Company is seeking people with paralysis to test its experimental device after getting green light from independent review board
Elon Musk’s brain-implant startup, Neuralink, said it has received approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting patients for its first human trial. The company is seeking people with paralysis to test its experimental device in a six-year study.
Neuralink is one of several companies developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can collect and analyze brain signals. But its billionaire executive’s bombastic promotion of the company, including promises to develop an all-encompassing brain computer to help humans keep up with artificial intelligence, has attracted skepticism and raised ethical concerns among neuroscientists and other experts.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration denied the company’s request to fast-track human trials, but in May approved Neuralink for an investigational device exemption (IDE) that allows a device to be used for clinical studies. The agency has not disclosed how its initial concerns were resolved.
Personally, I think I’ll be avoiding anything that starts with “Elon Musk’s…”
Yeah, I certainly won’t use any product associated with that muskrat.
Things would have to seismically change in the tech/business world for me to trust any company enough to put something in my brain. That said, if I was forced to buy one the last two I would consider letting near my brain are Musk and Zuck
Personally, I think I’ll be avoiding any device that can control my brain directly and has internet access, regardless of the owner.
This is the one he cooked all those monkey brains for? Pass.
1,500 animals died, including 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys. Sounds really reliable.
i mean its likely not reliable but i bet some animal deaths are inevitable when developing a new implant. 1500 sounds way too high though.
He ignored his employees saying that the device wasn’t ready and forced them to try it on the animals
ah didnt know that, yep thats awful
Come on fans. This is your moment to shine and show us just how much you believe in his bullshit.
Don’t you want to live like it’s Cyberpunk 2077? Now’s your chance!
Perhaps like one of the vegetables from 2077?
That fuck will sell ad space on the fucking thing and all you’ll get is Kanyes voice in your head chanting: “Elon macht frei” 24/7.
Musk: “Scumbags of the world are welcome on my platforms!”
Also Musk: “Let me put this device in your brain.”
It’ll never get into testing…
Everyone that would volunteer, doesn’t have a place for the implant to go
How long before Musk decides to charge per thought?
For $8, you get to be able to have basic motor function. For $10 a month, you get the rudiments of speech. For $15 a month, otherwise known as Neuralink Blue, you get free speech (free speech limited to what Elon approves of you saying).
He’s hoping to make your life pay to win.
It’s already pay to win. They’re trying to make it pay to live.
I wonder if he’ll later say he only implanted people who were already dying with the devices.
As opposed to the rest of us who are not dying.
I had forgotten about this until you mentioned it…
I just found it stupid that he said only those who were dying were tested on… Everyone’s dying, that’s a shit excuse.
Calm down Sylvia Plath. You know what he meant.
And Elon is going first right… right?
Actually… you might be on to something here. He may already have gone. Might explain the erratic behavior. The dumb shit he says and does looks an awful lot like brain damage 🤔
If you put any shit from this man in your head, you deserve what happens to you.
Where’s this independent review board so we can strip them of all authority? The crimes and abuses this project has committed against animal subjects should have gotten it shut down a long time ago and the PI brought up on animal cruelty charges. I do not envy the neurosurgeons and trauma surgeons who are going to have to try to save any of the human participants.
Do you have any more info about the crimes/abuses you mentioned? Interested to read on it
A couple of excerpts here:
The first complaints about the company’s testing involved its initial partnership with University of California, Davis, to conduct the experiments. In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and ultimately dying, while other monkeys had different complications from the implants.A note about Musk’s use of propaganda in the face of truth (emphasis mine):
Neuralink executives have said publicly that the company tests animals only when it has exhausted other research options, but documents and company messages suggest otherwise. During a Nov. 30 presentation the company broadcast on YouTube, for example, Musk said surgeries were used at a later stage of the process to confirm that the device works rather than to test early hypotheses. “We’re extremely careful,” he said, to make sure that testing is “confirmatory, not exploratory,” using animal testing as a last resort after trying other methods.In October, a month before Musk’s comments, Autumn Sorrells, the head of animal care, ordered employees to scrub "exploration" from study titles retroactively and stop using it in the future.There’s lots more in there and I highly recommend reading the whole article. It is from December of last year, but I’d find it hard to believe that things would have improved in the past 9 or 10 months…certainly not enough to excuse the shoddy work and unnecessary suffering caused early on in the project.
There have been some news pieces put out, but most importantly
… the Physicians Committee (PCRM) said records it obtained for the 23 monkeys used in the experiments reflect a “pattern of extreme suffering and staff negligence.” The committee said that the letter to the USDA is based on nearly 600 pages of what it calls “disturbing” documents released after the committee filed an initial public records lawsuit in 2021.
Now, CNN did link to Nueralink’s site, but not to PCRM. That, to me, says a lot about who you they’re supporting.
If you want to read PCRMs report, it’s here. Because reading the sources is always a good idea.
I can’t wait to have ads in my dreams /s
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Interfacing with the brain is easy, we’ve been doing it for decades. Let me know when we can leave an implant in for a decade without it turning into a scar tissue tumor.
Although hopefully I’ll have died of old age before that happens. Being able to plug in people is the basis of more dystopian nightmares than I can count, and I have zero confidence in our species ability to prevent those horrors from being reality.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink approved to recruit
foolshumans for brain-implant trialIf it works then it will be the ultimate advance in human capability since the invention of the internet. But i don’t trust Elon to respect anyone’s privacy rights.
What?
We’ve had implants that can control a mouse and even type on a keyboard for decades now…
Neurolink is just a less obvious interface, the gains are nowhere near worth the setbacks.
Regular science gets thing working then shrinks it down. Musk jumped straight to shrinking it down, and he just fucking can’t get it to work.
We’ve had implants that can control a mouse and even type on a keyboard for decades now…
I don’t really know if we’ve had other companies that are crazy enough to pierce the blood brain barrier, just for a brain interface machine.
There have been plenty of brain interface machines, but most are just pieces of headgear that you wear. And they’re just as useful as Musk’s interface… not very.
When you utilize a traditional mouse you are relying on both visual and proprioceptive data, which is interpreted in conjunction in real time by your brain. Without the proprioceptive sensation, your brain loses track of where the mouse is in the operational space. Meaning it takes a large amount of concentration to operate anything with just the aid of visualization.
The biggest problem is that they’ve essentially designed a meningitis machine. For my job we occasionally have to set skull pins for halo devices, basically a cervical immobilizing brace. These pins pierce the skin and are set into the bone of the skull, though we don’t pierce through the skull or damage the blood brain barrier.
These pins are extremely susceptible to infection depending on the level of patient compliance. Because the scalp is not firmly attached to the skull it’s is free to move against the pins and create a lot of skin irritation, which can lead to infections if not properly cleaned on a regular basis.
We can worry about privacy after he stops melting brains.
It cannot “work”. Even if it succeeded technically speaking, you cannot expect such a device to be secure (as no device is, and certainly not one made by Musk).
Now computerised cars are already an increasing risk in giving new ways to commit murder without being caught, but if you directly put a security risk in your brain, I am pretty sure that many people will jump on the occasion.
Even if it were secure, what happens to all the gen 1 implantees when gen 2 comes out? or when Musk decides to no longer support certain models? Imagine having a 2007 iphone stuck inside your brain, forever. Or I guess people could get brain surgery every few years. That seems reasonable.
I just hope the poor human test subjects don’t end up like those monkies.
I’m going to take the opposite stance here and hope some of his most devoted sycophants end up even more brain damage.
We’re way past being polite about this Nazi and his enablers.
They are recruiting desperate paralyzed people, not super fans.
On the bright side, there will be a few less musk fans around after they are lobotomised.
Ooof. Well played.
Did they run out of monkeys?
