weight change), which is a complex function of diet, metabolism, and a host of other factors.
Sure, but when you eat sugar in several forms and overeat generally, you statistically get fatter. This works the other way round too. There are myriads of specific cases on the sides of the bell curve but the solution for the everyday Joe is to eat less, more healthily. Practicing sports helps too, but not so much (it is important for other health reasons)
> As for the rest--your other posts implicitly assume that everyone else shares your choices and priorities--and if not then they aren't relevant.
Wow, where do you get that from? The main point of asking questions here is not to be a troll and wait for internet fights but to get interesting insights from others. You may want to slow down with the pitchforks and such statements.
> (BTW, there is strong evidence showing neither you nor anyone else knows what they would do after receiving such diagnoses.)
Or not. You also have people who prepare for that in advance, with a clear decision path. I have, and have no doubts taht I will go for that having evidenced suffering in other people. Not everyone contacts a company such as Dignitas to make sure things are organized. Not everyone discusses with the funeral house details about their death at 45, not everyone has a "what to do when I die" booklet with key information (financial and how to de-smart the house :)). Not everyone gave a deeper thought about designing a kill-switch device that would poison them in case they are incapacitated.
Not everyone is like you so I would not be that fast in making such radical statements.
For weight loss I go via a calorie deficit, but still consume all macronutrients, I wouldn't cut out sugar as I would feel pretty rubbish. I'd go less on the sweets like chocolate and lollies but I wouldn't completely cut out sugar as its important.
Super uncertain, and, if the effect exists, it's tiny --- huge numbers of people have been taking these drugs for many years. Meanwhile, we know with certainty that T2D can blind you, and we know mechanistically why that happens. If you're at T2D risk, NAION would be a really dumb reason to avoid GLP-1s.
There is a great podcast with the entire team + Noland on yt. It is ~ 8h long, but IMO it's worth the time. You get to hear things from the perspective of the chief brain surgeon, hardware team, software team, and of course Noland himself. I really recommend it, to get a better understanding of what's possible, what they had to do to get there, and how impactful this kind of research is for people with terrible conditions.
I love and hate this type of Lex Friedman interviews. Several factors give out when there's a podcast that is posted uncut with a 8 hour length that I'd like to listen to. Wish he cut them!
I completely relate - but I listened to this one, alone, in full. Technology has produced many things you might call a miracle, but this one stands out.
Still the same depraved head of neurosurgery, Dr. Matthew MacDougall, who said: "If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people that would step up." [1]
That is basically the textbook definition of unethical medical practice, so unquestionably far over the line of acceptable practice that you would have to be willfully ignorant to defend it, and they think it would be exciting if it were not banned.
> That is basically the textbook definition of unethical medical practice
This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what was said. First of all, it's really hard to get malpractice here, as consent is implied (unless you'd think he'd purposefully do a bad or sloppy job). You could say it's irresponsible, and that argument holds more water, but when folks are in these terrible situations (i.e. terminally ill, etc.), a strong argument could also be that it's morally impermissible to disallow them to partake in such experimental treatments.
In any case, it's an interesting moral conundrum, akin to abortion or euthanasia.
Being blind or disabled isn't anything like dying of cancer.
We allow compassionate testing of therapies that might allow you to live longer because the alternative is an ugly death.
Consent is never ever ever implied and you don't have to deliberately do a poor job to be liable.
Just not having good evidence of the therapy is liable to improve their lot and doing it anyway or failing to impart an accurate picture of the risks because you don't know enough to do so.
How can you possibly have informed consent without the same info that you hope to glean?
> Being blind or disabled isn't anything like dying of cancer
I think it’s presumptuous to conclude from afar where someone’s affliction lies on a scale of suffering.
People should be free to do with their bodies what they choose. To describe and act on their subjective experience of themselves as they see fit, not as a third party deems they ought to.
I think this comment highlights how bad the state of “medical ethics” is. Barring informed people from getting treatments they want is unethical in my book. Full stop. The entire apparatus is built on shoddy backwards ethics.
These kind of takes often place a higher value on people's life than they would place on their own. We should let people choose MAID if that's the best outcome for their lives, and we should let them risk their health for science. It's up to them whether they feel they have anything left to lose.
This is aside from the harm it does to the rest of us to prevent experimentation by willing participants, such as barring human challenge trials to quickly test Covid vaccines.
well, it may be one thing when we're talking about functional adults deciding for themselves to opt-in to experimental treatment.
i would guess that these protections exist to cover a broader group including children or those who are in the care of others and aren't necessarily capable of making their own decisions about experimental treatment... to say nothing of other forms of coercion otherwise-capable adults may face when it comes to stuff like this.
it's tricky! and it doesn't seem like there's a one-size-fits-all approach that offers protection for those who need it.
This tech is incredible but it will be very divisive. Leadership of the current leading company notwithstanding, novel implants such as pacemakers have also undergone a stage of social caution that I would very much expect to surface for brain-interface devices as well, if not more fervently due to an increasing mistrust in technology's utility in our lives.
I am personally hopeful for this technology. I know it will be able to improve the lives of loved ones who both need and want it. I am also afraid of a technology that can decide my thoughts one way or another...
If this tech could be made to work flawlessly, it would be the gate to all the SciFi cyborg stuff, including body enhancements, "telepathy", etc.
Also, as a "side effect", it would open a path to fully immersive VR, as in Matrix, Snow Crash, Neuromancer, etc - with all the upsides and downsides of those scenarios.
All that "just" from hooking up motor and sensor neurons. And then people would probably start and mess with neurons that are involved in cognitive functions and the consciousness.
If generative AI had potential for cultish behavior, I think that will pale in comparison to this stuff.
I recently watched an episode where there was a bit about "Don't date robots" and it had me absolutely rolling, but also hit pretty close to home in 2025
Imagine if your brain implant got infected by malware. There will be entries in the DSM for that, and another entry for "patient is convinced that implant is infected by malware, but it's actually totally fine".
Indeed it is. I think the tech is enormously exciting, but the ways in which both ordinary people and people in power could abuse it, are obvious.
I also don't trust the current brand of tech billionaires to handle this stuff responsibly - if they aren't specifically aiming for those dystopian scenarios even.
Based on all of Musk's past behavior, he doesn't exactly strike me as a guy who would deeply care for the disabled or make it his life's mission to cure spinal cord injuries - or even to grant super powers with no strings attached to the average person.
But he does seem like the kind of person who obsesses about the "next stage of evolution of the human race"...
That's an awfully dismissive reply. I agree with the parent, we already all require subscriptions to stay alive. In the most literal sense that's going to be basic utilities like water, power and arguably connectivity. And then there are those who are dependent on a continued supply of medication as well.
The parent post was an awfully broad sweeping statement that deserved an accurate reply. Obviously we don't "all need subscriptions to stay alive." I guess folks on hn have forgotten the difference between need and want.
A lot of potential for that episode. And I still love Roy, but I feel like that episode was a shallow as hell take on subscription services. Could have been a lot more.
Friends with Parkinson's with neural implants anecdotally report great results, but of course with rather coarse tech. There seems to be lots of future potential.
My brother has had YOPD since his late 20s. He got DBS done about 3 years ago, and it was life changing. Not only in the symptom reduction (tremors and rigidity significantly reduced -- he walked straight for the first time in years, could button his shirts again, etc), but also in lifestyle improvements around the amount and frequency of medication, the ability to sleep properly (several side effects of both PD and the meds affect sleep), the ability for his body to actually relax.
DBS, like you said, is rather course tech and actually quite old technology. Doctors still don't entirely know why it works, so the adjustment is often experimental. In fact prior to specialized MRI machines that they use during surgery now, the patients would remain awake during the placement (brain surgery) of the electrodes so that the surgeons would know when the placement was "correct" based on real-time assessment of their symptoms. Now they do it under MRI, but the point being it's far from an exact science.
Can't wait to see what the future holds as they improve on it. Hard to imagine a world where his symptoms are fully managed (PD is progressive degeneration, so his symptoms, even with DBS are gradually worsening with time), but it was also hard to imagine how DBS could overnight change his life in the ways it did.
My daughter has DBS for severe Tourette's. Her quality of life before the implant was horrible -- frequent 110 dB+ screams and self-injury. The implant has reduced her tic frequency and intensity by easily 95%. It's not only given her her life back but also the lives of her family members.
The potential of brain interface technology is truly incredible -- both for good and ill.
Too much marketing speak without the demo. I have read this long article and did read some more related content on the internet, so let me summarize it for you.
With Neuralink,
- Noland can control cursor of his computer
- He can schedule calendar meetings
- He can control his purifier, television, etc.
- He can play games like mario kart
This appears to be at least a partial solve for it.
Older implants are notorious for having that issue - and while scarring doesn't appear to hurt the brain all that much, it sure does hurt the connectivity.
The usual "bed of nails" Utah array typically deteriorates massively within 6 months. Neuralink's very first human implant has lasted for what, a year and a half already? It had issues with dislodged electrodes, which must have hurt the interface quality, but it still remains usable. That's a damn good sign.
There are flexible electrodes, rather than rigid arrays. The idea was that this would reduce scarring. I'm not aware of the exact results of the trials, but it works better than rigid arrays for longevity of recording.
Unfortunately, it'll be a while until this kind of interface is usable for that.
Neuralink is currently running trials on quadriplegia - with people who have their motor cortex intact, but their spinal cords damaged. Cerebral palsy often involves damage to motor cortex. So wiring the implants into it might be of limited use. No one knows if it'll work, or how well.
Targeting premotor cortex? It's extremely promising, but no one knows how to do that yet. In medicine, that means "years, if not decades, of research and development", sadly.
Neuralink is amazing technology and watching videos of participants who have completely different abilities and freedom with Neuralink implants is mind blowing. It’s sad that many want to dismiss these amazing achievements just because it’s an Elon Musk founded company. At some point you simply have to acknowledge his success (and his team’s), and hope they get further with all of this.
Neuralink is super cool actually great medical tech, and elon comes in -in this article- blabbing about optimus robots or whatever as usual. I hope elon continues to get neuralink lots of money so that they can do useful things.
Is it okay to be skeptically appreciative of Neuralink's technological breakthroughs while hoping that, due to its association with Elon, that the technology and talent decides to go elsewhere?
Could be for saltiness over his politics. Could be for skepticism that he can deliver (robotaxi, Mars, etc). Could be for wariness that he'll turn it to shit like USDS, Twitter, and Tesla's finances.
Before Neuralink, there was no major investment into BCI tech as far as eye could see - because medicine is where innovation goes to die. We've gone from Utah arrays in 1990 to Utah arrays in 2020. All while computing and AI - the other key enablers of neural interfaces - advanced in leaps and bounds.
I have lots of ideas. Some are great, some are ordinary, and some turn out to be embarrassingly stupid.
So does everyone else who tries to create new things. Edison had dumb ideas, too, like his mining ideas. The Wrights also had dumb ideas like their persistence with wing warping, and the canard stabilizer.
The sub thing didn't hurt anyone, it was an emergency so he didn't have much time to think about it, so really it's uncharitable to slam him for trying to help.
Do you think his rockets are dumb ideas, too? Starlink? Tesla?
This discussion started with somebody complaining that people are dismissing Neuralink because it's Musk's company. My point is that his ideas are getting way more attention than other people's ideas, stupid or not.
And he is an attention whore who will go after people who are dismissing his ideas. The cave guys in Thailand had to waste precious time thinking about his submarine. If Musk had really been willing to help, he would have done testing in quiet and published things only when it was clear that it worked. But he is an attention whore because he knows it's good for business.
Same for DOGE. They could have done their work in quiet and with deliberation. Instead they fired quickly some random people whose work they didn't understand or like.
> his ideas are getting way more attention than other people's ideas, stupid or not.
His amazing track record with success means his ideas merit more attention than your ideas or mine.
> The cave guys in Thailand had to waste precious time
insulting Musk on CNN. They didn't have to do that. They could have simply said "no thank you, we'll handle it".
> But he is an attention whore because he knows it's good for business.
Yes, offering his company's considerable engineering talent and resources for free is pure evil. Sheesh.
> Instead they fired quickly
They didn't have the people to evaluate tens of thousands of individuals, nor did they have several years to do it in. The way they proceeded was the only practical way. It's the way all organizations above a certain size cut costs when hemorrhaging cash.
Vern Unsworth said that the submarine wouldn't work, Musk then called him a paedophile and tried to hire a private investigator to discredit him. Could Musk not have just accepted that yes, his idea was stupid, and not thrown false accusations with no basis at Unsworth?
> It’s sad that many want to dismiss these amazing achievements just because it’s an Elon Musk founded company
That's not a fair take. This isn't "just a thing", this leads to massive financial gain by someone whose now a very influential power into people's lives from his involvement in politics and other circles of influence.
People can do good and bad at the same time, and if you're impacted by the bad things the person does, the good doesn't excuse it, and you'd want to stop them from doing more bad, it makes sense not to cheer on the good things they do that then fuels their effort into the bad things.
There can be disagreement on if they are doing bad, but to someone who believes so, it's a rational stance to not cheer on what can further fuel what they consider bad.
I'd expect that right now it's life changing in a positive way for many recipients.
- The people getting it are in very rough shape and even a tiny bit of improved ability to control their environment is a tremendous gift to them
- Musk seems to be busy playing with his other toys
- We're far to early in this tech's progress for enshitification to start
Much as I dislike Musk, for the sake of all the people with debilitating conditions that this could help, I wish him phenomenal success with this project.
OTOH, I don't trust him to manage this as a product in an ethical way. What's the DBI equivalent of locking you in a car to drown?
For someone with a supreme lack of judgement he sure does own a lot of billion dollar companies. I strive to have the same lack of judgement that he has.
I hope not, I'd rather have fewer narcissistic sociopaths in the world. He only cares about himself and what people think of him. Nothing he does is to benefit other people. He's not Iron Man, he's Lex Luthor.
I guess people have always idolized the creeps of the world, though.
It will never cease to amaze me how some people think they can know somebody the've never met as well as you think you do. I attribute it to projection.
This guy tweets all day and the press talks about every little thing he ever does, there are hundreds of videos of him on youtube, dozens of his employees and ex-employees telling stories about him on the net. How much more do you think you are going to learn if you actually talk to him?
I would argue a lot of Musk haters are not getting a representative sample of his behavior, but rather only the most outrageous things he says and does, which tend to be the things that penetrate their bubble.
I don’t hate him. I think he’s a sad, small man who makes himself feel big by being a bully and faking technical experience and knowledge. I think his fans confuse being in the right place at the right time in possession significant capital as genius. I think he is an incredibly toxic public figure. I think farming outrage and feeding trolls is bad for everyone. I think Nazi salutes are bad. I think that lying is bad. I think abandoning children is bad. I think buddying up with fascists is bad.
So sure maybe I miss out on his generous acts but honestly he does enough bad that I don’t particularly care about any good he does. He’s only doing it for himself anyway.
Walter, this is Elon Musk. Using my genius-level intellect and no emerald mine money, I have hacked into this humble HN account to contact you.
I want to thank you for being one of my most valiant defenders by bestowing upon you $1 billion! There are those online who would dare besmirch me, a billionaire, as anything but a demigod. Luckily I have my legions of loyal followers, of which you, Walter, are the greatest. I owe you my very life and cannot wait to have you over to lick my boots some more.
You keep saying I’m in a bubble. I read the Vance bio, and the Isaacson one. I came away with very different opinions of him. At least the Isaacson book didn’t leave me with the taste of boots in my mouth.
I watched the guy throw up a couple of nazi salutes while standing onstage after using his immense wealth to buy an election and a place in the government from which he caused immeasurable damage and engaged in outrageous corruption.
Then there's the union busting, the kneecaping of public transit projects, the environmental damage to protected areas caused by spacex dumping wastewater, the people being poisoned by the exhaust from xai datacenters, and so on.
Those "outrageous things he says and does" are beyond the pale and people are absolutely correct to judge him negatively for it.
I'd go so far to say that folks defending Musk are - wittingly or unwittingly - beyond the pale and the rest of us are absolutely correct to judge them negatively for it.
Is this the thing about California high-speed rail? I looked into that when it came up on HN the other day, and concluded that Musk had basically nothing to do with the failure of that project. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299460
So -- Do you have actual solid evidence to defend this "kneecaping of public transit projects" claim? Or shall I assume that the rest of your claims are also liable to be based on half-truths and internet rumors?
In any case, I'm not "defending" Musk in the sense of saying he's a good person. I'm just saying people should try to see him accurately. If you judge people negatively for giving you any information that challenges your worldview, I'd say you're basically admitting that your worldview isn't likely to be very accurate. You can persuade yourself of anything you like, if you're selective in the evidence you admit.
Is the “nazi salute”, still a thing?
It seems like accusations involving it are increasingly used as a tool to delegitimize, because cmon.. you can’t agree with him, but that wasn’t a nazi salute.
I'm not sure whenever it's a good idea to cheer for lack of life-changing technical progress just because it's ran by a company governed by an ethically problematic person. The person is temporary, the progress is permanent.
I'm mostly cheering for more competition in the field. No reason for advances in life-changing technical progress to belong solely to that one company.
Not trying to be snarky, but doesn't this mental model effectively allow you to ignore any/all things otherwise intelligent people have to say, simply because you disagree? If I met Einstein, and he had opinions about how to cook chicken that differed from mine, I wouldn't leap to "he's a complete moron in the kitchen!", i'd be inclined to really attempt to understand the difference of opinion.
I'm not disagreeing that intelligence can be domain specific, but I'd be careful going to far with this. It is _not_ obviously the case that "anyone who can think critically leans towards the Democratic party", and putting that forward seems like an exceptionally dangerous bubble to build.
If you are a person who has shown traits of very low intelligence, any fact you state has to have concrete evidence, especially if its something that is not easily verifiable.
Meanwhile people who have generally shown themselves to be more intelligent can generally be trusted more from the start.
>t is _not_ obviously the case that "anyone who can think critically leans towards the Democratic party"
Yes it is. Conservatism comes from not being able to comprehend reality around you correctly. Anything rational in the conservative movement (like sensible gun rights) is already a part of modern liberal Democrats, while the rest of the stuff is just objectively and verifiably wrong.
And just for clarity, its not my side versus your side. The far left movements that lean towards hard socialism and abandonment of private property are also verifiably wrong. This is part of horseshoe effect in politics.
Yes because it makes perfect sense to vote for convicted felon, most likely a child molester, who tried to coup the government when he lost in 2025, with Project 2025 behind his back.
That act alone pretty much disqualifies you from being able to talk about intelligence in the first place.
Four false turds packaged up in haughty fake outrage does not mean you have given us a golden truth. The democrats chose an unimaginably bad candidate and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Ah yes, the whole lawsuit where Trumps legal team argued that he in fact did submit a slate of fraudlent electors, but argued that he had the right to do so because he was immune from legal prosecution, is totally false, despite being all documented in publicly available court proceedings.
So please understand that when you claim that these things are false, it is absolutely ok for people to assume you are mentally ill. Because you chose to live in a world inside your head instead of actual reality.
It is. The opposition is getting ready to crater the economy whilst building concentration camps to be filled by the klan army he's putting together whilst gutting both our constitutional protections and ability to remove what ammounts to a senile version of Hitler.
They are doing so much damage to institutions and ultimately to people that their loss in 2028 will be damned near inevitable leaving them no course of action to stay out of prison other tha what they have already outlined which is to end democracy.
There is no substantial opposition from the Republicans singly or in groups. They are barely willing to verbally chastise him and none dare vote in a meaningful way that would impact his plans.
They were barely willing to admit he wasn't pres in 2021 when he was nothing.
It's exactly what a partisan reddit midwit would say and they're overrepresented when it comes to Elon Musk hatred.
There used to be less of that on HN, my theory is younger accounts that are more politically extreme/lefty are now here as the younger generation graduates school and posts more on HN.
There's some historical irony too since communism came out of highly educated academic elites and is responsible for an enormous amount of death and value destruction. Ideological driven academics that think they're better than everyone are particularly good at crafting insane ideologies someone outside of that insular community would not, then leveraging institutional and cultural power to force it on everyone else. The woke and gender ideologies share similar origins, same for DEI.
It's a political and ideological monoculture and it's a dangerous mixture of incredibly confidently smug and wrong.
Worth picking up Peter Thiel's first book which goes into this in some detail (he wrote it pretty young, observing the early start of this when he was at Stanford). It's wildly prescient and was from the mid 90s iirc.
What is "education"? Is it degrees? There are a lot of problems with this. It's hardly a sign that someone "thinks critically".
A lot mediocre students I knew in school stayed on to do more school because they were not able to do something else. A lot of degrees and classes are frankly bullshit and this problem has gotten worse since the 60s - the details matter. Time wasted studying pseudo-intellectual nonsense doesn't imply someone has a better understanding of the world than someone else (often the opposite) - just that they wasted time getting indoctrinated in a particular culture (often subsidized by others if not the taxpayer).
What about the people doing interesting and useful things in society, building stuff, creating wealth - what these people think matters a lot more than someone that got a PHD on olfactory ethics. Not all education is equal.
Even then, the meta analysis matters less than the details of the actual underlying argument. Appeal to authority and experts is a poor substitute for rigorous good faith debate of the actual issues.
There's a reason William F. Buckley said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from Harvard.
"I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."
So it's not that I dispute the data that there's a lefty bias in universities (there obviously is), I dispute what that actually means.
> So it's not that I dispute the data that there's a lefty bias in universities (there obviously is), I dispute what that actually means.
The issue at hand isn't perceived bias in universities, it's voting tendencies of people who have higher education.
PS, this conversation is a waste of both of our times. I won't be continuing it. Because there is no good faith either side. I'm certainly not going to display any and I aver you aren't either, but you can judge for yourself.
> The issue at hand isn't perceived bias in universities, it's voting tendencies of people who have higher education.
Arguably they go hand in hand, take young people and immerse them in a political/ideological monoculture for four formative years and it's not surprising many come out saying the same things and voting the same way all of their professors did, there's a lack of viewpoint diversity. Most people are mimetic, exposure to the best arguments from an intellectually diverse curriculum would be great but that's not what universities (broadly) are today. It's very hard to think for yourself, even harder when immersed in a place where ideological conformity is rigidly enforced.
FWIW I thought your comment was in good faith, we just don't agree.
Thanks for proving my point by demonstrating you can't comprehend reality. You assume that anything anti conservative must be in the Bernie Sanders camp of full left.
In reality, the modern democrats are pretty much the exact center. Any sensible traditional right leaning policy like free market capitalism, gun ownership, and immigration enforcement is already part of the liberal Democratic platform.
The reason that what I said holds true should be self evident. One of the cornerstone of modern conservativism is small government and reduced government spending. Yet Trump is pretty much doing the exact opposite of this. So to to even begin talking about why conservatism is valid, you have a LONG bridge to cross of somehow proving that Trump objectively the better choice, which at this point would require exceptionally extraordinary evidence.
Another way of testing intelligence is basically to ask the question - what concrete evidence would it take for you to change your mind to the opposite view on a certain subject? For the question of what is better for society, Democrats and their policies vs Republicans and their policies, no conservative can provide a clear answer on what would it take for them to change their mind.
If Trump had lost Iran would probably have a nuclear weapon - that's one reason among many why he was the better option despite his flaws in the last election. Ben Rhodes and others still have not updated despite what is overwhelming evidence at this point that they were wrong. The democrat's failure on immigration broadly (both at the border and on policy) is also something driving people away from them.
I did change my mind fwiw after watching what the Democratic Party became, it isn't what you think it is anymore and its why nearly every district in the US moved to the right in the last election. The soviet style lying about Biden's capacity was disturbing to me, the delusion to run him at all and still not dropping out after that debate was embarassing.
Compare the extreme competence/political capability of someone like Elon Musk or JD Vance to Harris and Walz - it's not even close. Harris was unable or unwilling to talk about anything in any depth and when she did it was particularly stupid (price controls on groceries?). Trump despite his flaws did engage with basically anyone that would talk to him and the policy debates were a lot more interesting - it is new and different from old school conservatism in some ways, but that's good. The democrats hate wealth creation and businesses, they mock Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and have done as much as they could to drive them away from the party.
The left has pushed identity based culture issues around DEI and gender ideology that have had serious negative effects up to and including surgical operations on children due to gender affirming care based on politically motivated bad science along with policing of speech and explicit racism for favored groups, this was ideologically enforced by a new bureaucracy installed at many American institutions. It's anti-west and in direct conflict with American values - favoring a multiculturalist worldview that elevates islamism over the west and rewrites American and western history as evil. It's the same ideology that has pushed Europe, Canada, and the UK (in part because of immigrants that do not share western values) to where they are now terrified to call out these issues and risk being physically attacked along with charges of "islamophobia". Pair this with repeated foreign policy failures that made the US look weak and empowered our adversaries.
Specifically wrt DEI - focusing on arbitrary designations of groups/identity to favor of disfavor based on characteristics unrelated to the work to do is a generally bad and untenable approach. Untenable because what groups to include or not include (or even what constitutes an arbitrary group member) ends up being a problem without a sane answer and bad because people shouldn't be favored/disfavored based on immutable characteristics (like their skin color or sex), but on their ideas/character/abilities. Groups are not a monolith with united thoughts or interests - individuals within groups disagree. The left is still pushing this stuff.
I generally reject DEI as practiced is about empathy or equality - it's an oversimplified collectivist identity/race based worldview that replaces good and evil with powerless (good) and powerful (bad) and gets a lot wrong along the way (generally anti-west, anti-individual). It's explicitly racist and similar to marxism in a lot of ways (just replace class with race or identity). It requires rigid ideological conformity, and outcasts anyone that doesn't adhere to it.
On the gender ideology front - the ideas from the progressive left have largely been rejected by the public and it's because those ideas are bad. This ideology requires people to believe things that are not true. Having biological males compete in sports with biological females (or share intimate spaces) is seen as rightfully absurd and wrong by people not tied up in this false ideology (most people). In addition the ideology, by denying sex, is also regressive when it comes to gender - narrowing the full spectrum of expressed by each sex into cliche categories that define "man" and "woman" by stereotypes. It's basically a false religion that takes confused autistic kids and indoctrinates them into irrevocably harming themselves. It also tramples on actual women's rights.
Watching the reaction after 10/7 on the left was the final straw for me, Harris still could not bring herself to equivocate on this issue. The left is the party marching in the streets and at universities all over the west calling for intifada in direct support of the people torturing, abducting, and killing jews as well as and excusing hatred of jews via its modern incarnation as 'anti-zionism'. It pushes this ideology in classrooms of public schools via Qatar funded school programs. The politicians on the left either directly align themselves with this faction (the squad, Zohran) or are too afraid of splitting their coalition to cast them out. I won't vote for a party that holds these views - especially when there's an alternative that explicitly calls out the problem and defends the values I care about.
I did change my mind along with many others and it was as a result of the democratic parties behavior, it pushed my sharply to the right despite trump's personal flaws - which should be pretty damning. The people left can continue to smugly condescend and they'll just keep losing which at this point is fine with me, they deserve it.
Also when it comes to guns, I live in California - the democrats are hardly the gun friendly party. Magazine restrictions, hand gun registry, CCW hoops and SB2 restrictions, ammo restrictions, waiting periods, rifle restrictions (fins), extra 11% tax, suppressor ban, etc. etc. - if that's an issue you care about they suck.
>If Trump had lost Iran would probably have a nuclear weapon
Random thing to be concerned about, and also very fringe evidence of "probably".
> The democrat's failure on immigration broadly (both at the border and on policy) is also something driving people away from them.
Immigration was never an issue - unemployment was at a record low especially after Covid, and crime was on its way down. Democrats had a bill that targeted immigration reform, which included provision for more funding to CBP and most importantly immigration hearings so that we can actually separate the people who are illegal versus people who are truly under refugee status and shown that they are willing to work and contribute. Trump told the Republicans to veto the bill because the immigration issue would make him look good in elections. You fell for it.
>Compare the extreme competence/political capability of someone like Elon Musk
You mean the guy that funded a candidate, that within 4 months told him to fuck off while passing the BBB that removed a major source of funding for his company? You mean the guy that bet Sam Harris 1mil after saying US wouldn't see more than 35k cases of Covid, only to reneg on the bet and block Sam?
Good one chief.
>The left has pushed identity based culture issues around DEI and gender ideology that have had serious negative effects up to and including surgical operations on children due to gender affirming care
A) Don't lump democrtats with the left. B) Surgical operations on children for gender affirmg care is a non issue, the number of these is incredibly small (and no, the argument Democrats would have increase this doesn't fly). As for DEI, you have to prove with numbers that this was harming American companies and institutions, in terms of economic impact or other factors.
>Also when it comes to guns, I live in California - the democrats are hardly the gun friendly party.
State politics =/= government politics. States have their right to enforce additional laws. Thats in the Constitution.
And again, above all, even if Im completely wrong on all of this, you still have a convicted felon who tried to coup the government, whos name was on the Epstein list with evidence of him being at parties, with Project 2025 thats halfway complete, who does dictator shit every single week. It would take an extraordinary amount of evidence to prove that Kamala was the worst choice.
Part of me really hopes that republicans win in 2026 and 2028, because as bad as things are now, they can get much much worse. Because people like you need to really suffer in daily lives to ever understand that Republican policies can lead to lives where you are concerned about being able to feed your kids instead of having the privilege to worry about tiny issues like DEI.
Yeah, there is a whole interesting story about the Thoratec Heartmate II bloodbpump ("artificial heart") implant and Dick Chaney. Can't be having a back door into the VPs heart implant...
>it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.
There's a lot of both negativity and positivity here. I think both are warranted and important. I'm not generally a fan of Musk and think most of his ventures are overhyped. I also understand that Neuralink committed a series of horrific acts against macaques to develop this device and they ought to be investigated and have what they did shown to the public for scrutiny.
That said, as someone who has undergone screening for a neurodegenerative disease (thankfully I tested negative), I'm fairly confident in saying that it's an awful thing to experience and any technology that can provide more autonomy is invaluable. When I had to confront the possibility that I might have MS or ALS, I literally said "Neuralink probably shouldn't have killed those monkeys but, fuck it, they're already dead so they better hurry up. I don't want to live like that."
I hope we can develop further treatments more ethically and in a way that doesn't result in dystopian brain adverts of course, but even this level of technology is miraculous.
Given the billions of animals we torture for food, at least the ones tortured for the good of humanity are slightly less unjustified. However, "animals kill each other in nature all the time" is not a good argument, because I don't have to hold myself to the moral standards of a hyena.
Love to see it. Wonder if Neuralink ever comes up with less invasive tech that could be used for fun like Emotiv EPOC, but even if they don't, maybe getting one implanted will be as normal as getting a tattoo or a piercing give some years. Because I see this being desirable for "normal" people pretty much already!
This counts as a "shallow dismissal" and is just what we're trying to avoid on HN. It started a flamewar, and we need all commenters to take more care to avoid that. Please take care to observe the guidelines, especially these ones:
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> I'm impressed by Musk's PR team. They hype tech years behind competitors with puff pieces like this with gullible journalists that don't contextualize.
Ok where is a paraplegic who's life has been fundamentally improved more then the Neuralink patient one by some of these other technologies that are "years" ahead?
Note that the first paper you were linked is about a patient in a clinical trial... the paraplegic's life which has been fundamentally improved is the participant in that clinical trial.
He's the most famous rich person on the planet, he was in an Iron Man movie, the president picked him to destroy the government, the list goes on. Of course he gets press coverage. Tesla doesn't even have a PR department.
I mean, let's be real - Telsa almost definitely has at least a whole PR department's worth of people who do PR kind of things, I'd bet they just don't call them PR or have a dedicated department for that PR so he can keep saying that...
Or who knows, maybe they actually just do have a PR department - plenty of stuff Musk has said has just been plain untrue, like when he promised that like his money was first in to Telsa, it would be "the last out" [1] (he has since sold billions in shares now).
I don't know if they're still sending poop emojis, but "public relations" is a term that encompasses more than "press relations", and "press relations" itself encompasses more than answering questions in email.
I always thought only tech people were interested in it.
But 2 years ago, I've talked to an old school, rather wealthy guy, and he was explaining to me that he always invested conservatively but he wants to buy Tesla stock, because Musk said they started producing Optimus robots and next year they will have thousands of those in the factory and all Tesla factory workers could be fired.
Yep, Musk knows exactly what he's doing overhyping his companies. The stock is the product.
Well your father can't buy a Waymo. Even if he could it wouldn't go very far, wouldn't work everywhere and would cost at least 2x a model 3 or Y. So there are at least several leads Tesla has.
It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it? This isn't Lyft vs Uber. A better comparison to Tesla FSD would be blue cruise, super cruise, drive pilot, god's eye, and every other consumer level 2 ADAS.
The premise of Tesla's current market value is that they will capture a majority share of a dramatically expanded global taxi market. Waymo being dramatically ahead at producing workable robotaxis entirely undercuts that premise.
If you instead think Tesla's promise is consumer cars, Tesla's valuation is roughly equal to the entire rest of the global auto industry, despite being only a tiny and declining fraction of global sales. The relevant competitors then are Toyota, VW, Ford, BYD, etc. etc. Objectively, as a consumer auto company Tesla seems to be stagnant and falling behind.
I guess they're also hyping vaporware humanoid robots; if you ask me a future where a significant proportion of all families on earth purchase a humanoid robot seems completely implausible. It's very Jetsons though. Maybe they'll start building flying cars too.
Okay that's not what ordinary people like GP's dad are envisioning. Normal people are envisioning either: "wow I can buy a Tesla and it can drive me around!!" or a macroview "wow in the future Elon Musk is going to make self-driving cars so good that nobody will have to drive!".
We are discussing "normal people thoughts", not market sentiment.
It’s the usual “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", as much as the fundamentals do not work he has captured the average investor and general narrative that something really huge would have to happen to take him down.
I really don’t see anything that will cut through the narrative now.
> It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it?
Because Tesla keeps claiming they'll have full autonomy "next year", year after year.
In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". That was a lie: https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...
Yes, I've heard this time and time again. It has nothing to do with the point I'm making. This is just stoking the flamewar.
If you want to compare Waymo and Tesla FSD from a technology standpoint and claim superiority of one over the other you can't use simple values like interventions per mile. It says very little. The solutions were designed for different purposes under different constraints. That's what engineers do. If Waymo was attempting to make consumer viable self driving vehicles they would have made very different decisions and likewise for Tesla if their only goal was taxi. That should be obvious to any technologist.
By definition if you aim to get autonomous that means you aim for zero or at least a very low intervention per mile. Tesla boast about that but doesn't provide.
You started with "Why is anyone..." and you got your answer - the founder and promoter of the technology has been on record lying about it multiple times. There's lawsuits about it. Steelmanning Tesla's position makes no sense here.
If you're building a cheap mass market self driving vehicle that has to work everywhere you'll make completely different design decisions than a geo restricted taxi. Would you care to acknowledge that simple fact? The amount of hypotheticals you'd have to go through to compare these technologies in superiority up to this point is extensive. Go ahead, do the thought experiment. It would be a lot more interesting than a blanket interventions per mile with zero context.
Otherwise it's a false equivalence dog pile in search of Internet points. We don't need repeating of exhaustingly well known qualities of Tesla's CEO. That's not interesting, the Internet is already overrun with that.
I can acknowledge many facts, but since you seem to dodge that really big one I don't think we can have a productive discussion here. Talking about rationality in that context of what appears to be motivated thinking is ... interesting.
This metric says nothing about self driving capabilities. In fact, I'd argue that FSD supervising the driver (and doing things like limiting speed before corners) would make their cars safer.
To me this metric shows that their cars are very high performing, and for most drivers they're probably the fastest accelerating cars they've ever driven. Tesla should probably default them to 'chill' mode and provide a warning about how fast the car is when you switch out of that mode.
It is fantastically optimistic to attribute Teslas horrific stats to the cars being speedy
For instance the model y had a fatality rate of 10.6 per billion vehicle miles 4x the average.
Its also seems unreasonable to suppose that they are poorly suited to survive a crash as this doesn't seem to be indicated.
A more logical conclusion is that a box with a giant flashing distracting tablet in the center which lies and says it can drive itself gets crashed more because people are functionally incapable of going from passenger to driver at random intervals with no notice.
Teslas also tend to attract people who hate driving and are bad at it. Yes, this is anecdotal, but - several friends and acquaintances said something along the lines of "my Tesla is the best, self-driving helps so much, I hate driving and I can't wait for them to fully automate it".
I wonder if segregating bad drivers into a separate population affects those fatality statistics.
I see that and it's a horrible comparison. Tesla's robotaxi is a consumer car, taxi isn't their singular focus. If it was, FSD design would have taken a different path.
Well because Elon Musk keeps making it. In January 2023, on the official Tesla earnings call, he said that FSD was currently overwhelmingly superior at autonomous driving than everything else in existence:
"So who do we think is close to Tesla with -- a general solution for self-driving? And we still don't even know really who would even be a distant second. So yes, it really seems like we're -- I mean, right now, I don't think you could see a second place with a telescope, at least we can't." [1]
That is a literal, direct, backward-looking statement about current capabilities comparing it to all existing systems. A backward-looking statement that is clearly and objectively false given their present day inability to safely deploy driverless vehicles which Waymo already achieved in 2022, let alone quantitative disengagement metrics demonstrating a level of capability between 10-100x worse than Waymo contemporaneously in 2022 [2] and inferior even to Waymo in 2015 [3]. A false statement made willingly and knowingly in official investor communications to maintain their stock price.
So a person who most of us strongly despise makes you throw out all rational thought and make false equivalence arguments about these autonomous systems?
Everything doesn't have to be about Elon. Imagine you replaced him in 2015, but still approached autonomy through mass market level 2. How would you compare them? I think you might add just a few caveats about the constraints and environments they operate in.
There's a lot of parallels here to the history of Nikola Tesla vs. Marconi. Tesla's inventions were superior, more reliable, more versatile in almost every way. But Marconi is the one remembered as the father of the radio, despite stealing Tesla's ideas and implementing them in less reliable fashion. He got to market fast, iterated on horrible versions, built broken products, but he shipped shipped shipped. And in the market, Tesla faded away, and Marconi won.
I say this as a big Elon skeptic. Technical superiority is only a small piece of the puzzle. But 10 years from now, I would be very surprised if the SOTA tech you mention has a fraction as many users as Neuralink.
I wouldn't be surprise if Musk is bankrupt in a few years. He acts in many ways like someone trying to keep a fraud going and running out of options for how to spin it.
i don't see it like a typical technological race for dominance. user count seems silly beyond bragging rights. i think it's more like a multiparty multipath expedition where the results of each team reaching the top is yet another option with different properties and/or a step forward for clinicians to improve the lives of people with horrible conditions and diseases.
Doesn't matter. That hype will draw attention, which will draw investors, which will draw in money to pay for the best researchers until they become SOTA.
If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up.
Distribution is part of innovation. Brain computer interfaces exist but those who would be willing to undergo the procedure to get them don't have that option, then an inefficiency exists in the market that can be filled by a competitor. Musk's companies play on the same field as everyone else, but they continue to win because operating efficiency, mind-share and tactics are all part of the game, and he is the best at winning it in many domains.
Edit: I understand the ethical considerations of such a nascent technology. I just feel that we live in a world where miracles exist that could help thousands of lives, but they move too slowly to help those lives. How long are paralyzed people waiting for a cheap way to have some more agency in the world? Is the only way to reach it being available sooner doing unscrupulous things that buck safety requirements?
>If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up.
Because other companies have ethics and follow the rules and best practices. They register their clinical trials with the NIH and they stop and ask questions if half the monkeys they test on end up dead.
Because the FDA slowed down his chimp studies and wouldn’t let him combine Neurallink, FSD testing and NHSA crash testing into the same experiment for faster iterations.
It's entirely possible to spend so long trying to remove the rough edges and be perfectly safe that you kill the people you were trying to save via the sheer passage of time.
That's not how things have played out with Tesla. They have all the investment in the world and the most irrational valuation to have ever graced the public markets, yet their tech is years behind competitors.
That “steaming pile at the dog park” drives me driveway-to-parking-lot without intervention on 100% of my drives now. It’s one of the best steaming piles I’ve ever seen and I would pay many dollars for that steaming pile on future cars I purchase.
> would pay many dollars for that steaming pile on future cars I purchase.
Thankfully Elon has already got that sorted for you! $12k, and if you sell your Tesla for a new one, you’ll have to buy it again! Doesn’t transfer with you (or the car for that matter, it just vanishes on title transfer).
But they were first to market. That's 90% of the work. There's a huge gap between "perfect unrealized idea" and "shit you can actually buy". Hate the man all you want, he'll go down in history as the Edison of electric vehicles, even though others will undoubtedly surpass the initial public offering technologically.
The claim was that Musk's companies will "win" though, and they aren't (aside from the irrational valuation). Maybe Space X is winning, but Tesla is a minor player in the auto market with declining revenue.
Electric cars have been sold since the 1800s (electric vehicles predate the 4-cycle internal combustion engine). Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda and Toyota all had serial production of EVs in the 1990s or earlier. The land speed record holder in 1900 was an electric vehicle. Tesla wasn't first, they were relatively late, they just got it right in a number of ways.
Self driving? Maybe, but there is a lot of argument about whether a Tesla is self driving. Based on the fact that Tesla themselves require a human driver ready to intervene, it isn't a credible claim.
> we live in a world where miracles exist that could help thousands of lives, but they move too slowly to help those lives
Do you understand what you're saying? Too slowly in contrast to "move fast and break things" where "things" = "people"? In a thread about the risks of tesla killing pedestrians? This is classic supervillain logic.
Great study, thanks for the reference. Surprised that it's actually still quite far from natural conversation, both in speed and error rate. Created an infographic that summarize the full study: https://studyvisuals.com/medicine-health/a-highperformance-s...
Classic HN middlebrow dismissal, only upvoted because people dislike Musk. Word error rate of 25% is unusable. Also it needs extensive retraining every few days. They used four fixed electrode arrays, like pushing a miniature bed of nails into your brain, which is far more invasive and less advanced than Neuralink's one device with threads individually implanted by robot. Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities.
As for FSD, it leads by far for systems you can own, and while it is not as good as Waymo it is much cheaper and still rapidly improving. It is too early to say which approach will ultimately win.
I have never seen stats showing that FSD is "rapidly improving". Quite the contrary, it seems hobbled by its backward hardware and plateaued in terms of progress.
The backward hardware in my 2020 car has plateaued at driving me driveway-to-parking-lot on 100% of my drives in recent history. It’s a pretty nice plateau, really.
(I admit I’m mocking your wording; in fact it has not plateaued. Just every update makes things slightly smoother in non-safety-critical ways.)
> Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities.
This is entirely ridiculous. There is no and will be no universal device that just works, and does different things depending on just where in the brain you happen to stick it.
"All the people I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice say that Elon Musk is wrong to disagree with them."
Elon Musk does something smart.
"No, Elon Musk did not do something smart. That's because only smart people do smart things. If he were smart, he would agree with the people that I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice. He must have cheated or lied or stole someone else's idea which also makes him not nice and not trustworthy. How can anyone support anything he does?"
"Oh look, someone on HN pointed out that Elon Musk did something smart. They must be not smart, not trustworthy and not nice just like all the other people who disagree with things the people I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice support. Here's a downvote!"
It's impressive someone would be pissed enough for some reason to put effort to spread such a false image as you are.
Robotaxi has been in service a fraction of the time as Waymo has. And the "4000x" figure is absolutely ridiculous, I'd maybe believe 2x at best given I've seen LONG drives with Robotaxi and common FSD while Waymos get stuck / park badly around them. For both, the interventions are done remotely and I bet a lot of Waymo's ones especially are made "secretly". This while Waymo easier decides to do things like parking in middle of road instead of invoking an intervention, and has basically zero scaling prospects compared to Tesla, for which, every Tesla on the road becoming a robotaxi on the owner's command is not actually inconvincible for hw4+ cars in some years.
Neuralink "being 5x slower" sounds hardly believable in real life too, as I've seen their webgrid demo, ran it myself, and seen other people only get fractionally better scores than the person using neuralink with no limbic activity. And "5x faster" means little if the device is not practical, something Neuralink has seemingly put more effort to than others combined. Impracticability especially questions the quality of the data as its probably more "lab-like" while Neuralink patients can just navigate to benchmarks themselves on their own time and run them for fun, obivously with the utility of Neuralink.
Elon truly does lead Tesla and SpaceX, while being in a key role at Neuralink too. If you ever look at some of their demonstrations, he defers a lot to his employees for specific features/demonstrations. It is media's own issue that they hyperfocus on Elon, probably for keyword clicks.
You cannot compare using a technical metric a geofenced pre-mapped self driving technology and a general self driving technology. You can hate on their dishonest marketing all you like, but this is disingenuous.
> Maybe spend more time researching than hating and you'll end up with a more factual state of the world.
The comment you were replying to was the kind of dismissal we want to avoid on HN, but we need you to avoid swipes like this on HN. The comment would been fine without that last line. Please try to observe the guidelines, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
I believe you when you insist you were trying to be encouraging. It’s just that it didn’t come across that way, and several other users flagged and downvoted it, presumably for that reason. We often underestimate how our words come across. What seems like reasonable, friendly advice when formulated in our minds can end up coming across as a snarky personal attack by the time end turns into words on a screen read by strangers.
It’s all good, please just be mindful of this and think about how you can avoid your intended sentiment being lost next time you post this kind of comment.
I would consider getting a Neuralink, because I think better doctors would be available to help make it successful, and I’m getting to the age where I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute much more; maybe having a prosthesis would make more opportunities available, especially given that AI will probably take my job before I could retrain to another occupation that could make similar money. Maybe I’d get the opportunity to go to Mars one day.
I think you can support the technologies behind these companies and respect that someone on the spectrum may be struggling with trying to do what’s right for themselves and the people of Earth as a whole, but has just made a shitload of bad decisions. Many of us struggling with mental health of us can empathize, even if we fully and wholeheartedly disagree on many things.
Once the technology is replicated and perfected by somebody outside of Neuralink. I would potentially consider it. Also, the entire technology landscape would need to be changed.
I don't want brain implants to be owned by the wealthy, as it currently exists. Elon Musk and PR team can fuck off.
Have there been any reviews by independent experts? This reads like a promo piece, in particular I'm not sure why the fluff bits about Musk "being a regular guy" are relevant. Most of the linked sources are either other Fortune puff pieces or Neuralink press releases.
I think a bit of skepticism is warranted here. Patient number 1 isn't some random guy getting the procedure and recounting it's benefits. But someone self-selected and willing from day 1, massively engaged with the company, likely paid or compensated, getting a lot of promotion, visibility and attention, etc.
It's possible a lot of the QOL improvements are from the circumstances of getting all that attention, or the hype circle they themselves found themselves in.
I also think people need to be open minded to the possibility Neuralink does offer promising benefits.
I'm just seeing a lot of people strongly for or against, and really I think the reasonable stance here is to remain optimistically pessimistic until further evidence.
Let's be clear about what is a good subject for review and what is not. One person's opinion about how they feel is not. It can be a good subject for further inquiry, though: learn more about their experiences and consider critically whether those experiences generalize to others.
No placebo can let him "do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body."
Given that there are objective changes, it is not unreasonable to believe his claim that he is satisfied or has benefitted from them.
if it is truly "objective" then his subjective experience is irrelevant, so your logic makes no sense. it is not necessarily incorrect to investigate or be skeptical about another's self reported "subjective" claims (never mind their "objective" ones), for the reasons the comment you were dismissive of mentioned. plus given the nature of the company one would hardly be surprised if certain facts are cherry-picked over others. if it's truly as cut and dry as you believe, then surely any independent expert will soon end up empty handed. being dismissive of such an endeavor before it has even begun feels like kool-aid sippin...
The objective and subjective observations are about different but related things.
The objective measurements are about his enhanced abilities. He can do things he couldn't before.
But, the GP comment referred to "quality of life" which is innately difficult to measure objectively. It's possible that he was able to do those things but it caused him enough irritation to do them that he avoided using it (like CPAP often is for example), or that the things it enabled him to do weren't sufficient to warrant feeling improved. My father has limited mobility, but no interest in playing mario kart or adjusting an air filter, and there's very little in his home that he has or would want to be automated. Anything that could be my mom or another family member usually takes care of anyway, even if it's still something he could do himself as he's rather tech illiterate.
So, in this scenario, given my father's age, the risks involved in such a major surgery for his age, and his personal inclinations, the very same additional capabilities likely wouldn't be worthwhile in his opinion. Hence, the subjective experience of the objective changes are how you measure quality of life for this kind of operation.
yes, quality of life is a very difficult thing to measure objectively, because of the subjective component, as you state. are you under the impression the "reviews by independent experts" mentioned in the comment above the one you cited would only be meaningful if the person narrating their subjective experience was found to be outright lying? you are clearly familiar with some of the nuances, thus i'm not sure why you would not also be interested in independent reviews of the subject. his personal story is worth a lot, but it's not everything. i would think the more people reviewing it seriously, the more benefit to people like your father (and countless others)
If you don't trust the subject, he would most likely decline to participate in an independent review entirely.
In any case, just like the stock market, the fact he responded well does not guarantee someone else will.
What we need is more data, not a higher degree of confidence in this one point. An independent review would be nice to satisfy our curiosity, but it wouldn't add much to our understanding anyway.
You are right when it comes to qualia, but wholly incorrect in this case. There are measurable metrics in his life (ie independent use of computers, social engagements etc.)
It's not like he's having to rate his level of happiness here, these are physical benefits
if that's the case why do you care to read about his subjective experience, at all? isn't that the point of the comment inquiring about an independent review?
Because the subjective experience is the thing we actually care about.
Same reason you ask the users of any product for feedback. Sure, you can objectively see that they were able to click the register button, still doesn’t guarantee they came out of that experience wanting to use the product.
are you under the impression that the sole focus of an independent review as described in the root comment would be to investigate the personal veracity of "Participant 1"'s narration? do you alter course in your product because of single, particular user anecdote? i'm not sure what you think you are arguing against here...
Who is measuring the physical benefits? because based on this article it's no one... so again, we're taking one person's word for it... and it's very likely this person is contractually obligated to not disparage the company
we don't have enough information to say that either, wouldn't be unusual to get free medical treatment in exchange for good press... and even without an explicit incentive there's a lot of implicit bias to not speak ill of someone that has hardware in your brain
this is why it's worthless without a third party review of conditions
That's not categorically true. Although a placebo inherently relies on a patient's subjective understanding of receiving a treatment, that understanding can change any number of very objective outcomes. That's why so many studies that measure objective metrics use placebos to begin with.
a good point, and one that highlights the fact that people are unironically relying on "objective"/"subjective" distinctions in this thread - when this division is not necessarily a straightforward one in neurology or philosophy/language. putting a neurological implant in someone's brain doesn't strike me as an act that immediately clarifies this issue, to put it mildly. but this technology is still in its infancy. thus, the more people to "review" it, the better... doesn't mean the benefits they are giving people or the work has to stop... it just doesn't mean some skepticism isn't warranted either...
I can't tell if you're trying to be clever, sarcastic, or are failing at both so I'll answer earnestly: reviews by independent experts of the claims of Neurolink the company and of the methods used to achieve those claimed results.
See: Yeonmi Park and the absurdity of her stories that are essentially a product of South Korea's day-time TV.
(North Korean refugees typically can't get work permits, some of the little work available is telling people how bad NK is. It is illegal to say anything good about NK in SK)
Its a promising first sign, but that's all. I think you have unrealistic expectations if you expect rigorus science on the cost/benefit after just one experimental procedure. Stuff like this takes time.
The mere fact he didn't die from the procedure is probably a success in and of itself.
> What kind of reprobate thinks it is OK to swat a disabled person? Do you understand the kinds of active harm that your partisanship causes?
What are you talking about? Are you pretending to be upset at a mild question, on the behalf of the disabled? You should explain the active harm this causes, because your partisan celebrity worship is causing you to look goofy in front of strangers.
edit: I am very excited about brain-computer interfaces.
I don't care whether or not he likes Musk, this is America, we love assholes here. I simply don't see how that fact is relevant to an article discussing the merits of Neurolink the program.
I am rooting for success in the general field, but Elon's claims ranging from self-driving cars to autonomous taxi fleets to government cost savings of hundreds of billions need to all be viewed with skepticism. I'll need to see a a lot more than one patient.
personally, I don't necessarily hate the work that Musk's companies do, I think that some of the advances that spaceX have made are excellent, but I just don't like supporting Musk, seeing as he has been very outspoken against people like me, and supports people who hate me
>can they wire up the neurons [...] to something useful e.g. "Open terminal" shortcut?
Pretty much. You could do something like that with non-invasive consumer-grade BCIs already though. What we really need to see is more distinct "keypresses" you can listen for. It's my understanding that something like "imagining pushing/pulling a heavy object" can be read clearly enough, while "twitching your left ear" gets lost in the noise.
It's a long way to go before we can replace the 400 keystrokes per minute, 104/105 distinct keys bandwidth of a keyboard.
With the ear twitch muscles, it would probably be easier to use muscle sensors, which are a lot cheaper and easier to use (stick them on the skin), instead of delving inside someone's brain
I wish they wouldn’t call it “Elon Musk’s Brain Chip”. I guess it is true in a sense since he owns the majority of Neuralink. But it feels unfair to the scientists and engineers who actually designed it, and to all the people who could benefit from it, to overemphasize Musk’s involvement.
Considering all the possible future implications of a Brain Computer Interface - both positive and negative - I would say Musk’s involvement is the least interesting part of this story.
I think that the negativity here is unfortunate. The reality is that it’s very hard to see a normal VC level return on the $100M+ Elon and friends have invested here. And don’t let anyone fool you - this is the fundamental reason the BCI field has moved slowly.
If Neuralink proceeds to a scenario where quadriplegic patients can get reliable (ie lifelong) control of their computers for less than $100k that will be a huge win for them for a cost that no one else was willing to pay.
To be clear, at that order of magnitude they might make back their investment, but it won’t be 10x or 100x, and the potential healthy-brain-connected-to-the-AI play is much less rooted in reality than Teslas all becoming taxis.
Worst case scenario is that Elon loses interest and pulls the plug and Mr Arbaugh loses continued tech support a la a google product. I think that’s the one question I wish the author had asked…
The unfortunate part is that your first thought went to return on investment rather than the humanitarian angle, which I think is the common perspective; optics and money.
Then there's the pessimists, like me, wondering how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up.
> how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up
It's really hard for me to imagine that making more logistic sense than the current state of affairs - which is hiring armies of poor able-bodied people in developing countries.
It's not that difficult, really.
"By using this implant I agree to the collection and sharing of analysis data with Neuralink and its trusted third parties".
[ ] Agree
[ ] Ask me later
The point is the scale of poor people vastly outweighs the scale of Neuralink users. It's not worth both the setup cost, nor the backlash to convert the relatively small number of Neuralink users into forced labour. Especially since they would still need the poor workforce as well.
Agreeing to data collection and sharing of your brain activity while concerning for it's own reasons, is not the same as forcing them to complete Mechanical Turk like tasks.
> unfortunate part is that your first thought went to return on investment rather than the humanitarian angle
It’s just a pragmatic take on sustainability of innovation. If nobody—no person or government or non-profit—would find value in the future of the work, it merits questioning why do it versus something else.
There's a spectrum here, though. There's a difference between "nobody would find value in the work" and "nobody can figure out how to get VC-level returns from the work on VC timescales."
> a difference between "nobody would find value in the work" and "nobody can figure out how to get VC-level returns from the work on VC timescales”
In theory, yes. But other than maybe rare-disease research, I’m struggling to think of an example in medical research.
I don't think it's unfortunate - in principle, return on investment today can achieve greater humanitarian impact tomorrow vs humanitarian impact today.
Of course, this creates a perverse situation where choosing humanitarian impact today over investment is always irrational, but this is the fundamental tension in charity vs investment, and aside from relying on governments and guilt, I'm not sure we have discovered a great model to solve it
Problem is, when people start to analyse things like this, even apart from falling into utilitarian traps, they don’t apply regular business reasoning.
There’s a bunch of effects to consider 1) improving lives right now may well improve subsequent generations lives directly 2) your future project may have a higher failure rate than your current one 3) the problems you are trying to solve may no longer be relevant in the future 4) you could be very wrong about future population growth.
All of this boils down to: you should be risk-discounting future benefits just the same way as you do future cash flows.
It's the people thinking about the bottom line who will push for the gradual enshittification of the product until it's beaming ads into people's brain, preventing them from saying anything bad about elon, forcing them to sing his praises against their will, or charging them a monthly fee for "continued autonomous breathing as a service".
Taking a good thing and fucking people over with it in every way possible is "regular business reasoning"
At a certain point it's smart to say "We have the technology to do something good, let's be extremely cautious about concerns over what's profitable and focus on doing what's right with it"
If something cannot stand on its own two legs, then it can be the most awesome stuff in the world but it will die nonetheless. Being self-sustainable (i.e. profitable) greatly helps with keeping the show going. The alternative is either becoming publicly owned (i.e. paid with your taxes whether you want it or not) or to fail miserably and have all your technology and talent scattered.
Unfortunate phrasing about inability to stand on its own two legs or it dies here.
It does kinda feel like there's an accidental attempt to LARP the plot of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan (if you squint hard enough) - richest man in the world, brain control, Mars colony, attempted coup on Earth... all the plot points are there!
Once Elon gets a robotic arm, steel teeth and prosthetic eyes that's when we know we're in real trouble.
To me that's the greatest part. Probably everyone working on this is interested in the humanitarian angle, and they know this can benefit potentially millions. But ROI is partly what's required to make it sustainable long term. And that's a great thing to me. It motivates business people to put money into it.
Things are only created or expanded if there is a return. Its that simple.
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Things have costs so we should be ok with a society where the wealthy exploit poor and desperate people?
The supposedly cynical comment above talks about giving quadriplegic people a reliable way to control computers for <$100k, something that was science fiction before. Is this what you call exploitation of the poor and desperate by the wealthy? You have to finance things somehow, or they won't be done at all.
There are many ways to finance this without strapping a parasite to leech off of it on top
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As much as I dislike (current) Musk, the comment I'm responding to clearly wasn't about that. Do you see this work being done by anyone else? I don't. And yes, it has the potential to turn dystopian, sure. Don't let it. I don't know how some people manage to see everything as strictly black and white.
Being called a bot was unexpected, to put it mildly.
Exploiting? I’m lefty, but this dude volunteered for the procedure and was fully reimbursed. I’m having a really hard time seeing “exploited” on this one.
> this dude volunteered for the procedure and was fully reimbursed
And it worked! The animal subjects were exploited. This man was not.
The only way I can square this circle is with the hypothesis that everything a billionaire does must be exploitative of the poor. (Which holds about as much water as its balancing hypothesis on the far right about leftists being good for nothing more than whining.)
According to the left exploitation can occur when people choose and are paid for it.
For example demeaning work. Also much of slavery, indentured servitude in the past was chosen and fully reimbursed. Most classic lefties would say all work is exploitation under capitalism.
It's the idea of individualism mostly seen on the right wing and the modern/American democratic left that says that people make free and rational choices in an amoral economic model. When money sets the rules there is no exploitation. I think the reality isn't so black and white and people can make good and bad decisions.
So while I agree he probably wasn't exploited it doesn't mean that others in the same place doing the same things will not be.
> "much of slavery was chosen"
Have you ever thought of "choosing slavery" for yourself and your children? No, because given a choice, nobody would choose to be a slave. The fact that people "choose" to be slaves is evidence that they had Hobson's choice. Probably because the wealthy and powerful arranged the system and laws to give people no choice because they wanted slaves.
> "When money sets the rules there is no exploitation
People didn't freely choose to migrate from their ancestral homeland, farming and hunting and grazing animals on common ground, to go and "find their fortune" in the slums and workhouses of the growing urban areas; the land was taken by force, the laws were set by the wealthy to kick the commoners off, to make wild grazing and hunting illegal, to shift the taxes away from land and onto trade, and the commoners were forced into it or "choose" starvation. William the 'Conqueror' in 1066 in Britain started it and set the model for the British colonies and British Empire which pushed it out around the world. From[1]:
"the Anglo-Saxon period as the system of law know as ‘folkland’, whereby land was held in allodial title by the group or regional community .. 1066-7 Norman invasion displaces Anglo-Saxon commons/land ownership model. William the Bastard declares that all land, animals and people in the country belong to him personally. .. We go from a country in which >90% of people owned land, to a country of landless serfs, themselves owned by foreign lords. .. The intended effect was precisely the result: the dispossession of the ‘common folk’ (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a Latin speaking Norman aristocrat) of their ancestral lands and rights."
"Commons Act 1236 allowed Lords to enclose common land .. Statutes of Westminster 1275/85/90 restrict subtenure/sale of parcels of land other than to the direct heirs of the landlord. These restrictions gave rise to .. the retention and control by the nobility of land, money, soldiers and servants via salaries, land sales and rent. In-effect, this was the start of modern wage-slavery"
"1536 to 1541 Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, who privatises church lands (then 1/5th of the country). As these lands were often used by commoners, for grazing – this dispossesses people further from essential access to the land and generates yet more landless people who are wholly dependent upon the emerging model of selling their labour to survive i.e. wage-slavery. 1671 Game Act made it illegal to hunt wild animals, considered a common right since time immemorial. 1700-1850 Parliamentary Enclosures, now no longer held back by the sections of the Church, nor by the power of the (heavily indebted) nobility and Monarchy, land enclosures increase exponentially in both speed and size, and the new urban slums grew correspondingly"
"By 1700 half all arable lands are enclosed, and by 1815 nearly all farm land was enclosed; hunting, grazing, pannage, foraging, wood collection and gleaning rights, are all but lost. From 1750 to 1820 desperate poachers were ‘hanged en-mass’. 1800-1850 the Highland Clearances led to the displacement of up to 500,000 Highlanders and crofters, tens of thousands of which died in the early-mid 19th century, their settlements and economies replaced by Sheep. An esteemed member of the ‘British’ aristocracy noted: ‘It is time to make way for the grand-improvement of mutton over man.’. 1790-1830 a third of the rural population migrates to urban slums. Where they are put to work in early forms of factories, workhouses"
[1] https://tlio.org.uk/a-short-angry-history-of-land-in-britain...
I’m familiar with those applications of exploitation, too, but they also wouldn’t apply here. This wasn’t demeaning work and wasn’t predicated on necessity, past their disability.
And of course, all work is exploitation under capitalism (from a true lefty point of view) but I didn’t perceive the original comment as referring to that level of exploitation. Just saying that this isn’t the hill to die on if one wants a case for capitalist exploitation.
I do understand the dangers of others being exploited down the line but again, that wasn’t what OP was saying either.
Really, if this is exploitative it’s only an indictment of profit incentives in healthcare, which are abhorrent.
Far too often I see someone stepping in to stop some "exploitation" and thereby making the poor/desperate people they were supposedly helping worse off.
The problem here is what is the best use of our resources? Neurolink has raised a total of $1.29B USD.
Is funding a high risk project the right allocation of $1.29B that supports a tiny fraction of humanity or would $1.29B be better spent on cancer research, addressing childhood food insecurities (free school lunches), etc?
Do we know? Is this answerable in advance? Probably not.
Pretending scarcities don't exist is one of the biggest problems with current policy.
This is the forum for a VC-funded startup accelerator, so yes, the implicit belief you hold if you're posting here is supposed to be "VCs deserve money, i.e. the wealthy deserve more wealth, and I will help them get there".
It's not exactly the same as "so we should exploit the poor and desperate", but that is one of the pitches VCs like the most.
I want to say the answer to this is "not all lurkers/posters", because at this point I'm more treating this place as an early warning system for how the hellhole dystopia will come about.
The amount of self-censoring I've ramped up to to keep anything useful from amoral VC's though does appear to prove your point though.
One of the biggest unsolved issues with BCI and neural implants is the immune response to implanted electrodes. The tissue buildup and fluid that encapsulates the probe or stimulator drastically increases the impedance of the device and causes all sorts of hard to solve problems for longevity of the implant and whatever therapy or recording it's trying to accomplish.
The endgame for Neuralink here, and most other competitors in the field is to use these transplants on healthy people as well to "enhance" human function.
> Worst case scenario is that Elon loses interest and pulls the plug and Mr Arbaugh loses continued tech support a la a google product.
That’s not even close to the worst case scenario. There are many worse outcomes than the product becoming inoperative, such as it malfunctioning in a way that significantly worsens the person’s quality of life, or its creator deliberately holding functionality hostage. Musk is known for being incredibly petty and thin skinned, I wonder how he’d react to Neuralink users doing or saying things he doesn‘t agree with.
I am genuinely glad this participant and presumably others have a new chance at quality of life, but it would be better if the one in control of the technology weren’t a private individual with such a history, and that the process to reach this milestone had been handled more responsibly and respectfully.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-...
Probably a decent reason that all such augmentations need to be built on open technologies. If no provider can guarantee future support, only open strategies are even viable for users.
> decent reason that all such augmentations need to be built on open technologies
Open is a red herring. Mandate documentation and bonding for long-term support. If the cheapest way to provide those are through an open-source platform, great. If not, that’s also fine. Patient outcomes outweigh ideological preferences.
exactly!
Open Source Accessibility isn't sustainable right now. How on earth do you imagine open medical hardware to ever reach a level where it is generally useful to people with disabilities?
In general, I find the negativity in this whole thread very sad. If I were in the situation were I was looking forward for technology like this, and I'd read the comments here, they would make me very sad. Because in essence, I would learn that politics is more important to some SV people than actual progress.
Frankly, if Elon ended up creating a technology that helps people, I wouldn't care about his politics at all. I'd be damn grateful for someone investing in something that ended up helping me. But obviously, politics trumps empathy here, which is very very sad.
I am still a magnitude off regarding 100k for assistive technologies, but sufficiently large braille displays cost 10k$ to 15k$ in Europe. That is a plain display of 80!!! characters in a single line. No 1080p, mind you. This has been the case since I am alive. The costs are mostly driven by redistriibutors, who usually add around 70% when importing from the US. Do I feel exploited? No, I am glad the technology exists. And frankly, if you have any empathy left, you should as well.
By commercializing open source technology development so that the paying non-programmer and the ecosystem dependent SME's and Fortune 500's can meaningfully drive development of what they need.
You can see my gloriously broken prototype at PrizeForge. Currently between iterations and still not quite viable enough to properly operate.
Well, Sun Accessibility Office already did great work from roughly 2003 to 2008. Then came 2008. And Sun AND IBM terminated their Accessibility work. From then on, Orca was basically kept alive by a single developer for roughly a decade. I am not 100% sure if she has given up by now, but I'd be surprised if she didn'.t
So, giving this job to Fortune500 companies is demonstratably not sustainable. A single higher up can terminate such projects with the wink of an eye.
I was more hopeful 20 years ago. Then I watched how all the good work on GNOME2 was basically trashed because of DBus transition, GTK3, and now Wayland. Fact is, hoping for the corporate world to do the work is no guarantee they will continue. And for "scratch your own itch"-philosophy to work, there are not enough disabled OSS devs. Maybe after WWIII there will be a surge in Open Source Accessibility.
You read my comment, but you are missing that I'm building to tools to bundle the work together, which is the way to make a strong enough open foundation that things like open accessibility technologies can have more ground to stand on.
Scratching our own itch works better when coordination means we can bundle together a whole lot of itch. There is no such thing as individual incentive to cooperate without a means of coordination. Anything else is just the volunteer's dilemma, and so only small itches get scratched.
Not everything can be handled using death by a thousand cuts. In the Rust in 2021 blog [1], the importance of depth versus breadth was pointed out. Depth comes from dedicated, full-time, paid work.
[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/12/rust-in-2021.html]
From a capitalist point of view, Neuralink will only become profitable and valuable if they go full sci-fi and offer a brain/computer interface that anyone can use, AND that there's systems and applications that use it, AND that it becomes popular and "better" than e.g. smartphones.
But that last one is the kicker. AR never became mainstream. Unless a brain interface is faster and more intuitive than e.g. a physical keyboard, it will never become mainstream either.
AR will become mainstream with time. It's a question of UX which has very heavy investment behind it.
Exactly. AR is still extremely early days, limited by hardware and software. I have no doubt that it has a future, there are just some impediments that have yet to be remedied (but I have no doubt that they will)
> If Neuralink proceeds to a scenario where quadriplegic patients can get reliable (ie lifelong) control of their computers for less than $100k that will be a huge win for them for a cost that no one else was willing to pay.
Until subscription price is increased.
After nearly two decades of flat out lying about Tesla's capabilities and then the last year of insane lies, I literally don't believe anything that comes out of any of his companies. Perhaps you do.
It's not really a lie, it's so-called "make-belief", which entrepreneurs exude in order to justify their own time and money investment, as well as spreading it to the army of employees. This sort of delusion is necessary for the inaugural period of concept development, until you prove whether the concept is viable or not. Some people call it vision. It is an entirely fictional concept, of course. Sometimes you stumble onto something working that gets traction. Then this lie turns into reality, and the entrepreneur is raised to the rank of prophets.
In other words, he doesn't do it out of malice. These are the rules of the game.
> The reality is that it’s very hard to see a normal VC level return on the $100M+
Nobody gives a shit about the iNvEsToR rEtUrN on iNveStMeNt. This is a humanitarian project which should be owned by the people, not a select few billionaires or investors to license out and dangle yet another expense, subscription, or ad model.
Why aren't any humanitarian organizations doing it currently?
Nothing is stopping them from doing it. You sound mad that he's actually out there making it happen because some theoretical humanitarian project should. Why not be happy he's actually out there solving this for people and the fact that real people are materially benefitting?
Companies like this going under is a horror story for the patients I've seen playing out a few times. But I honestly can't see something as public and well-funded having the same fate. "Elon Musk losing interest" isn't really something I see likely as he doesn't function in the money-oriented ways pretty much almost all other billionaire-types do. He loves the tech and the ideals, and Neuralink is past the point of ever being potentially a dud
Ah yes he just became a billionnaire because he isn't money motivated and just loves tech. If only we all loved tech as much as Elon and money as little as Elon does.
> isn't really something I see likely as he doesn't function in the money-oriented ways pretty much almost all other billionaire-types do
Is that why he sued to obtain his $29B package from Tesla shareholders?
I’m not the biggest Elon fan, but “man sues to receive the thing he earned over several years of accomplishment that made a lot of people a lot more money than they originally agreed to pay him” is something a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to.
> man sues to receive the thing he earned over several years of accomplishment that made a lot of people a lot more money than they originally agreed to pay him
Do you have a source for this?
As far as I understand, the bonus package represents a large part of revenue of all Teslas sold since the beginning.
> is something a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to.
Does he also need to pay back stocks when he does a nazi salute, thus tarnishing the brand's image and stock value?
> Do you have a source for this?
At the time of the original pay package award (3/21/2018), with primary performance conditions being the growth of Tesla market cap (making money for Tesla shareholders), Tesla had a market cap of $53.5B.
At the time the lawsuit against Musk set aside that pay package in January 2024, Tesla's market cap had expanded under Musk's leadership to around $600B.
$600B - $55B = $545 billion in market cap increase (making money for shareholders), which dwarfs both the $29B he agreed to take as well as the larger amount he would have been due under the 2018 agreement.
Is that why he has a non-functioning board of lackeys friends and family members?
That's not how public companies are supposed to work. And no, he didn't earn $29 billion.
Elon musk is a Nazi. He should not be running these companies.
He's simply in a position by undermining what normally is in public company governance to siphon money away from the company.
> Is that why he sued to obtain his $29B package from Tesla shareholders?
I think you're confused on two sort-of-related things: one is the $56B package agreed to and approved in 2018 that a judge decided to revoke, for that he's suing.
The other one is the relatively recent (July/August) $29B package that was created by two indipendent board advisors to give him a "salary" (he did not participate or vote on the creation of this package), since apparently he received nothing from Tesla for the past 6-7 years. This comes as a result of him expressing that if he wants more control over the company, or he's going to build things (AI, robotics) outside of it. Part of the deal is that he's to forfeit this if the ruling on the 2018 package is in his favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tes...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/04/tesla-hands-29b-comp-packa...
> he doesn't function in the money-oriented ways pretty much almost all other billionaire-types do
I'm pretty sure he does, his actions in government and his lobbying were specifically so he made more money. He does love the tech, though I'm not as optimistic about his love of the ideals (but that might be the socialist in me talking).
I'm am wary about how brain implants could be abused further down the line, but for now it's not the main thing I'm looking at with Neuralink. It seems to be a positive change for the patient, and if costs can be reduced to make it affordable to the masses, it can be a great thing.a
Sorry what? You couldn't have picked a better example of someone who is going get bored, walk off and leave customers screwed. Tesla customers bought a full self-driving car about a decade ago. Where is it? Oh yes, that's right. Elon Musk lost interest and now he's over at neuralink sticking electrodes in this guys head. This guy better hope that Elon doesn't get bored again.
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That’s last point reminds me of the Second Sight situation where they abonan their tech. Previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349871
I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave. I do not know much of anything about medical science, but my impression is that we are still very, very far from having a deep grasp of how both the brain and the immune system work. Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.
Many tech professionals work on projects that effect people's lives in very serious ways. But a lot of folk seem to feel a bit of meaninglessness in this career and the threshold of making a mistake isn't very high. If it's an off day, sloppy work yesterday can be fixed with another PR.
Building something that is meant to attach to someone's brain would be quite the burden to carry.
> I think anyone who chooses to undergo the first few trials of a new operation like this, and is informed about the risks, is very brave.
Brave and/or incredibly desperate.
> would be quite the burden to carry
only if you care
The kind of amount of regulation around this makes me think they are not in that big of a danger, especially as previous devices in this class are way more invasive than Neuralink. I remember that even in their earliest own presentations the width of the "wires" is fraction to previous solutions
> Ultimately, to the body an implant is simply a foreign object.
I get your point but, there's a lot of foreign objects going in by the way of various pores and openings. Biological beings are surprisingly resilient & fragile at the same time.
Those openings lead to spaces that are not "inside" the body, though. For deuterostomes like humans, the digestive tract is still "outside" in a lot of important ways.
Well good golly miss molly, that's a word I had never heard of. Thanks!
For the lazy it basically means as embryos our anus forms before our mouths do. So we have to talk out our asses before we even leave the womb!
Not remotely the same thing.
Pesticides and micro plastics are equally foreign even if not absorbed/ingested in as one big unit. Besides, in modern medicine, implanting devices in organs (ex: pacemakers, valves, electrodes) isn't unheard of?
I think you narfed your own point by using objects getting into various pores and openings.
Pacemakers are somewhat similar devices that get implanted into bodies and still effectively are "foreign objects".
I'll let other blind people go first, but I'm definitely some one that would love, love, love to be able to see. Driving, knowing body language, playing any and every video game out there, shoot yeah!
The exact same comment I would write. Waitin for generation two of any of this kind of tech.
I hope that you get that opportunity one day.
From what I've read, if you are blind from birth, but visual signals were suddenly restored, your brain wouldn't know how to process them. Blind from birth = blind forever. I'm not certain though.
Some part of this is true, but it’s complicated.
I lack stereoscopic vision, due to eye surgery in infancy & wildly different focal lengths in each eye (one is very nearsighted, the other farsighted).
I can still see in 3D because my brain uses tricks like relative object size, shadows, and sometimes I move my head laterally so my farsighted eye gets different angles on an object (“faking” stereoscopic vision with one eye).
Nonetheless, catching a ball thrown straight at me is very difficult— I have to judge the size at which the circle is getting larger, and know the actual size of the ball. It often hits me in the hand and I try to grab it before it bounces away.
And I can never see those stereogram images where it looks like static unless you focus both eyes at some distance. I never see the world with both eyes simultaneously.
I once got glasses that corrected my vision “perfectly” but got major headaches and couldn’t wear them. Objects were in focus in both eyes, but were wildly different sizes!
I went to an ophthalmologist who basically told me they can correct my lenses but in my brain “the wiring is shot”.
I mostly work in front of a computer screen. I now use reading glasses so that when my nearsighted eye gets tired, I can put them on and continue working with my farsighted eye. These glasses have only a minor correction on the nearsighted eye so they don’t give me headaches.
Do you notice any difference in thinking when you are “left eye active” vs “right eye active” in front of the screen or reading ? Asking because I have a much milder version of the situation that you describe (still within the boundaries to make it work without the glasses almost all the time), but I notice a weird “not the same” feeling when I am using not the eye I am used to.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, and I haven’t noticed different thinking. But I switch back and forth all the time. Like writing this I’m using my nearsighted eye, but if I look across the room my vision switches to my farsighted eye (more or less instantly).
The thing other people notice is after I’ve had a long day of screen time and am physically tired (long day, late night), and I’m out with friends, my farsighted eye does all the work and my nearsighted eye gets lazy and wanders. It’s got nothing to do and can take a break! I’ve heard many a good-natured joke about it over the years.
"Blind" has way more of a wide definition than we usually appreciate.
I volunteer at a food pantry. There is one old lady who is sometimes rude in the line, shoving through saying "move it, I'm blind!!" She sometimes informs me that produce I hand her has black spots and she doesn't want it.
I believe she may actually be legally blind.
I have family like this. They can see enough 'shape' to play something like Tetris extremely well but anything that relies on colors is usually a no. When we were young they had color but that went away first. My understanding is that as they get older the resolution of the shapes gets lower and lower, so they have to make things bigger and be as close as possible.
It was beyond the point of glasses being able to do anything useful for them just as they finished college.
Black spots often have a different feeling on produce.
That's a good point. I'm fairly certain that lady has said that to me before touching the food. I think some legally blind people are good with shapes and big contrasts. She may also be relying on smell and not expressing it.
If they have any sight at all, their ability to cope with that limited sight would also be greatly increased; that is, if their resolution is significantly lower, their relative contrast may be much higher, even if what the object is is much less clear, without context.
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I think the brain would adapt. It may take a while but the brain is very flexible and adaptable.
According to research impaired structural brain development due to visual deprivation from birth is not fully reversible and limits functional recovery. So even if eye sight is fully restored, cortical function will not be able to fully take advantage of that.
Experiments and studies have shown that this might be due to the fact that the visual cortex will take over a similar role in blind people as it does for people with intact eye sight. The brain uses different sensory inputs in that case and the visual brain structure is not restored after eye sight recovery.
This is still an ongoing field of research of course, but so far congenital blindless seems to be incurable, regardless of whether the sensory apparatus could be restored or replaced. Note that this only means seeing like a non-blind person. Some limited visual perception is still possible, just not "normal" sight.
Do you have some links handy? I'd be very much interested in the description of experience from people that have gained sight after congenital blindness.
You might be interested in searching up "strong critical periods" in brain development - this phenomenon has been studied for decades and has interesting implications for lots of aspects of brain development: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period
Case studies suggest otherwise, at least for most people.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not...
don't have full article access but this part near the top makes it not applicable to the situation being discussed (blind from birth)
> since early childhood
In a way it strengthens it since even if he became blind later one, still:
> It was, rather, the behavior of one mentally blind, or agnosic—able to see but not to decipher what he was seeing.
And while he does get better, it does end up with:
> But then, paradoxically, a release was given, in the form of a second and now final blindness—a blindness he received as a gift.
Cf: https://web.archive.org/web/20240111185639/https://www.newyo... (older version does not trigger the paywall or at least can disable it while it's loading).
Depending on the task[1], it takes 1 week[2] to 1 year[3].
1. https://news.mit.edu/2011/vision-problem-0411
2. Shape recognition
3. Face recognition
If you are young enough, yes. But after a while, the neuroplasticity is simply not enough. Seeing is a complex enough process, if you miss learning it in your childhood, the train is gone. This is a very common error people make, announcing implant technologies to grown blind people as if the cure was just around the corner. It isn't. You will never adapt to a point where the vision you just gained is actually useful. Imagine trying to learn to read print, at 30, with a pixelated implant? It is a naiv pixie dream of sighted people.
> I'll let other desperate people go first
FTFY.
Calling them desperate seems rude. Why judge the participants? Not everyone has access to other SOTA solutions and if this is the next best thing for them, why not.
The rhetoric in this thread is generally laden with patronisation. I know that phenomenon as a person with a disability. Left leaning people are quick to speak for me and try to patronize on my situation. It is, frankly, plain virtue signaling. I could do without that, thank you very much.
Why would you not go first? If you are blind it cannot be worse (well it can, but there are always risks).
My wife went through semi-expetimental therapy (at that time) for her MS. It was tough but ultimately a net benefit.
It all depends on what is at stake - I would consider Ozempic for some weight loss but prefer, for now, go for no sugar and moderate portions. This is not life changing for me so I indeed prefer people who will benefit way more from it to go first.
It's a brain chip. How do you feel about being blind and paralyzed? Or comatose? Or dead? How about never-ending pain or constant bright flashes? What if they go bankrupt, and something happens to the implant?
Brain surgery isn't exactly an industry where "move fast and break things" is an acceptable approach - especially when you are the patient. Considering Neuralink's historical record, going first sounds like a horrible idea to me.
Also seizures, personality changes and myriad forms of cognitive impairment.
The 20 years of US adventures in Iraq & Afghanistan led to many traumatic brain injury cases analyzed by modern medicine, and the chronic symptoms are worse than one might think.
How do you feel about not having THE sense that defines your whole life? This is a matter of personal choice and weighing risks vs your life as it is.
Nobody is forcing anybody to have the chip - my question was about the reasons behind not taking it for someone who is blind, as a matter of curiosity. It is obvious that everyone will react differently.
As I mentioned, my wife went for that and it was quite a ride initially. You do not want to be on the witnessing side of such treatments but I respect her choice despite the risks.
Vision is not the sense that defines the whole life of a blind person.
Of course, this is why I gave the counterexample of the case where it would be.
Of course your statement is false? Strange.
> Considering Neuralink's historical record
What historical record? This article is about their first human participant.
They had a rocky path to that first human patient, and even the first human participant has had a rocky journey with it, with many electrodes failing soon after implanted.
Experimental procedure on volunteer is experimental. More news at 11.
Counterpoint: the main motivation for installing brain chips is to be able to do those things to subordinates.
It's important that no one can accidentally sideload misinformation.
No different than checking an ID at the airport, really.
> If you are blind it cannot be worse
Holy moly.
I think it was obvious they meant the condition of blindness cant't be worse.
No, that's obviously not obvious, since the person you responded to thought otherwise.
Yes, this is what I meant.
I can imagine some rather catastrophic negative outcomes from novel new brain surgery techniques, even if the blindness were not somehow made worse.
From a game theory perspective it's very rare for it to make sense to be the first to try new medical interventions.
Mate thats not game theory its common sense.
1 + 1 = 2 is common sense, but it’s also math.
It's a lifelong change and whatever the state of the first release is, chances are in 5 years time there'll be a better version and everything is safer.
I guess I don't have a similar thought process as someone who thinks going no sugar is the right way to achieve weight loss.
The reason you might think twice about going first is for that exact reason, there are risks. Plenty of blind people would prefer to stay as they are than be left worse off to a greater degree after undergoing the implant.
How would you go for weight loss then? This is calories in - calories out.
And as for which state one wants to be in, this is a matter of personal choice. I know that I will commit suicide right after I get a diagnosis of, say, Alzheimer's (after cleaning up my stuff). If I went blind and had a reasonable chance to get back to sight, then I would also go for it, weighing the risks.
It all boils down to what someone perceives as "better"
One cannot measure calories out (other than deducing it from calories in and weight change), which is a complex function of diet, metabolism, and a host of other factors.
As for the rest--your other posts implicitly assume that everyone else shares your choices and priorities--and if not then they aren't relevant. (BTW, there is strong evidence showing neither you nor anyone else knows what they would do after receiving such diagnoses.)
> One cannot measure calories out (other than deducing it from calories in and weight change), which is a complex function of diet, metabolism, and a host of other factors.
Sure, but when you eat sugar in several forms and overeat generally, you statistically get fatter. This works the other way round too. There are myriads of specific cases on the sides of the bell curve but the solution for the everyday Joe is to eat less, more healthily. Practicing sports helps too, but not so much (it is important for other health reasons)
> As for the rest--your other posts implicitly assume that everyone else shares your choices and priorities--and if not then they aren't relevant.
Wow, where do you get that from? The main point of asking questions here is not to be a troll and wait for internet fights but to get interesting insights from others. You may want to slow down with the pitchforks and such statements.
> (BTW, there is strong evidence showing neither you nor anyone else knows what they would do after receiving such diagnoses.)
Or not. You also have people who prepare for that in advance, with a clear decision path. I have, and have no doubts taht I will go for that having evidenced suffering in other people. Not everyone contacts a company such as Dignitas to make sure things are organized. Not everyone discusses with the funeral house details about their death at 45, not everyone has a "what to do when I die" booklet with key information (financial and how to de-smart the house :)). Not everyone gave a deeper thought about designing a kill-switch device that would poison them in case they are incapacitated.
Not everyone is like you so I would not be that fast in making such radical statements.
> Sure, but when you eat sugar in several forms and overeat generally, you statistically get fatter. This works the other way round too.
I wrote about calories OUT.
In respect for dang I won't comment or engage further.
For weight loss I go via a calorie deficit, but still consume all macronutrients, I wouldn't cut out sugar as I would feel pretty rubbish. I'd go less on the sweets like chocolate and lollies but I wouldn't completely cut out sugar as its important.
what therapy did your wife go through?
The very early form of TYSABRI
That's funny because Ozempic can blind you.
It’s associated, not causal, and likely explained by diabetes as a 3rd variable. (Diabetes can blind you and glp-1 drugs are treatments for diabetes.)
The blindness is linked to rapidly changing A1C in diabetics and is a small increase in overall risk.
If you're just using it for weight loss and aren't diabetic, you have no increase in risk.
This is also why your weight loss should be monitored by a doctor.
Super uncertain, and, if the effect exists, it's tiny --- huge numbers of people have been taking these drugs for many years. Meanwhile, we know with certainty that T2D can blind you, and we know mechanistically why that happens. If you're at T2D risk, NAION would be a really dumb reason to avoid GLP-1s.
There is a great podcast with the entire team + Noland on yt. It is ~ 8h long, but IMO it's worth the time. You get to hear things from the perspective of the chief brain surgeon, hardware team, software team, and of course Noland himself. I really recommend it, to get a better understanding of what's possible, what they had to do to get there, and how impactful this kind of research is for people with terrible conditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbk9BiPhm7o
I love and hate this type of Lex Friedman interviews. Several factors give out when there's a podcast that is posted uncut with a 8 hour length that I'd like to listen to. Wish he cut them!
I completely relate - but I listened to this one, alone, in full. Technology has produced many things you might call a miracle, but this one stands out.
Still the same depraved head of neurosurgery, Dr. Matthew MacDougall, who said: "If tomorrow laws were changed and the FDA said okay you can do some of this early experimentation in willing human participants that would be a very interesting option I think there would be a lot of people that would step up." [1]
That is basically the textbook definition of unethical medical practice, so unquestionably far over the line of acceptable practice that you would have to be willfully ignorant to defend it, and they think it would be exciting if it were not banned.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZGItIAUQmI&t=5239s
> That is basically the textbook definition of unethical medical practice
This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what was said. First of all, it's really hard to get malpractice here, as consent is implied (unless you'd think he'd purposefully do a bad or sloppy job). You could say it's irresponsible, and that argument holds more water, but when folks are in these terrible situations (i.e. terminally ill, etc.), a strong argument could also be that it's morally impermissible to disallow them to partake in such experimental treatments.
In any case, it's an interesting moral conundrum, akin to abortion or euthanasia.
Being blind or disabled isn't anything like dying of cancer.
We allow compassionate testing of therapies that might allow you to live longer because the alternative is an ugly death.
Consent is never ever ever implied and you don't have to deliberately do a poor job to be liable.
Just not having good evidence of the therapy is liable to improve their lot and doing it anyway or failing to impart an accurate picture of the risks because you don't know enough to do so.
How can you possibly have informed consent without the same info that you hope to glean?
> We allow compassionate testing of therapies that might allow you to live longer because the alternative is an ugly death.
Calling many of these therapies "compassionate" is a bit of a stretch after you learn about their side effects...
> Being blind or disabled isn't anything like dying of cancer
I think it’s presumptuous to conclude from afar where someone’s affliction lies on a scale of suffering.
People should be free to do with their bodies what they choose. To describe and act on their subjective experience of themselves as they see fit, not as a third party deems they ought to.
But how you glean info without volunteers consenting to take a risk in hope of improving their lot?
I think this comment highlights how bad the state of “medical ethics” is. Barring informed people from getting treatments they want is unethical in my book. Full stop. The entire apparatus is built on shoddy backwards ethics.
If it were up to you I bet we couldn't ride motorcycles or jump out of airplanes either.
These kind of takes often place a higher value on people's life than they would place on their own. We should let people choose MAID if that's the best outcome for their lives, and we should let them risk their health for science. It's up to them whether they feel they have anything left to lose.
This is aside from the harm it does to the rest of us to prevent experimentation by willing participants, such as barring human challenge trials to quickly test Covid vaccines.
well, it may be one thing when we're talking about functional adults deciding for themselves to opt-in to experimental treatment.
i would guess that these protections exist to cover a broader group including children or those who are in the care of others and aren't necessarily capable of making their own decisions about experimental treatment... to say nothing of other forms of coercion otherwise-capable adults may face when it comes to stuff like this.
it's tricky! and it doesn't seem like there's a one-size-fits-all approach that offers protection for those who need it.
Who are you to decide what is acceptable? This type of moral system is entirely cultural.
It was a rational speculation about people's behavior, not any sort of medical practice.
This tech is incredible but it will be very divisive. Leadership of the current leading company notwithstanding, novel implants such as pacemakers have also undergone a stage of social caution that I would very much expect to surface for brain-interface devices as well, if not more fervently due to an increasing mistrust in technology's utility in our lives.
I am personally hopeful for this technology. I know it will be able to improve the lives of loved ones who both need and want it. I am also afraid of a technology that can decide my thoughts one way or another...
That said, I'll take two.
Divisive is an understatement.
If this tech could be made to work flawlessly, it would be the gate to all the SciFi cyborg stuff, including body enhancements, "telepathy", etc.
Also, as a "side effect", it would open a path to fully immersive VR, as in Matrix, Snow Crash, Neuromancer, etc - with all the upsides and downsides of those scenarios.
All that "just" from hooking up motor and sensor neurons. And then people would probably start and mess with neurons that are involved in cognitive functions and the consciousness.
If generative AI had potential for cultish behavior, I think that will pale in comparison to this stuff.
The dystopian downside is significant. It is not difficult to come up with half a dozen horrific outcomes of this technology.
Unskippable preroll ads in your dreams. A whole new meaning to "sentiment analysis".
Futurama! Just watched that episode today.
It is amazing how well Futurama has held up :-D
I recently watched an episode where there was a bit about "Don't date robots" and it had me absolutely rolling, but also hit pretty close to home in 2025
Black Mirror had a recent episode as well.
Funny part being how we have ads everywhere else today.
“Just a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding.”
Imagine if your brain implant got infected by malware. There will be entries in the DSM for that, and another entry for "patient is convinced that implant is infected by malware, but it's actually totally fine".
And then there will be neural rootkits that make people compulsively reject the mere possibility that they could be infected...
Indeed it is. I think the tech is enormously exciting, but the ways in which both ordinary people and people in power could abuse it, are obvious.
I also don't trust the current brand of tech billionaires to handle this stuff responsibly - if they aren't specifically aiming for those dystopian scenarios even.
Based on all of Musk's past behavior, he doesn't exactly strike me as a guy who would deeply care for the disabled or make it his life's mission to cure spinal cord injuries - or even to grant super powers with no strings attached to the average person.
But he does seem like the kind of person who obsesses about the "next stage of evolution of the human race"...
It killed the vast majority of animals used for testing. Two would probably yield that result for you
This is genuinely exciting, but I still can't help thinking about the Black Mirror episode where a woman requires a subscription to stay alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Don’t we all need subscriptions to stay alive?
No.
That's an awfully dismissive reply. I agree with the parent, we already all require subscriptions to stay alive. In the most literal sense that's going to be basic utilities like water, power and arguably connectivity. And then there are those who are dependent on a continued supply of medication as well.
The parent post was an awfully broad sweeping statement that deserved an accurate reply. Obviously we don't "all need subscriptions to stay alive." I guess folks on hn have forgotten the difference between need and want.
A lot of potential for that episode. And I still love Roy, but I feel like that episode was a shallow as hell take on subscription services. Could have been a lot more.
Friends with Parkinson's with neural implants anecdotally report great results, but of course with rather coarse tech. There seems to be lots of future potential.
https://www.parkinson.org/living-with-parkinsons/treatment/s...
My brother has had YOPD since his late 20s. He got DBS done about 3 years ago, and it was life changing. Not only in the symptom reduction (tremors and rigidity significantly reduced -- he walked straight for the first time in years, could button his shirts again, etc), but also in lifestyle improvements around the amount and frequency of medication, the ability to sleep properly (several side effects of both PD and the meds affect sleep), the ability for his body to actually relax.
DBS, like you said, is rather course tech and actually quite old technology. Doctors still don't entirely know why it works, so the adjustment is often experimental. In fact prior to specialized MRI machines that they use during surgery now, the patients would remain awake during the placement (brain surgery) of the electrodes so that the surgeons would know when the placement was "correct" based on real-time assessment of their symptoms. Now they do it under MRI, but the point being it's far from an exact science.
Can't wait to see what the future holds as they improve on it. Hard to imagine a world where his symptoms are fully managed (PD is progressive degeneration, so his symptoms, even with DBS are gradually worsening with time), but it was also hard to imagine how DBS could overnight change his life in the ways it did.
My daughter has DBS for severe Tourette's. Her quality of life before the implant was horrible -- frequent 110 dB+ screams and self-injury. The implant has reduced her tic frequency and intensity by easily 95%. It's not only given her her life back but also the lives of her family members.
The potential of brain interface technology is truly incredible -- both for good and ill.
I don't know if Congratulations is the right word to use, but it conveys how I feel about what you said.
Has this been used for other health issues too?
Yes, it comes from pacemaker tech, and is used for all kinds of dbs applications like this and also for pain blocking applications
Too much marketing speak without the demo. I have read this long article and did read some more related content on the internet, so let me summarize it for you.
With Neuralink,
- Noland can control cursor of his computer - He can schedule calendar meetings - He can control his purifier, television, etc. - He can play games like mario kart
I could only find this demo on the internet where Noland plays chess - https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1ypJdkXjaLNGW
I still remember the first person with the Dobell Eye back in the late 90's
https://archive.ph/3H31i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Dobelle
I did not see any breakthroughs in neural link patents. Have they solved neural scaring?
This appears to be at least a partial solve for it.
Older implants are notorious for having that issue - and while scarring doesn't appear to hurt the brain all that much, it sure does hurt the connectivity.
The usual "bed of nails" Utah array typically deteriorates massively within 6 months. Neuralink's very first human implant has lasted for what, a year and a half already? It had issues with dislodged electrodes, which must have hurt the interface quality, but it still remains usable. That's a damn good sign.
There are flexible electrodes, rather than rigid arrays. The idea was that this would reduce scarring. I'm not aware of the exact results of the trials, but it works better than rigid arrays for longevity of recording.
Trade secrets?
Not sure but they did manage to make the patients say that it had changed their lives. :smirk:
My son has cerebral palsy, doesn't talk and has poor motor skills. I certainly hope this technology progresses.
Unfortunately, it'll be a while until this kind of interface is usable for that.
Neuralink is currently running trials on quadriplegia - with people who have their motor cortex intact, but their spinal cords damaged. Cerebral palsy often involves damage to motor cortex. So wiring the implants into it might be of limited use. No one knows if it'll work, or how well.
Targeting premotor cortex? It's extremely promising, but no one knows how to do that yet. In medicine, that means "years, if not decades, of research and development", sadly.
I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to watch the tech move slowly from afar when you have the issue at home.
Neuralink is amazing technology and watching videos of participants who have completely different abilities and freedom with Neuralink implants is mind blowing. It’s sad that many want to dismiss these amazing achievements just because it’s an Elon Musk founded company. At some point you simply have to acknowledge his success (and his team’s), and hope they get further with all of this.
For those interested in their clinical trials:
https://neuralink.com/trials/
Neuralink is super cool actually great medical tech, and elon comes in -in this article- blabbing about optimus robots or whatever as usual. I hope elon continues to get neuralink lots of money so that they can do useful things.
Is it okay to be skeptically appreciative of Neuralink's technological breakthroughs while hoping that, due to its association with Elon, that the technology and talent decides to go elsewhere?
Could be for saltiness over his politics. Could be for skepticism that he can deliver (robotaxi, Mars, etc). Could be for wariness that he'll turn it to shit like USDS, Twitter, and Tesla's finances.
It’s actually the other way around. Musk is getting a ton of attention even for stuff that’s inferior to what other teams are doing.
"Inferior?" Neuralink's tech is SOTA.
Before Neuralink, there was no major investment into BCI tech as far as eye could see - because medicine is where innovation goes to die. We've gone from Utah arrays in 1990 to Utah arrays in 2020. All while computing and AI - the other key enablers of neural interfaces - advanced in leaps and bounds.
Neuralink maybe. Do you remember how much attention he got for his stupid submarine during the Thai cave rescue?
I have lots of ideas. Some are great, some are ordinary, and some turn out to be embarrassingly stupid.
So does everyone else who tries to create new things. Edison had dumb ideas, too, like his mining ideas. The Wrights also had dumb ideas like their persistence with wing warping, and the canard stabilizer.
The sub thing didn't hurt anyone, it was an emergency so he didn't have much time to think about it, so really it's uncharitable to slam him for trying to help.
Do you think his rockets are dumb ideas, too? Starlink? Tesla?
This discussion started with somebody complaining that people are dismissing Neuralink because it's Musk's company. My point is that his ideas are getting way more attention than other people's ideas, stupid or not.
And he is an attention whore who will go after people who are dismissing his ideas. The cave guys in Thailand had to waste precious time thinking about his submarine. If Musk had really been willing to help, he would have done testing in quiet and published things only when it was clear that it worked. But he is an attention whore because he knows it's good for business.
Same for DOGE. They could have done their work in quiet and with deliberation. Instead they fired quickly some random people whose work they didn't understand or like.
> his ideas are getting way more attention than other people's ideas, stupid or not.
His amazing track record with success means his ideas merit more attention than your ideas or mine.
> The cave guys in Thailand had to waste precious time
insulting Musk on CNN. They didn't have to do that. They could have simply said "no thank you, we'll handle it".
> But he is an attention whore because he knows it's good for business.
Yes, offering his company's considerable engineering talent and resources for free is pure evil. Sheesh.
> Instead they fired quickly
They didn't have the people to evaluate tens of thousands of individuals, nor did they have several years to do it in. The way they proceeded was the only practical way. It's the way all organizations above a certain size cut costs when hemorrhaging cash.
I mean it hurt the guy who disagreed with it a lot, since Elon decided that because of that he was a pedophile and proclaimed that publicly
"the guy" initiated the exchange by calling Musk names on TV. Musk did not initiate it.
Vern Unsworth said that the submarine wouldn't work, Musk then called him a paedophile and tried to hire a private investigator to discredit him. Could Musk not have just accepted that yes, his idea was stupid, and not thrown false accusations with no basis at Unsworth?
> Vern Unsworth said that the submarine wouldn't work
He said a lot more than that, and none of it nice. He definitely threw the first punch in this exchange
Vern publicly insulted Musk on TV first, and so I have no sympathy for him when Musk insulted him back.
> Unsworth had mocked Musk’s submarine in an interview with CNN, deeming it a “PR stunt” and saying Musk should “stick his submarine where it hurts”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/05/elon-musk...
Isn’t that still a win for the field?
> It’s sad that many want to dismiss these amazing achievements just because it’s an Elon Musk founded company
That's not a fair take. This isn't "just a thing", this leads to massive financial gain by someone whose now a very influential power into people's lives from his involvement in politics and other circles of influence.
People can do good and bad at the same time, and if you're impacted by the bad things the person does, the good doesn't excuse it, and you'd want to stop them from doing more bad, it makes sense not to cheer on the good things they do that then fuels their effort into the bad things.
There can be disagreement on if they are doing bad, but to someone who believes so, it's a rational stance to not cheer on what can further fuel what they consider bad.
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I'd expect that right now it's life changing in a positive way for many recipients.
- The people getting it are in very rough shape and even a tiny bit of improved ability to control their environment is a tremendous gift to them - Musk seems to be busy playing with his other toys - We're far to early in this tech's progress for enshitification to start
Much as I dislike Musk, for the sake of all the people with debilitating conditions that this could help, I wish him phenomenal success with this project.
OTOH, I don't trust him to manage this as a product in an ethical way. What's the DBI equivalent of locking you in a car to drown?
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For someone with a supreme lack of judgement he sure does own a lot of billion dollar companies. I strive to have the same lack of judgement that he has.
Caligula was pretty successful too. Maybe money and power aren't the magical trump card you think they are.
Pretty sure there's a correlation between intelligence + sociopathy and money.
I hope not, I'd rather have fewer narcissistic sociopaths in the world. He only cares about himself and what people think of him. Nothing he does is to benefit other people. He's not Iron Man, he's Lex Luthor.
I guess people have always idolized the creeps of the world, though.
> Nothing he does is to benefit other people
The only way Elon makes money is through people voluntarily giving it to him in exchange for what he creates.
That, and billions of government contracts and subsidies.
The government contracts were simply being paid for a service, like you paying a taxi for a ride. Not a gift in any way, shape, or form.
The subsidies were EV subsidies, which were available for all electric cars.
It will never cease to amaze me how some people think they can know somebody the've never met as well as you think you do. I attribute it to projection.
This guy tweets all day and the press talks about every little thing he ever does, there are hundreds of videos of him on youtube, dozens of his employees and ex-employees telling stories about him on the net. How much more do you think you are going to learn if you actually talk to him?
I would argue a lot of Musk haters are not getting a representative sample of his behavior, but rather only the most outrageous things he says and does, which tend to be the things that penetrate their bubble.
I don’t hate him. I think he’s a sad, small man who makes himself feel big by being a bully and faking technical experience and knowledge. I think his fans confuse being in the right place at the right time in possession significant capital as genius. I think he is an incredibly toxic public figure. I think farming outrage and feeding trolls is bad for everyone. I think Nazi salutes are bad. I think that lying is bad. I think abandoning children is bad. I think buddying up with fascists is bad.
So sure maybe I miss out on his generous acts but honestly he does enough bad that I don’t particularly care about any good he does. He’s only doing it for himself anyway.
> in the right place at the right time in possession significant capital as genius
1. he created the capital he had
2. he is not the only person with capital
3. the opportunities he saw, no one else did
When someone wins the lottery 3 times in a row, it is no longer credible to call it "luck". He's simply a genius.
Walter, this is Elon Musk. Using my genius-level intellect and no emerald mine money, I have hacked into this humble HN account to contact you.
I want to thank you for being one of my most valiant defenders by bestowing upon you $1 billion! There are those online who would dare besmirch me, a billionaire, as anything but a demigod. Luckily I have my legions of loyal followers, of which you, Walter, are the greatest. I owe you my very life and cannot wait to have you over to lick my boots some more.
I read this Musk biography a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
I don't think he's short of technical skill. I think he is a genius, and I think he's sincere in his desire to make humanity multiplanetary.
I recommend reading the biography to get the facts that aren't penetrating your bubble.
I think Musk is going kind of insane due to ketamine abuse, bipolar disorder, and/or whatever caused his father to go insane around his current age.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PaL38q9a4e8Bzsh3S/elon-musk-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/ketamine-...
You keep saying I’m in a bubble. I read the Vance bio, and the Isaacson one. I came away with very different opinions of him. At least the Isaacson book didn’t leave me with the taste of boots in my mouth.
I watched the guy throw up a couple of nazi salutes while standing onstage after using his immense wealth to buy an election and a place in the government from which he caused immeasurable damage and engaged in outrageous corruption.
Then there's the union busting, the kneecaping of public transit projects, the environmental damage to protected areas caused by spacex dumping wastewater, the people being poisoned by the exhaust from xai datacenters, and so on.
Those "outrageous things he says and does" are beyond the pale and people are absolutely correct to judge him negatively for it.
I'd go so far to say that folks defending Musk are - wittingly or unwittingly - beyond the pale and the rest of us are absolutely correct to judge them negatively for it.
>the kneecaping of public transit projects
Is this the thing about California high-speed rail? I looked into that when it came up on HN the other day, and concluded that Musk had basically nothing to do with the failure of that project. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299460
So -- Do you have actual solid evidence to defend this "kneecaping of public transit projects" claim? Or shall I assume that the rest of your claims are also liable to be based on half-truths and internet rumors?
Because from my POV there appears to be no end of BS floating around the internet about Musk: https://www.snopes.com/collections/musk-rumors-collection/
In any case, I'm not "defending" Musk in the sense of saying he's a good person. I'm just saying people should try to see him accurately. If you judge people negatively for giving you any information that challenges your worldview, I'd say you're basically admitting that your worldview isn't likely to be very accurate. You can persuade yourself of anything you like, if you're selective in the evidence you admit.
Is the “nazi salute”, still a thing? It seems like accusations involving it are increasingly used as a tool to delegitimize, because cmon.. you can’t agree with him, but that wasn’t a nazi salute.
It is entirely possible that parent poster is simply basing their judgment of Elon on his Nazi salu---er, public behavior.
I'm not sure whenever it's a good idea to cheer for lack of life-changing technical progress just because it's ran by a company governed by an ethically problematic person. The person is temporary, the progress is permanent.
I'm mostly cheering for more competition in the field. No reason for advances in life-changing technical progress to belong solely to that one company.
The damage that can be done by an unethical person is not always temporary.
It is if 99.9% don't need the tech and face worse outcomes in real life because of Musk
> It is if 99.9% don't need the tech and face worse outcomes in real life because of Musk
Everyone with motor dysfunction should suffer so we can stick it to a racist man child? Who’s the villain in that narrative?
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Not trying to be snarky, but doesn't this mental model effectively allow you to ignore any/all things otherwise intelligent people have to say, simply because you disagree? If I met Einstein, and he had opinions about how to cook chicken that differed from mine, I wouldn't leap to "he's a complete moron in the kitchen!", i'd be inclined to really attempt to understand the difference of opinion.
I'm not disagreeing that intelligence can be domain specific, but I'd be careful going to far with this. It is _not_ obviously the case that "anyone who can think critically leans towards the Democratic party", and putting that forward seems like an exceptionally dangerous bubble to build.
I already answered this
If you are a person who has shown traits of very low intelligence, any fact you state has to have concrete evidence, especially if its something that is not easily verifiable.
Meanwhile people who have generally shown themselves to be more intelligent can generally be trusted more from the start.
>t is _not_ obviously the case that "anyone who can think critically leans towards the Democratic party"
Yes it is. Conservatism comes from not being able to comprehend reality around you correctly. Anything rational in the conservative movement (like sensible gun rights) is already a part of modern liberal Democrats, while the rest of the stuff is just objectively and verifiably wrong.
And just for clarity, its not my side versus your side. The far left movements that lean towards hard socialism and abandonment of private property are also verifiably wrong. This is part of horseshoe effect in politics.
> Yes it is. Conservatism comes from not being able to comprehend reality around you
ffs, go talk to a real conservative sometime. If you lived their life, you would be them.
"anyone who can think critically leans towards the Democratic party" isn't something anyone who's actually intelligent would ever say.
Yes because it makes perfect sense to vote for convicted felon, most likely a child molester, who tried to coup the government when he lost in 2025, with Project 2025 behind his back.
That act alone pretty much disqualifies you from being able to talk about intelligence in the first place.
Four false turds packaged up in haughty fake outrage does not mean you have given us a golden truth. The democrats chose an unimaginably bad candidate and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Ah yes, the whole lawsuit where Trumps legal team argued that he in fact did submit a slate of fraudlent electors, but argued that he had the right to do so because he was immune from legal prosecution, is totally false, despite being all documented in publicly available court proceedings.
Also this https://www.project2025.observer/en
So please understand that when you claim that these things are false, it is absolutely ok for people to assume you are mentally ill. Because you chose to live in a world inside your head instead of actual reality.
That’s fine if you assume that! I definitely am not 100% perfect. Thanks for the link I’ll take a look.
It is. The opposition is getting ready to crater the economy whilst building concentration camps to be filled by the klan army he's putting together whilst gutting both our constitutional protections and ability to remove what ammounts to a senile version of Hitler.
They are doing so much damage to institutions and ultimately to people that their loss in 2028 will be damned near inevitable leaving them no course of action to stay out of prison other tha what they have already outlined which is to end democracy.
There is no substantial opposition from the Republicans singly or in groups. They are barely willing to verbally chastise him and none dare vote in a meaningful way that would impact his plans.
They were barely willing to admit he wasn't pres in 2021 when he was nothing.
It's exactly what a partisan reddit midwit would say and they're overrepresented when it comes to Elon Musk hatred.
There used to be less of that on HN, my theory is younger accounts that are more politically extreme/lefty are now here as the younger generation graduates school and posts more on HN.
There's some historical irony too since communism came out of highly educated academic elites and is responsible for an enormous amount of death and value destruction. Ideological driven academics that think they're better than everyone are particularly good at crafting insane ideologies someone outside of that insular community would not, then leveraging institutional and cultural power to force it on everyone else. The woke and gender ideologies share similar origins, same for DEI.
It's a political and ideological monoculture and it's a dangerous mixture of incredibly confidently smug and wrong.
Worth picking up Peter Thiel's first book which goes into this in some detail (he wrote it pretty young, observing the early start of this when he was at Stanford). It's wildly prescient and was from the mid 90s iirc.
Do you think Pew research is a democrat shill body?
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideo...
I'm very midwitted. 50% of the planet is below the mean after all..
What is "education"? Is it degrees? There are a lot of problems with this. It's hardly a sign that someone "thinks critically".
A lot mediocre students I knew in school stayed on to do more school because they were not able to do something else. A lot of degrees and classes are frankly bullshit and this problem has gotten worse since the 60s - the details matter. Time wasted studying pseudo-intellectual nonsense doesn't imply someone has a better understanding of the world than someone else (often the opposite) - just that they wasted time getting indoctrinated in a particular culture (often subsidized by others if not the taxpayer).
What about the people doing interesting and useful things in society, building stuff, creating wealth - what these people think matters a lot more than someone that got a PHD on olfactory ethics. Not all education is equal.
Even then, the meta analysis matters less than the details of the actual underlying argument. Appeal to authority and experts is a poor substitute for rigorous good faith debate of the actual issues.
There's a reason William F. Buckley said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from Harvard.
"I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."
So it's not that I dispute the data that there's a lefty bias in universities (there obviously is), I dispute what that actually means.
> So it's not that I dispute the data that there's a lefty bias in universities (there obviously is), I dispute what that actually means.
The issue at hand isn't perceived bias in universities, it's voting tendencies of people who have higher education.
PS, this conversation is a waste of both of our times. I won't be continuing it. Because there is no good faith either side. I'm certainly not going to display any and I aver you aren't either, but you can judge for yourself.
> The issue at hand isn't perceived bias in universities, it's voting tendencies of people who have higher education.
Arguably they go hand in hand, take young people and immerse them in a political/ideological monoculture for four formative years and it's not surprising many come out saying the same things and voting the same way all of their professors did, there's a lack of viewpoint diversity. Most people are mimetic, exposure to the best arguments from an intellectually diverse curriculum would be great but that's not what universities (broadly) are today. It's very hard to think for yourself, even harder when immersed in a place where ideological conformity is rigidly enforced.
FWIW I thought your comment was in good faith, we just don't agree.
Thanks for proving my point by demonstrating you can't comprehend reality. You assume that anything anti conservative must be in the Bernie Sanders camp of full left.
In reality, the modern democrats are pretty much the exact center. Any sensible traditional right leaning policy like free market capitalism, gun ownership, and immigration enforcement is already part of the liberal Democratic platform.
The reason that what I said holds true should be self evident. One of the cornerstone of modern conservativism is small government and reduced government spending. Yet Trump is pretty much doing the exact opposite of this. So to to even begin talking about why conservatism is valid, you have a LONG bridge to cross of somehow proving that Trump objectively the better choice, which at this point would require exceptionally extraordinary evidence.
Another way of testing intelligence is basically to ask the question - what concrete evidence would it take for you to change your mind to the opposite view on a certain subject? For the question of what is better for society, Democrats and their policies vs Republicans and their policies, no conservative can provide a clear answer on what would it take for them to change their mind.
If Trump had lost Iran would probably have a nuclear weapon - that's one reason among many why he was the better option despite his flaws in the last election. Ben Rhodes and others still have not updated despite what is overwhelming evidence at this point that they were wrong. The democrat's failure on immigration broadly (both at the border and on policy) is also something driving people away from them.
I did change my mind fwiw after watching what the Democratic Party became, it isn't what you think it is anymore and its why nearly every district in the US moved to the right in the last election. The soviet style lying about Biden's capacity was disturbing to me, the delusion to run him at all and still not dropping out after that debate was embarassing.
Compare the extreme competence/political capability of someone like Elon Musk or JD Vance to Harris and Walz - it's not even close. Harris was unable or unwilling to talk about anything in any depth and when she did it was particularly stupid (price controls on groceries?). Trump despite his flaws did engage with basically anyone that would talk to him and the policy debates were a lot more interesting - it is new and different from old school conservatism in some ways, but that's good. The democrats hate wealth creation and businesses, they mock Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and have done as much as they could to drive them away from the party.
The left has pushed identity based culture issues around DEI and gender ideology that have had serious negative effects up to and including surgical operations on children due to gender affirming care based on politically motivated bad science along with policing of speech and explicit racism for favored groups, this was ideologically enforced by a new bureaucracy installed at many American institutions. It's anti-west and in direct conflict with American values - favoring a multiculturalist worldview that elevates islamism over the west and rewrites American and western history as evil. It's the same ideology that has pushed Europe, Canada, and the UK (in part because of immigrants that do not share western values) to where they are now terrified to call out these issues and risk being physically attacked along with charges of "islamophobia". Pair this with repeated foreign policy failures that made the US look weak and empowered our adversaries.
Specifically wrt DEI - focusing on arbitrary designations of groups/identity to favor of disfavor based on characteristics unrelated to the work to do is a generally bad and untenable approach. Untenable because what groups to include or not include (or even what constitutes an arbitrary group member) ends up being a problem without a sane answer and bad because people shouldn't be favored/disfavored based on immutable characteristics (like their skin color or sex), but on their ideas/character/abilities. Groups are not a monolith with united thoughts or interests - individuals within groups disagree. The left is still pushing this stuff.
I generally reject DEI as practiced is about empathy or equality - it's an oversimplified collectivist identity/race based worldview that replaces good and evil with powerless (good) and powerful (bad) and gets a lot wrong along the way (generally anti-west, anti-individual). It's explicitly racist and similar to marxism in a lot of ways (just replace class with race or identity). It requires rigid ideological conformity, and outcasts anyone that doesn't adhere to it.
On the gender ideology front - the ideas from the progressive left have largely been rejected by the public and it's because those ideas are bad. This ideology requires people to believe things that are not true. Having biological males compete in sports with biological females (or share intimate spaces) is seen as rightfully absurd and wrong by people not tied up in this false ideology (most people). In addition the ideology, by denying sex, is also regressive when it comes to gender - narrowing the full spectrum of expressed by each sex into cliche categories that define "man" and "woman" by stereotypes. It's basically a false religion that takes confused autistic kids and indoctrinates them into irrevocably harming themselves. It also tramples on actual women's rights.
Watching the reaction after 10/7 on the left was the final straw for me, Harris still could not bring herself to equivocate on this issue. The left is the party marching in the streets and at universities all over the west calling for intifada in direct support of the people torturing, abducting, and killing jews as well as and excusing hatred of jews via its modern incarnation as 'anti-zionism'. It pushes this ideology in classrooms of public schools via Qatar funded school programs. The politicians on the left either directly align themselves with this faction (the squad, Zohran) or are too afraid of splitting their coalition to cast them out. I won't vote for a party that holds these views - especially when there's an alternative that explicitly calls out the problem and defends the values I care about.
I did change my mind along with many others and it was as a result of the democratic parties behavior, it pushed my sharply to the right despite trump's personal flaws - which should be pretty damning. The people left can continue to smugly condescend and they'll just keep losing which at this point is fine with me, they deserve it.
Also when it comes to guns, I live in California - the democrats are hardly the gun friendly party. Magazine restrictions, hand gun registry, CCW hoops and SB2 restrictions, ammo restrictions, waiting periods, rifle restrictions (fins), extra 11% tax, suppressor ban, etc. etc. - if that's an issue you care about they suck.
>If Trump had lost Iran would probably have a nuclear weapon
Random thing to be concerned about, and also very fringe evidence of "probably".
> The democrat's failure on immigration broadly (both at the border and on policy) is also something driving people away from them.
Immigration was never an issue - unemployment was at a record low especially after Covid, and crime was on its way down. Democrats had a bill that targeted immigration reform, which included provision for more funding to CBP and most importantly immigration hearings so that we can actually separate the people who are illegal versus people who are truly under refugee status and shown that they are willing to work and contribute. Trump told the Republicans to veto the bill because the immigration issue would make him look good in elections. You fell for it.
>Compare the extreme competence/political capability of someone like Elon Musk
You mean the guy that funded a candidate, that within 4 months told him to fuck off while passing the BBB that removed a major source of funding for his company? You mean the guy that bet Sam Harris 1mil after saying US wouldn't see more than 35k cases of Covid, only to reneg on the bet and block Sam?
Good one chief.
>The left has pushed identity based culture issues around DEI and gender ideology that have had serious negative effects up to and including surgical operations on children due to gender affirming care
A) Don't lump democrtats with the left. B) Surgical operations on children for gender affirmg care is a non issue, the number of these is incredibly small (and no, the argument Democrats would have increase this doesn't fly). As for DEI, you have to prove with numbers that this was harming American companies and institutions, in terms of economic impact or other factors.
>Also when it comes to guns, I live in California - the democrats are hardly the gun friendly party.
State politics =/= government politics. States have their right to enforce additional laws. Thats in the Constitution.
And again, above all, even if Im completely wrong on all of this, you still have a convicted felon who tried to coup the government, whos name was on the Epstein list with evidence of him being at parties, with Project 2025 thats halfway complete, who does dictator shit every single week. It would take an extraordinary amount of evidence to prove that Kamala was the worst choice.
Part of me really hopes that republicans win in 2026 and 2028, because as bad as things are now, they can get much much worse. Because people like you need to really suffer in daily lives to ever understand that Republican policies can lead to lives where you are concerned about being able to feed your kids instead of having the privilege to worry about tiny issues like DEI.
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this isn't reddit
Everyone who has ever worked in security: “Ain’t no way”.
A computer virus that can access brains is a scary thought and I'm not sure what would alleviate that concern for me.
That said, if you need this, the security side of it is a secondary concern to the very immediate quality of life improvement.
Yeah, there is a whole interesting story about the Thoratec Heartmate II bloodbpump ("artificial heart") implant and Dick Chaney. Can't be having a back door into the VPs heart implant...
I’m not convinced this would apply to OpSec people who are physically unable to move any limbs. Pro and cons of course, but..
I doubt that.
>it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.
Oliver Sachs
There's a lot of both negativity and positivity here. I think both are warranted and important. I'm not generally a fan of Musk and think most of his ventures are overhyped. I also understand that Neuralink committed a series of horrific acts against macaques to develop this device and they ought to be investigated and have what they did shown to the public for scrutiny.
That said, as someone who has undergone screening for a neurodegenerative disease (thankfully I tested negative), I'm fairly confident in saying that it's an awful thing to experience and any technology that can provide more autonomy is invaluable. When I had to confront the possibility that I might have MS or ALS, I literally said "Neuralink probably shouldn't have killed those monkeys but, fuck it, they're already dead so they better hurry up. I don't want to live like that."
I hope we can develop further treatments more ethically and in a way that doesn't result in dystopian brain adverts of course, but even this level of technology is miraculous.
I don't think anyone here should comment about Neuralink when they haven't watched Lex Fridman 8 hours episode with the team. Seriously
so true!
I'm sure that lives of those animals whom are being tortured for this tech to be developed were changed as well.
As you typed these words, millions of animals out in the wild were being devoured alive by other animals. Torture was here before humans.
Given the billions of animals we torture for food, at least the ones tortured for the good of humanity are slightly less unjustified. However, "animals kill each other in nature all the time" is not a good argument, because I don't have to hold myself to the moral standards of a hyena.
I don't feel like it is unreasonable to put a different set of ethical standards to an animal out in the wild and a human.
Love to see it. Wonder if Neuralink ever comes up with less invasive tech that could be used for fun like Emotiv EPOC, but even if they don't, maybe getting one implanted will be as normal as getting a tattoo or a piercing give some years. Because I see this being desirable for "normal" people pretty much already!
Of course he said that
The 1-st human that has undergone a partial stroggification?
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This counts as a "shallow dismissal" and is just what we're trying to avoid on HN. It started a flamewar, and we need all commenters to take more care to avoid that. Please take care to observe the guidelines, especially these ones:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I'm impressed by Musk's PR team. They hype tech years behind competitors with puff pieces like this with gullible journalists that don't contextualize.
Ok where is a paraplegic who's life has been fundamentally improved more then the Neuralink patient one by some of these other technologies that are "years" ahead?
Note that the first paper you were linked is about a patient in a clinical trial... the paraplegic's life which has been fundamentally improved is the participant in that clinical trial.
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It's freely available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10826467/
As opposed to verified by armchair scientists? It's public, btw.
He's the most famous rich person on the planet, he was in an Iron Man movie, the president picked him to destroy the government, the list goes on. Of course he gets press coverage. Tesla doesn't even have a PR department.
I mean, let's be real - Telsa almost definitely has at least a whole PR department's worth of people who do PR kind of things, I'd bet they just don't call them PR or have a dedicated department for that PR so he can keep saying that...
Or who knows, maybe they actually just do have a PR department - plenty of stuff Musk has said has just been plain untrue, like when he promised that like his money was first in to Telsa, it would be "the last out" [1] (he has since sold billions in shares now).
1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/342107352041922560
PR means "public relations." Such as talking to the press. Are they still sending journalists poop emojis or did they start talking to them again?
Literally everything here is public relations by Tesla, as a bunch of examples: https://www.youtube.com/@tesla/videos
I don't know if they're still sending poop emojis, but "public relations" is a term that encompasses more than "press relations", and "press relations" itself encompasses more than answering questions in email.
I always thought only tech people were interested in it.
But 2 years ago, I've talked to an old school, rather wealthy guy, and he was explaining to me that he always invested conservatively but he wants to buy Tesla stock, because Musk said they started producing Optimus robots and next year they will have thousands of those in the factory and all Tesla factory workers could be fired.
Yep, Musk knows exactly what he's doing overhyping his companies. The stock is the product.
Well your father can't buy a Waymo. Even if he could it wouldn't go very far, wouldn't work everywhere and would cost at least 2x a model 3 or Y. So there are at least several leads Tesla has.
It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it? This isn't Lyft vs Uber. A better comparison to Tesla FSD would be blue cruise, super cruise, drive pilot, god's eye, and every other consumer level 2 ADAS.
The premise of Tesla's current market value is that they will capture a majority share of a dramatically expanded global taxi market. Waymo being dramatically ahead at producing workable robotaxis entirely undercuts that premise.
If you instead think Tesla's promise is consumer cars, Tesla's valuation is roughly equal to the entire rest of the global auto industry, despite being only a tiny and declining fraction of global sales. The relevant competitors then are Toyota, VW, Ford, BYD, etc. etc. Objectively, as a consumer auto company Tesla seems to be stagnant and falling behind.
I guess they're also hyping vaporware humanoid robots; if you ask me a future where a significant proportion of all families on earth purchase a humanoid robot seems completely implausible. It's very Jetsons though. Maybe they'll start building flying cars too.
Okay that's not what ordinary people like GP's dad are envisioning. Normal people are envisioning either: "wow I can buy a Tesla and it can drive me around!!" or a macroview "wow in the future Elon Musk is going to make self-driving cars so good that nobody will have to drive!".
We are discussing "normal people thoughts", not market sentiment.
It’s the usual “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", as much as the fundamentals do not work he has captured the average investor and general narrative that something really huge would have to happen to take him down.
I really don’t see anything that will cut through the narrative now.
> It's a horrible comparison. Why do people keep making it?
Because Tesla keeps claiming they'll have full autonomy "next year", year after year.
In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". That was a lie: https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...
By the end of 2020 there were supposed to be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road. That was also a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
Tesla sets its own benchmark and consistently fails to achieve it.
Yes, I've heard this time and time again. It has nothing to do with the point I'm making. This is just stoking the flamewar.
If you want to compare Waymo and Tesla FSD from a technology standpoint and claim superiority of one over the other you can't use simple values like interventions per mile. It says very little. The solutions were designed for different purposes under different constraints. That's what engineers do. If Waymo was attempting to make consumer viable self driving vehicles they would have made very different decisions and likewise for Tesla if their only goal was taxi. That should be obvious to any technologist.
By definition if you aim to get autonomous that means you aim for zero or at least a very low intervention per mile. Tesla boast about that but doesn't provide.
The context clearly matters.
You started with "Why is anyone..." and you got your answer - the founder and promoter of the technology has been on record lying about it multiple times. There's lawsuits about it. Steelmanning Tesla's position makes no sense here.
I did not get a rational answer.
If you're building a cheap mass market self driving vehicle that has to work everywhere you'll make completely different design decisions than a geo restricted taxi. Would you care to acknowledge that simple fact? The amount of hypotheticals you'd have to go through to compare these technologies in superiority up to this point is extensive. Go ahead, do the thought experiment. It would be a lot more interesting than a blanket interventions per mile with zero context.
Otherwise it's a false equivalence dog pile in search of Internet points. We don't need repeating of exhaustingly well known qualities of Tesla's CEO. That's not interesting, the Internet is already overrun with that.
I can acknowledge many facts, but since you seem to dodge that really big one I don't think we can have a productive discussion here. Talking about rationality in that context of what appears to be motivated thinking is ... interesting.
I was comparing Robotaxis with Waymo in Texas.
If you want to compare Teslas with consumer cars, the best metric we have is the fatality rate per mile. Tesla is #1.
This metric says nothing about self driving capabilities. In fact, I'd argue that FSD supervising the driver (and doing things like limiting speed before corners) would make their cars safer.
To me this metric shows that their cars are very high performing, and for most drivers they're probably the fastest accelerating cars they've ever driven. Tesla should probably default them to 'chill' mode and provide a warning about how fast the car is when you switch out of that mode.
It is fantastically optimistic to attribute Teslas horrific stats to the cars being speedy
For instance the model y had a fatality rate of 10.6 per billion vehicle miles 4x the average.
Its also seems unreasonable to suppose that they are poorly suited to survive a crash as this doesn't seem to be indicated.
A more logical conclusion is that a box with a giant flashing distracting tablet in the center which lies and says it can drive itself gets crashed more because people are functionally incapable of going from passenger to driver at random intervals with no notice.
Teslas also tend to attract people who hate driving and are bad at it. Yes, this is anecdotal, but - several friends and acquaintances said something along the lines of "my Tesla is the best, self-driving helps so much, I hate driving and I can't wait for them to fully automate it".
I wonder if segregating bad drivers into a separate population affects those fatality statistics.
When a car across all users has more deaths one should simply assume it is less safe. Nobody makes these bullshit excuses for any other car.
I see that and it's a horrible comparison. Tesla's robotaxi is a consumer car, taxi isn't their singular focus. If it was, FSD design would have taken a different path.
Well because Elon Musk keeps making it. In January 2023, on the official Tesla earnings call, he said that FSD was currently overwhelmingly superior at autonomous driving than everything else in existence:
"So who do we think is close to Tesla with -- a general solution for self-driving? And we still don't even know really who would even be a distant second. So yes, it really seems like we're -- I mean, right now, I don't think you could see a second place with a telescope, at least we can't." [1]
That is a literal, direct, backward-looking statement about current capabilities comparing it to all existing systems. A backward-looking statement that is clearly and objectively false given their present day inability to safely deploy driverless vehicles which Waymo already achieved in 2022, let alone quantitative disengagement metrics demonstrating a level of capability between 10-100x worse than Waymo contemporaneously in 2022 [2] and inferior even to Waymo in 2015 [3]. A false statement made willingly and knowingly in official investor communications to maintain their stock price.
[1] https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2023/01/26/te...
[2] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/02/17/2022-disen...
[3] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/02/01/disengagem...
So a person who most of us strongly despise makes you throw out all rational thought and make false equivalence arguments about these autonomous systems?
Everything doesn't have to be about Elon. Imagine you replaced him in 2015, but still approached autonomy through mass market level 2. How would you compare them? I think you might add just a few caveats about the constraints and environments they operate in.
Also comma.ai.
Why? Ideological capture. I thought that was obvious. TDS/MDS.
There's a lot of parallels here to the history of Nikola Tesla vs. Marconi. Tesla's inventions were superior, more reliable, more versatile in almost every way. But Marconi is the one remembered as the father of the radio, despite stealing Tesla's ideas and implementing them in less reliable fashion. He got to market fast, iterated on horrible versions, built broken products, but he shipped shipped shipped. And in the market, Tesla faded away, and Marconi won.
I say this as a big Elon skeptic. Technical superiority is only a small piece of the puzzle. But 10 years from now, I would be very surprised if the SOTA tech you mention has a fraction as many users as Neuralink.
I wouldn't be surprise if Musk is bankrupt in a few years. He acts in many ways like someone trying to keep a fraud going and running out of options for how to spin it.
i don't see it like a typical technological race for dominance. user count seems silly beyond bragging rights. i think it's more like a multiparty multipath expedition where the results of each team reaching the top is yet another option with different properties and/or a step forward for clinicians to improve the lives of people with horrible conditions and diseases.
Doesn't matter. That hype will draw attention, which will draw investors, which will draw in money to pay for the best researchers until they become SOTA.
If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up.
Distribution is part of innovation. Brain computer interfaces exist but those who would be willing to undergo the procedure to get them don't have that option, then an inefficiency exists in the market that can be filled by a competitor. Musk's companies play on the same field as everyone else, but they continue to win because operating efficiency, mind-share and tactics are all part of the game, and he is the best at winning it in many domains.
Edit: I understand the ethical considerations of such a nascent technology. I just feel that we live in a world where miracles exist that could help thousands of lives, but they move too slowly to help those lives. How long are paralyzed people waiting for a cheap way to have some more agency in the world? Is the only way to reach it being available sooner doing unscrupulous things that buck safety requirements?
>If 3 years ago the tech was available then how come the Neuralink patients never got that? I'm sure they'd be the first to sign up.
Because other companies have ethics and follow the rules and best practices. They register their clinical trials with the NIH and they stop and ask questions if half the monkeys they test on end up dead.
Because the FDA slowed down his chimp studies and wouldn’t let him combine Neurallink, FSD testing and NHSA crash testing into the same experiment for faster iterations.
It's entirely possible to spend so long trying to remove the rough edges and be perfectly safe that you kill the people you were trying to save via the sheer passage of time.
That's not how things have played out with Tesla. They have all the investment in the world and the most irrational valuation to have ever graced the public markets, yet their tech is years behind competitors.
Does any other consumer car brand have a self-driving mode as good as Tesla's?
"Tastiest steaming pile at the dog park" is a curious honor to wrap one's champion in but perhaps I'm not the target audience
That “steaming pile at the dog park” drives me driveway-to-parking-lot without intervention on 100% of my drives now. It’s one of the best steaming piles I’ve ever seen and I would pay many dollars for that steaming pile on future cars I purchase.
> would pay many dollars for that steaming pile on future cars I purchase.
Thankfully Elon has already got that sorted for you! $12k, and if you sell your Tesla for a new one, you’ll have to buy it again! Doesn’t transfer with you (or the car for that matter, it just vanishes on title transfer).
Literally everything you wrote is false, you should educate yourself more to avoid spreading misinformation:
1. FSD on a new car is currently $8k [0]
2. FSD has been transferable on buying a new car for a while - there’s usually some kind of promo [1]
3. If you don’t transfer it to a new car, it does transfer with the car [2]
—-
0: https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#overview
1: https://www.tesla.com/support/fsd-transfer
2: I bought my car used and FSD stayed with the car, the default behavior unless you use a promo like [1]
Oh good! They've done better, then.
It was $12K. And as you acknowledge, it was non-transferable until relatively recently.
Well there are other manufacturers willing to assume the legal liability for accidents in their self driving mode so… yes?
But they were first to market. That's 90% of the work. There's a huge gap between "perfect unrealized idea" and "shit you can actually buy". Hate the man all you want, he'll go down in history as the Edison of electric vehicles, even though others will undoubtedly surpass the initial public offering technologically.
The claim was that Musk's companies will "win" though, and they aren't (aside from the irrational valuation). Maybe Space X is winning, but Tesla is a minor player in the auto market with declining revenue.
First to what market?
Electric cars have been sold since the 1800s (electric vehicles predate the 4-cycle internal combustion engine). Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda and Toyota all had serial production of EVs in the 1990s or earlier. The land speed record holder in 1900 was an electric vehicle. Tesla wasn't first, they were relatively late, they just got it right in a number of ways.
Self driving? Maybe, but there is a lot of argument about whether a Tesla is self driving. Based on the fact that Tesla themselves require a human driver ready to intervene, it isn't a credible claim.
Turns out Edison was a jerk like Elon as well. At least according to Tesla.
> we live in a world where miracles exist that could help thousands of lives, but they move too slowly to help those lives
Do you understand what you're saying? Too slowly in contrast to "move fast and break things" where "things" = "people"? In a thread about the risks of tesla killing pedestrians? This is classic supervillain logic.
> median word error rate of 25%
So 1 out of every 4 words is wrong? How does Neuralink compare?
I agree significant bits per minute are a better metric, I vulgarized a bit too much.
Great study, thanks for the reference. Surprised that it's actually still quite far from natural conversation, both in speed and error rate. Created an infographic that summarize the full study: https://studyvisuals.com/medicine-health/a-highperformance-s...
Classic HN middlebrow dismissal, only upvoted because people dislike Musk. Word error rate of 25% is unusable. Also it needs extensive retraining every few days. They used four fixed electrode arrays, like pushing a miniature bed of nails into your brain, which is far more invasive and less advanced than Neuralink's one device with threads individually implanted by robot. Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities.
As for FSD, it leads by far for systems you can own, and while it is not as good as Waymo it is much cheaper and still rapidly improving. It is too early to say which approach will ultimately win.
I have never seen stats showing that FSD is "rapidly improving". Quite the contrary, it seems hobbled by its backward hardware and plateaued in terms of progress.
The backward hardware in my 2020 car has plateaued at driving me driveway-to-parking-lot on 100% of my drives in recent history. It’s a pretty nice plateau, really.
(I admit I’m mocking your wording; in fact it has not plateaued. Just every update makes things slightly smoother in non-safety-critical ways.)
Very nice of you to put everyone's lives at risk.
The 25% error rate is for 100k+ vocabulary, it drops under 10% for smaller vocab. Meaningful bits per minute would be a better metric indeed.
I appreciate comments like yours that actually contribute to the debate. We need critical thinking and data. Not one-sided puff pieces out of context.
9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary is not that great either.
> Neuralink is not exclusively for speech, focusing more on general computer use. This is mostly about where the device is implanted, not the device's capabilities.
This is entirely ridiculous. There is no and will be no universal device that just works, and does different things depending on just where in the brain you happen to stick it.
I think the cognitive dissonance works like this.
"All the people I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice say that Elon Musk is wrong to disagree with them."
Elon Musk does something smart.
"No, Elon Musk did not do something smart. That's because only smart people do smart things. If he were smart, he would agree with the people that I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice. He must have cheated or lied or stole someone else's idea which also makes him not nice and not trustworthy. How can anyone support anything he does?"
"Oh look, someone on HN pointed out that Elon Musk did something smart. They must be not smart, not trustworthy and not nice just like all the other people who disagree with things the people I believe to be smart and trustworthy and nice support. Here's a downvote!"
It's impressive someone would be pissed enough for some reason to put effort to spread such a false image as you are.
Robotaxi has been in service a fraction of the time as Waymo has. And the "4000x" figure is absolutely ridiculous, I'd maybe believe 2x at best given I've seen LONG drives with Robotaxi and common FSD while Waymos get stuck / park badly around them. For both, the interventions are done remotely and I bet a lot of Waymo's ones especially are made "secretly". This while Waymo easier decides to do things like parking in middle of road instead of invoking an intervention, and has basically zero scaling prospects compared to Tesla, for which, every Tesla on the road becoming a robotaxi on the owner's command is not actually inconvincible for hw4+ cars in some years.
Neuralink "being 5x slower" sounds hardly believable in real life too, as I've seen their webgrid demo, ran it myself, and seen other people only get fractionally better scores than the person using neuralink with no limbic activity. And "5x faster" means little if the device is not practical, something Neuralink has seemingly put more effort to than others combined. Impracticability especially questions the quality of the data as its probably more "lab-like" while Neuralink patients can just navigate to benchmarks themselves on their own time and run them for fun, obivously with the utility of Neuralink.
Elon truly does lead Tesla and SpaceX, while being in a key role at Neuralink too. If you ever look at some of their demonstrations, he defers a lot to his employees for specific features/demonstrations. It is media's own issue that they hyperfocus on Elon, probably for keyword clicks.
> 4000x worse
You cannot compare using a technical metric a geofenced pre-mapped self driving technology and a general self driving technology. You can hate on their dishonest marketing all you like, but this is disingenuous.
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> Maybe spend more time researching than hating and you'll end up with a more factual state of the world.
The comment you were replying to was the kind of dismissal we want to avoid on HN, but we need you to avoid swipes like this on HN. The comment would been fine without that last line. Please try to observe the guidelines, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is my last line not something we want to teach people in this community? It's not snark if it's sincere.
I'd rather use encouraging words than moderation but use the method you prefer, it's your platform.
I believe you when you insist you were trying to be encouraging. It’s just that it didn’t come across that way, and several other users flagged and downvoted it, presumably for that reason. We often underestimate how our words come across. What seems like reasonable, friendly advice when formulated in our minds can end up coming across as a snarky personal attack by the time end turns into words on a screen read by strangers.
It’s all good, please just be mindful of this and think about how you can avoid your intended sentiment being lost next time you post this kind of comment.
The first comment quite clearly started the incivility
Sure, I've penalized that comment and will reply.
To be fair, the entirety of GP felt snarky to me, although I may be reading it wrong.
I agree, and I've penalized that comment.
You had a great comment until that last sentence. Let's not do that here.
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>Elon derangement syndrome.
Named after patient zero I am sure.
Can people not disagree without saying the other person has a derangement syndrome any more?
I am equally impressed by naysayers and anti Musk brigadiers in media and here on HN.
I would consider getting a Neuralink, because I think better doctors would be available to help make it successful, and I’m getting to the age where I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute much more; maybe having a prosthesis would make more opportunities available, especially given that AI will probably take my job before I could retrain to another occupation that could make similar money. Maybe I’d get the opportunity to go to Mars one day.
I think you can support the technologies behind these companies and respect that someone on the spectrum may be struggling with trying to do what’s right for themselves and the people of Earth as a whole, but has just made a shitload of bad decisions. Many of us struggling with mental health of us can empathize, even if we fully and wholeheartedly disagree on many things.
I'm sure it has; and I'm sure it will again, and again, with every single software update.
Once the technology is replicated and perfected by somebody outside of Neuralink. I would potentially consider it. Also, the entire technology landscape would need to be changed.
I don't want brain implants to be owned by the wealthy, as it currently exists. Elon Musk and PR team can fuck off.
Have there been any reviews by independent experts? This reads like a promo piece, in particular I'm not sure why the fluff bits about Musk "being a regular guy" are relevant. Most of the linked sources are either other Fortune puff pieces or Neuralink press releases.
Reviews by independent experts about the quality of this guy's life? I think he can be considered an authority on that subject.
I think a bit of skepticism is warranted here. Patient number 1 isn't some random guy getting the procedure and recounting it's benefits. But someone self-selected and willing from day 1, massively engaged with the company, likely paid or compensated, getting a lot of promotion, visibility and attention, etc.
It's possible a lot of the QOL improvements are from the circumstances of getting all that attention, or the hype circle they themselves found themselves in.
I also think people need to be open minded to the possibility Neuralink does offer promising benefits.
I'm just seeing a lot of people strongly for or against, and really I think the reasonable stance here is to remain optimistically pessimistic until further evidence.
Let's be clear about what is a good subject for review and what is not. One person's opinion about how they feel is not. It can be a good subject for further inquiry, though: learn more about their experiences and consider critically whether those experiences generalize to others.
Credentialism at its finest.
so are people who claim placebos and homeopathy improved their conditions, we are not reliable on an individual level
No placebo can let him "do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body."
Given that there are objective changes, it is not unreasonable to believe his claim that he is satisfied or has benefitted from them.
if it is truly "objective" then his subjective experience is irrelevant, so your logic makes no sense. it is not necessarily incorrect to investigate or be skeptical about another's self reported "subjective" claims (never mind their "objective" ones), for the reasons the comment you were dismissive of mentioned. plus given the nature of the company one would hardly be surprised if certain facts are cherry-picked over others. if it's truly as cut and dry as you believe, then surely any independent expert will soon end up empty handed. being dismissive of such an endeavor before it has even begun feels like kool-aid sippin...
The objective and subjective observations are about different but related things.
The objective measurements are about his enhanced abilities. He can do things he couldn't before.
But, the GP comment referred to "quality of life" which is innately difficult to measure objectively. It's possible that he was able to do those things but it caused him enough irritation to do them that he avoided using it (like CPAP often is for example), or that the things it enabled him to do weren't sufficient to warrant feeling improved. My father has limited mobility, but no interest in playing mario kart or adjusting an air filter, and there's very little in his home that he has or would want to be automated. Anything that could be my mom or another family member usually takes care of anyway, even if it's still something he could do himself as he's rather tech illiterate.
So, in this scenario, given my father's age, the risks involved in such a major surgery for his age, and his personal inclinations, the very same additional capabilities likely wouldn't be worthwhile in his opinion. Hence, the subjective experience of the objective changes are how you measure quality of life for this kind of operation.
yes, quality of life is a very difficult thing to measure objectively, because of the subjective component, as you state. are you under the impression the "reviews by independent experts" mentioned in the comment above the one you cited would only be meaningful if the person narrating their subjective experience was found to be outright lying? you are clearly familiar with some of the nuances, thus i'm not sure why you would not also be interested in independent reviews of the subject. his personal story is worth a lot, but it's not everything. i would think the more people reviewing it seriously, the more benefit to people like your father (and countless others)
If you don't trust the subject, he would most likely decline to participate in an independent review entirely.
In any case, just like the stock market, the fact he responded well does not guarantee someone else will.
What we need is more data, not a higher degree of confidence in this one point. An independent review would be nice to satisfy our curiosity, but it wouldn't add much to our understanding anyway.
it's not objective when there's only a single reporter and it's the subject
no before/after video, no third party report, there's nothing here but puffery... half the article goes on to promote robots
You are right when it comes to qualia, but wholly incorrect in this case. There are measurable metrics in his life (ie independent use of computers, social engagements etc.)
It's not like he's having to rate his level of happiness here, these are physical benefits
if that's the case why do you care to read about his subjective experience, at all? isn't that the point of the comment inquiring about an independent review?
Because the subjective experience is the thing we actually care about.
Same reason you ask the users of any product for feedback. Sure, you can objectively see that they were able to click the register button, still doesn’t guarantee they came out of that experience wanting to use the product.
are you under the impression that the sole focus of an independent review as described in the root comment would be to investigate the personal veracity of "Participant 1"'s narration? do you alter course in your product because of single, particular user anecdote? i'm not sure what you think you are arguing against here...
That seems entirely reasonable to me in this instance, yes
Who is measuring the physical benefits? because based on this article it's no one... so again, we're taking one person's word for it... and it's very likely this person is contractually obligated to not disparage the company
He may be obligated not to say bad things, but he isn't obligated to say good things.
we don't have enough information to say that either, wouldn't be unusual to get free medical treatment in exchange for good press... and even without an explicit incentive there's a lot of implicit bias to not speak ill of someone that has hardware in your brain
this is why it's worthless without a third party review of conditions
Placebos only effect subjective outcomes, not objective ones.
That's not categorically true. Although a placebo inherently relies on a patient's subjective understanding of receiving a treatment, that understanding can change any number of very objective outcomes. That's why so many studies that measure objective metrics use placebos to begin with.
a good point, and one that highlights the fact that people are unironically relying on "objective"/"subjective" distinctions in this thread - when this division is not necessarily a straightforward one in neurology or philosophy/language. putting a neurological implant in someone's brain doesn't strike me as an act that immediately clarifies this issue, to put it mildly. but this technology is still in its infancy. thus, the more people to "review" it, the better... doesn't mean the benefits they are giving people or the work has to stop... it just doesn't mean some skepticism isn't warranted either...
For all we know, the Neuralink is making him say that... /s
Not to go full tin-foil hat - but how do we know it isn't?
The fact that the CIA hasn't black-hole classified it is a good start.
I can't tell if you're trying to be clever, sarcastic, or are failing at both so I'll answer earnestly: reviews by independent experts of the claims of Neurolink the company and of the methods used to achieve those claimed results.
Not if you're being paid to be there.
See: Yeonmi Park and the absurdity of her stories that are essentially a product of South Korea's day-time TV.
(North Korean refugees typically can't get work permits, some of the little work available is telling people how bad NK is. It is illegal to say anything good about NK in SK)
DPRK propaganda on my HN????
An exaggerated example of people lying about their lives for their new livelyhood. Relax.
> in particular I'm not sure why the fluff bits about Musk "being a regular guy" are relevant
They're relevant because this was almost certainly written by a PR firm being paid by Musk to resuscitate his 32% approval rating.
Its a sample size of 1, of course its ancedotal.
Its a promising first sign, but that's all. I think you have unrealistic expectations if you expect rigorus science on the cost/benefit after just one experimental procedure. Stuff like this takes time.
The mere fact he didn't die from the procedure is probably a success in and of itself.
Probably necessary PR in order to avoid being cut off. Or just gratuitously inserted by the device into the wearer's decoded thoughts/output.
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> What kind of reprobate thinks it is OK to swat a disabled person? Do you understand the kinds of active harm that your partisanship causes?
What are you talking about? Are you pretending to be upset at a mild question, on the behalf of the disabled? You should explain the active harm this causes, because your partisan celebrity worship is causing you to look goofy in front of strangers.
edit: I am very excited about brain-computer interfaces.
> You should explain the active harm this causes, because your partisan celebrity worship is causing you to look goofy in front of strangers.
I explained the active harm in the very sentence you quoted.
>> he told me that a SWAT team showed up with AR-15s after someone gave a false tip to the local sheriff’s office that Arbaugh was in danger.
I'm not a big fan of Musk for a number of different reasons. I'm even less a fan of the cult of hatred that pops up whenever his name is mentioned.
I'd rather look like a goof (nothing wrong with being goofy or weird sometimes) than help spread hatred.
>I'd rather look like a goof (nothing wrong with being goofy or weird sometimes) than help spread hatred.
No one in this thread is helping "spread hatred".
> No one in this thread is helping "spread hatred".
What do you think partisanship is these days?
Not synonymous with "spreading hate".
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I don't care whether or not he likes Musk, this is America, we love assholes here. I simply don't see how that fact is relevant to an article discussing the merits of Neurolink the program.
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Nazi salute*. No idea why you wrote Roman.
Because that is the joke.
Right over my head.
no, the psyop is getting the public to believe a single wave to a crowd is anything more than that.
Do it on one of your work zoom calls and report back.
Cooked, absolutely chopped.
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I am rooting for success in the general field, but Elon's claims ranging from self-driving cars to autonomous taxi fleets to government cost savings of hundreds of billions need to all be viewed with skepticism. I'll need to see a a lot more than one patient.
Skepticism is good but I think there are 9 patients now. https://x.com/ModdedQuad/status/1953274433025786031
Anti Tesla hate is just silly. Grow up
personally, I don't necessarily hate the work that Musk's companies do, I think that some of the advances that spaceX have made are excellent, but I just don't like supporting Musk, seeing as he has been very outspoken against people like me, and supports people who hate me
Target audience here are all libs from Sillicon Valley who has been trained to hate spaceshipman
so this is like MCP but for neurons?
can they wire up the neurons that control ear twitch muscles to something useful e.g. "Open terminal" shortcut?
>can they wire up the neurons [...] to something useful e.g. "Open terminal" shortcut?
Pretty much. You could do something like that with non-invasive consumer-grade BCIs already though. What we really need to see is more distinct "keypresses" you can listen for. It's my understanding that something like "imagining pushing/pulling a heavy object" can be read clearly enough, while "twitching your left ear" gets lost in the noise.
It's a long way to go before we can replace the 400 keystrokes per minute, 104/105 distinct keys bandwidth of a keyboard.
With the ear twitch muscles, it would probably be easier to use muscle sensors, which are a lot cheaper and easier to use (stick them on the skin), instead of delving inside someone's brain
Just don't let the playwright MCP anywhere near it
Hahahahaha
I wish they wouldn’t call it “Elon Musk’s Brain Chip”. I guess it is true in a sense since he owns the majority of Neuralink. But it feels unfair to the scientists and engineers who actually designed it, and to all the people who could benefit from it, to overemphasize Musk’s involvement.
Considering all the possible future implications of a Brain Computer Interface - both positive and negative - I would say Musk’s involvement is the least interesting part of this story.