We've all been playing Mario Kart with our minds already, using our mind to manipulate those fleshy sticks attached to our shoulders. It's fuckin amazing.
The only usefulness this has is to help someone who can't do that. And the fact that it's attached to Elon and that all previous test subjects died and that it's still been put in a human is pretty dystopian.
All previous animal test subjects died, including the majority that were euthanized at the end of the test period for dissection and study. There was a super high failure rate but let's not misrepresent what actually happened.
I mean, it's at the very edge of what science can do and realistically there's not that much else you could do except test on relatively highly developed animals. You'd kind of expect that to happen, but I don't see a viable alternative.
Working on the bleeding edge of scientific research does not relieve someone of treating animals with ethical consideration. A "move fast and break things" approach might be good for a startup and maybe even for a rocket company, but that approach isn't okay if "breaking things" includes living, feeling animals.
I believe experiments like these should move slower and with more scrutiny. As in more animal testing before moving on to humans, esp. due to the controversies surrounding Neuralink’s last animal experiments.
The least they should do is make sure no animal suffers needlessly and no more animals than necessary are used for testing. I don't have confidence in moral standards, when employees say the number of deaths is higher than needed because of demands of faster research.
Also there is some research on non-invasive ways to get signals from the brain. Why not try that before testing implants on animals?
You can in fact test many of these devices in mice and even zebrafish.
You repeat testing in animals (with modifications) til it is actually safe or you at least understand what the risk is and how to mitigate it to tell the people who are going to trial it.
Yes, but lower order animals. There are creatures with more or less intelligence and therefore more or less capacity of suffering.
Euthanasia is fine for an end point but as an implanted device is lifelong such a short time with the implant before sacrifice is not as useful as longer timepoints.
There are creatures with more or less intelligence and therefore more or less capacity of suffering.
…. So it’s okay to make less intelligent creatures suffer…? Intelligence has literally nothing to do with something’s capacity to suffer. Where the hell did you get that from? Let’s see some citations on that asinine claim lmfao.
You need data from every step of the way… so no…. Not at all.
We've had brain-computer interfaces for DECADES, which didn't need to be inside the skull. This isn't bleeding-edge research, it's just a bloody edge used to kill research subjects.
Maybe, but that is not particularly relevant to the article, and
We've all been playing Mario Kart with our minds already, using our mind to manipulate those fleshy sticks attached to our shoulders. It's fuckin amazing.
is quite an ableist thing to say when the subject at hand is a literal quadriplegic person playing Mario Kart.
Probably thinks that I’m a Elon Musk fan, when the exact opposite is true. Why denounce a Musk-owned company for improving the life of a quadriplegic person when there are a million more valid criticisms to be made?