• Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
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    6 months ago

    “We managed to not kill the first subject, but we’re hopeful to succeed in the future”…

      • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        A success does not include leaving a victim of failed experimental medicine with a non-functional implant. In contrast to how animal subjects are used as test subjects (often conducted with less oversight than there should be), using experimental medicine on volunteering patients should be done not just to collect better data than the chimps before them supplied, but with the genuine expectation that the product in question will benefit the patient beyond their usefulness as a test subject for continued product development.

        • Grimy@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Through software updates, they were able to alleviate the problem. They are a bit vague in the article but it’s not a total loss and more than he had before the operation.

          Tbh though, the real test is how his brain accommodates it over the years and if it starts getting complicated later.

          • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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            6 months ago

            Also, this was the very first test implant into a human. At this point in testing “doesn’t harm the patient” is a perfectly good result to call a success.

            Honestly, people calling Neuralink a failure because the first patient didn’t get up and start dancing are just showing themselves to be either ignorant of the process or ridiculously biased.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          6 months ago

          SpaceX has a 64% market share in the global commercial rocket launch market for sending satellites, scientific instruments, and other payloads into orbit. In the first six months of 2023, SpaceX handled 21 flights for outside customers, or 64% of the worldwide total. In the first half of 2023, SpaceX handled 88 percent of customer flights from U.S. launch sites.[1]

          If success isn’t their goal I’d be amazed at what they accomplished if the decided to try for it someday.

          • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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            6 months ago

            That’s not analogous to the situation with the brain chips. We’re in the testing phases, and the testing phases for SpaceX rockets involves so many unplanned explosions that they’ve been in multiple investigations.

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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                6 months ago

                Yes and it stands. I’m still comparing SpaceX to Neuralink in terms of unethical rushed testing and development, and it still stands. What I’m not referring to is the products that SpaceX ships, YOU were the one who brought that up.

            • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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              6 months ago

              Falcon 9 is definitely manned.

              The capsule Crew dragon, developed by Spacex for NASA, that flies on the Falcon 9 is the currently the only human rated orbital spacecraft in the US

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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                6 months ago

                My apologies, looks like the first manned flight was on 16 November 2020 after about 9 years of delays. Weather forced them to abandon their goal of reaching the ISS.

                • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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                  6 months ago

                  I don’t know where you found this number, the commercial crew contract was awarded by NASA in September 2014 to SpaceX and Boeing (Boeing getting twice the amount of money than SpaceX). It was expected that two crew capsule would be certified by NASA in 2017.

                  SpaceX only certified the capsule Crew Dragon with a crewed launch in 2020, so 3 years delay. In the mean time NASA is still waiting for Boeing to do its first crewed Starliner launch.

                  There is plenty of reason to hate Musk but people at SpaceX did accomplish great things.

                  Without SpaceX NASA would still be relying on Soyuz to send astronauts to the ISS.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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    6 months ago

    Maybe this indicates that the FDA’s investigations have shown that Neuralink isn’t quite as awful at this as random internet commentators believe.

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      6 months ago

      Still a questionable decision. Brain interface tech isn’t even that new or novel, but the real bottleneck is that flesh is temporary, eventually the attachment place will die and be replaced. That’s exactly what we saw with their first brain chip and other attempts going back at least 50 years.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Nope, I hate musk so everything he is associated with has to be the worst thing ever and pure evil.

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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        6 months ago

        Unironically yes, he’s just throwing money at scifi concepts and hoping it pays off.

        • FMT99@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          This one paid off. Read the interviews given by mr Arbaugh. Musk is an ego-driven maniac, you won’t get any argument from me. But as a result a bunch of scientists got more funding than they normally would for this project that gave great joy and some measure of independence to a young quadriplegic, maybe with more to follow.

          You want to hate on Musk? I’ll happily join you. But if you’re one of those assholes rooting against these doctors and scientists doing ground breaking work with Musk’s money, that’s a pretty terrible take.

          • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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            6 months ago

            The chips are attached to impermanent brain flesh. That has been the brick wall in our way for fifty years. Any benefit is short term, and the long term implications are harrowing. This field would have advanced at roughly the same rate without subjecting people and animals to undue risks.

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Because it will encroach into everything if we let it be.

        There’s always a dumdum like you saying “it doesn’t affect you, so why do you care?”.

        Because the company implanting the chip killed a good amount of monkeys for their tests. They’re an unethical company.

        Because Elon Musk is a fucking piece of shit and he is clearly disregarding the laws if it makes him money.

        Because private, for-profit companies cannot be trusted to not fuck over everyone if it makes them a cent more.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          6 months ago

          And that’s why all those paralyzed people should just sit in their chairs and wait for eventual death, I guess.

          Seriously, just don’t get one if you think they’re so awful.

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            The issue is not the tech, it’s how it is developed and tested, and the terrible track record of the mega corpos.

            Just like AI, the tech itself is great, but corpos turn it into a pile of shit for the money.

            It won’t be different this time around with daddy Musk.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              6 months ago

              Yeah, things would be going so much better if garage hobbyists were developing these brain implants instead.

              • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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                6 months ago

                Yeah because it’s either a socipath billionaire or a dusty garage hobbyist. Nothing in between.

                At the very least, the garage hobbyist has more chance to be a more ethical person.

                • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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                  6 months ago

                  One of the common arguments I hear against technological advancement is “but what if some sociopath brews up a pandemic virus in their garage!”

                  The FDA is monitoring the corporations that are working on this sort of thing. As is mentioned in the title of this thread.

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          You know what else killed a good amount of monkeys for their tests? Pretty much every single Class 3 medical device out there. Neuralink didn’t do anything far outside the ordinary with their tests, they just got a lot of media attention because “Elon bad”.

          Medical device testing goes through animal trials before human ones. Those trials use monkeys. Those monkeys often die. The only unusual thing about Neuralink’s tests is a lot of people pretending like they suddenly give a shit.

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            Here’s an idea, maybe stop killing animal for medical testing?

            Other companies doing the same shit isn’t any better. But with Neuralink, they said that no monkey were killed during their trials, which is false. So it makes it even worst.

      • Jomega@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Because it kills everything you put it in? I don’t know how to tell you that you’re supposed to care about other people.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          Apart from the only other human it’s been put in, who from all reporting has had no ill side effects.

            • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              6 months ago

              This is extremely old news. The dude is alive, and has regained much of the functionality he lost in the chip with a firmware update.

              Put your rage boner away.

                • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  6 months ago

                  … First off, the guy was a paraplegic before the implant. This isn’t a sudden or new thing to happen.

                  Secondly, you’re literally asking for a final version of something without any sort of human testing involved. Can you name a single medical device, ever, which has had exactly 1 version, no updates, and went through 0 human trials before completion?

                  This guy was never going to be out and about on his daily walk through the middle of the street using his v0.001 neuralink implant. And if you honestly thought that was ever on the table, you have absolutely no idea what is going on.

                  Again, put the hate boner away.

                • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Put.

                  Your hate boner.

                  Away.

                  Your ignorance of the subject is insane. You don’t even have the first clue as to who is involved in the tests or what it’s meant to accomplish.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Luckily the value of SpaceX is not determined by their success, but more by what bullshit Musk can come up with. So if Musk can bullshit his way around this too, there is no harm to the stock.

    Edit:
    Ups sorry posted this the wrong place.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Nothing, I posted in the wrong place. The 2 stories were together, and after reading it, I must have clicked the wrong one, and posted it here, instead of the story about the SpaceX engine blowing up.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    6 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Neuralink, the Elon Musk-funded neuroscience startup, has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant its next patient with its experimental brain chip.

    Neuralink previously implanted its experimental brain-computer interface chip in a paraplegic man, Noland Arbaugh, in an operation that was publicly announced this past January.

    Arbaugh’s identity was revealed during a livestream interview in March, during which the patient demonstrated some of the abilities the chip had given him, including the chance to play computer chess with his mind.

    However, Arbaugh says that updates to the chip’s software have allowed him to regain many of the abilities that he previously had and that he is still very supportive of Neuralink and what it’s done for him.

    This hardware then rests in the portion of the patient’s skull that was removed, right below the scalp, while its tiny wires carry data back and forth between the brain and the startup’s servers.

    A large number of the company’s animal test subjects had to be euthanized and some died quite horribly, according to a lawsuit from a physicians group.


    The original article contains 419 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Guy_Fieris_Hair@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Can we just … not keep going down the brain rot rabbit hole we are going down as a society? 24 hours in a day doesn’t allow enough screen time? We need to just… funnel this shit straight in somehow?

    I used to be excited for this kind of stuff, then I saw what we’ve done with the technology we have. People are “auto” driving their cars while they wear their apple vision pros, that’s what we do with it… Pretty soon tiktoc titties will be streamed straight to our frontal cortex.

    Maybe I am just old, or maybe it would just be better if it was a different company doing it. But maybe a giant meteor should take us out ASAP.

    • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 months ago

      In my 20’s I was all for it. I understand where the techbros are coming from. Now with over a decade more experience, I see clearly we need to spend so much more of our energy healing from traumas on the societal level: To dispel imperial-colonialist mindsets. Im thinkin of Bo Burningham speaking about how the empires exhausted all physical territory, and then discovered Data, going on to colonize every waking moment of our attention.

      We need to shed the subconcious conquistador, with all it’s machismo, all it’s tribalism (most agregiously white supremacist nationalism) and covetous paranoia. It is a poison which will prevent us from making the societal leap from which all tides would rise.

      Until we do that, all we’ll get for this tech will be:

      • dystopic labor camp colonies on Mars
      • advertisements when we are trying to dream
      • Military tech developed under the guise of “medical 🌈 disabilities 🌈 quality 🌈 of 🌈 life 🌈 improvement 🌈 research” [1]

      And we collectively deserve better

      1: DeathPanel Podcast | Wheelchair-to-Warfare Pipeline

    • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      The ultimate goal of this technology is to enable the blind to see, deaf to hear and the paralyzed to walk. Not that you can watch netflix in your mind.

      • Guy_Fieris_Hair@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I’m down, if I even remotely believed anything that comes out of Elon Musks mouth. I promise you, that is not where this will go.