A Year of Telepathy

I really enjoyed that read. Is it hinted that everyone has the experience though?

There's a week where the jewel and the brain are still paired, but the jewel is in control. The hospitals monitor that the two are similar to within tolerance, but somehow this jewel slips through the net. What makes you think there's more to it than the 'one in a million' explanation?

You're very welcome!

What about the scar tissue those implants generate? How did they avoid that?

You are ignoring the benefit side of a benefit-harm morality analysis.

Eating an animal at least ostensibly has positive value for the people doing so. However, there are plenty of forms of "animal testing" that confer zero positive value. For instance, testing the wrong compound or inserting the wrong implant confers zero benefit. Having improper controls, "testing" nonsensical theories, repeating stale results poorly, inadequate data collection, etc. are just a few ways a test procedure can be totally useless or even actively harmful.

This also ignores one of the other aspects of animal testing which is as a dry run or rehearsal for actual application. You do it right in animals so you are practiced at doing it right for when you need to do it right in humans. "Oh yeah, we royally screwed up in every rehearsal, but we will nail it in production." is not an acceptable approach. You look at the care taken during their practiced procedures on less critical subjects to determine if their practiced procedure is adequate for more critical subjects. A process that kills far more test subjects than others or achieves middling results relative to resource expenditure or that treats subjects as disposable for "advancing science" is not a process fit for human subjects. Assuming ingrained cultural process deficiencies will magically disappear when using changing subjects is foolish.

These are just some of the reasons why people eating a ridiculous number of animals does not and should not waive our invalidate concerns about animal testing procedure.

I'm pulling out my vegetarian pass to say, without hypocrisy, that Neuralink's animal testing record appears to be pretty horrific.

Right, but neither irony nor hypocrisy means that it's wrong. Murder is wrong and if a murderer on death row says that murder is wrong they are still correct.

> Being concerned about animal testing seems pretty silly coming from people who likely eat pigs

This is reductive and lacking any form of nuance. If I eat chicken, should I automatically be okay with heavily industrialized chicken farms, or even setting chickens alight for entertainment? Just because one evolved to be an omnivore doesn't mean one is okay with all forms of killing animals.

You should perhaps consider that most people would rather die than be tortured to death and perhaps we feel the same way about animals even if we eat meat - especially primates.

Taken seriously, this is a fallacy and a way of thinking that easily halts progress in making the world a better place. You can always use whataboutism to argue against any improvement on grounds that a consistent ethic would require you to improve several other things at once. Being this kind of silly on the way is fine.

(Also of course a lot of the critics don't eat meat, and it's also true that the rest of us should stop, starting from factory farmed meat)

Volontary humans over constrained animals? Sure!

Why would you cease developing BCIs? It’s not ethical to force another sentient being into biological R&D on their own body. OTOH there’s no problem to enroll someone to a dangerous mission if they’re truly voluntary and get a benefit from it.

Give it time. Under President Musk it'll only be a matter of time until they invent a drug like the one used by Dr Cortazar's group in The Vital Abyss, eschewing ethics for scientific progression. I wouldn't be surprised if half the scientists under Musk's companies jump at the chance to use it, considering they still work for him while he dismantles American democracy (so their ethics are already questionable).

Don’t you? They’ll need to do it sooner or later. The sooner - the less unwilling cobaye used.

you consume more than one whole animal a day? you might want to cut down on that

I mean a set of if/else chains is, in the broadest sense, AI

but it's not the AI that Altman is selling, ditto for ML

> Can you tell us more what you surmise we all think is the end-game objective?

Musk's original stated end-game objective is to give humans a chance against ASI by removing the biggest impediment that humans have to communicate digitally, the keyboard.

This is hard to believe as the truth, as it is extremely short-sighted. If ASI can think 1000x faster than a human brain, and with much more intelligence, then what does giving humans even a 100x improvement in I/O achieve? Also, if ASI is achieved, then it will continue to self-improve. The meat brain is stuck at our current speed.

Please see my HN profile for a privacy rant about the downsides, which only assumes a read capability. Once a write capability is introduced, I mean you gotta be kidding me. Who should you trust with that power? The answer is no one.

Isn't it to sell brain-computer connectivity to the masses?

Jensen Huang becoming a sandworm from Dune, only he keeps shitting out mountains of NVIDIA cards instead of spice. Elon Musk and the rest of the technorati using neuralink to upload themselves into said mountain of GPUs to become immortal.

powerful general BCI, FDVR, cyborg intelligence and so on. Elon Musk clearly stated this many times.

Someone who has genuine concern for helping people doesn't cut medical programs in fly-by-night operations to leave people with medical devices in their body and whatnot. Empathy and caring about suffering can be ruled out.

Generally speaking, the demo is always about finding the green ball on top of a red cube, or the person who went missing in a land slide, but what sells it is detecting and aiming at the dissident hiding under a truck.

And isn't it weird how "think of the children" is always ridiculed but "think of the paralyzed etc." is just fine? I've seen it countless times in the last decades. Just recently when I said on here I want "AI" art to be marked as "AI" made and someone claimed I don't care about the people who have Parkinson's and can't hold a brush, but wouldn't answer why we can't mark it anyway. It's not the people with Parkinson's that want to pass of their creations as hand-made. They're just getting used.

Sure, paralyzed people would love to be able to control a cursor with their mind etc., but even more than that they don't want cuts to social programs, that enable them a dignified life beyond "making them as functional as a healthy person", to allow tax cuts for the super rich. They want friends to have time for them instead of working 3 jobs, that sort of stuff. But Musk and his spiritual brethren are gleefully moving in the opposite direction, as fast and ruthlessly as they can.

So I say this particular doctor is three butchers in a trench coat. I can't prove it, because I can't read minds, but nobody else can either, and this is the "bet" I'm going with. Vulnerable and sick people can only have things that would a.) help super rich people with the same conditions and b.) enable more persecution and exploitation, and an easier discard of undesirable, unproductive or rebellious members of society.

My first puzzled interpretation was of a "reservoir of co-pays", as if there was some kind of financial/insurance exploitation going on.

I think that would be these eye implants[1].

1: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

The simple solution is that all such devices must be submitted to a central government database and all blue prints, source code etc. will be released into the public domain is the company no longer supports the device or closes down.

Sure but that's a much more solvable problem!

> taking away their ability to participate in society first, then selling it back to the richest of them is an ingenious business approach.

That's not what is happening here. These tools (Neuralink and others) enable people who are disabled to participate more in society.

Not everyone has the precise same definition of hate, and you know what they ^ mean.

Elon used to be all about truly advancing society, now he only seems interested in gaining wealth and power.

At this point it would be much less effort to make a short list of the unquestionably good things he has done or is well known for, rather than attempting to list all of the despicable things he is recently associated with.

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