In an interview with the Journal, Neuralink’s first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, opened up about the roller-coaster experience. “I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard,” Arbaugh said. “I cried.” He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.
Neuralink isn’t just treating humans like guinea pigs, they’re treating them like disposable guinea pigs.
You cherry-picked the first part of that paragraph. The end goes like this:
Arbaugh went on to say that he has since recovered from the initial disappointment and continues to have hope for the technology.
And then the next part of his statement is found in the following paragraph:
“I thought that I had just gotten to, you know, scratch the surface of this amazing technology, and then it was all going to be taken away,” he added. "But it only took me a few days to really recover from that and realize that everything I’ve done up to that point was going to benefit everyone who came after me.” He also said that “it seems like we’ve learned a lot and it seems like things are going in the right direction.”
Of course, the goal here is not to have an honest assessment of what happened. . .but to simply choose what we want to further our hatred (justified, IMO) of Musk.
None of that concerns Neuralink’s treatment of him—just his process of learning to live with it.
And nothing about what you quoted indicates what he was or was not told about the potential outcomes of the procedure, or how he was treated. Only that he was disappointed with the outcome. Of course he was, of course he wanted it to work out, so of course he was disappointed.
I stand by my point that only the negative part of his statement was cherry-picked out in order to justify shitting on Musk, rather than honestly assessing what happened.
My criticism of Neuralink’s response has nothing to do with whether or not the first patient was treated unfairly. It’s that it reveals Neuralink’s priorities: they had a choice going forward of trying to fix the first patient’s implant or giving up and starting over with a fresh patient, and they chose the latter.
In animal testing, that decision would depend on how valuable the guinea pigs are.
Okay, no. As much of an issue as I have with musk and the way he bullrushes into these things, this really was the right response at this point.
It’s a new tech. That goes into someone’s brain. You do not just go rutting around up there if the first attempt failed, and further tests (which have a significant element of risk) shouldn’t be in the brain that’s already been through this, not until it’s much better tuned.
Brain surgery isn’t a minor procedure.
If they’re able to fix it for him, there’s a fair chance they will, I’d imagine.
But continuing to dig around after that failure is what treating him like a disposable Guinea pig would look like because that’s how they’d very likely kill him or substantially diminish his quality of life with brain damage.
There are lots of real reasons to hate musk. This isn’t one of them.
No? That’s insane. “We don’t k ow exactly what’s going on, but we are going to go poke around inside- oh shit he’s dead, if only we had waited until things stabilized and we had the information we needed.”
Come on, don’t be ridiculous. “Try to fix it” could easily result in a dead patient, and I’m sure you’d be all for praising their attempt to fix it, right?
They didn’t exactly say no, they just said they want more data. It might not be that crazy not to rush things with a patient that needs re-implantation when you’re trying to test the next revision of the implant and have willing patient who only requires an initial implantation.
As long as these patients are properly informed on the risks and limitations of this experimental tech, I don’t see a problem. There’s no evidence that they are treating their patients badly, or failing to fulfill any promises in regards to the efficacy of the implants, or commitment to support these early test implants insofar as they agreed to provide to their patients (to my understanding, they are informed that the implant could be a total failure with no opportunities to re-implant.).
My guess is you know nothing about this. They may think reinserting them is too risky for the patient because they don’t know. You’re almost certainly just making up facts to justify your conclusions, rather than assessing the facts and coming to a conclusion based on them.
I’m sure he was as he isn’t living under a rock. He agreed to this.
Thank you for showing how much bias is on this website and standing up for it.
People really need to chill out with their preconceived notions.
This website is going to be a shower of shit if it just people circle jerking.
If there is a reason not to like Musk this isn’t it. Honestly I could care less about some random guy.
You could actually read the article. The guy is glad to have helped make some one else’s life better. He doesn’t have brain damage and he is not dead nor is he worse off.
Oh boy he’s a currently happy disposable guinea pig, that makes it all better!
God forbid an adult of sound mind is allowed to decide what to do with his own body.
Haters got to hate
Or they want to actually have something that has a chance of working before doing it again…I doubt installing one of these things is a walk in the park and every install carries a high risk … I sure hope patient #2 is getting something with a possible fix…
The patient fully embraced the Elon propaganda and spouted his praises on the dozens of media interviews he agreed to.
No sympathy for someone who invited a leopard into their house to catch the mice
If such a person doesn’t deserve sympathy, who does?
Starving children in Gaza, who will never see their families again because they’re dead
Is that where you draw the line on sympathy, or are you one of those people who is physically incapable of talking about anything but Israel/Palestine?
Of course it’s not where I draw the line. Don’t be obtuse.
When asked who deserves sympathy, I gave an answer— and a far more deserving one than this dope.
Even the worst people in history were at some point just a child that we could have potentially saved. Even as an adult, or after doing evil, I think sympathy and compassion never stops being the right answer. It’s just in practice we have to prioritise: the needy, the many.
Yeah, ok 👍🏻
So unless someone is bombed and starving they deserve no sympathy? What kinda brain dead take is that?
As brain dead as putting those words in my mouth
You said verbatim, that a quadriplegic guy hoping to regain some control deserves no sympathy and then immediately went to war orphans in Gaza. I’m not putting anything in your mouth you didn’t shit out of it before
That’s not what I said. That’s just what you wanted to hear so your tantrum could be justified.
Perhaps if you spent Less time making up lies and more time learning how to read, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Yeah, everyone who signs up for experimental medical trials is a stooge.
Neuralink, owned by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, believes it can prevent thread movement in the next patient by simply implanting the fine wires deeper into brain tissue. The company is planning on—and the FDA has reportedly signed off on—implanting the threads 8 millimeters into the brain of the second trial participant rather than the 3 mm to 5 mm depth used in Arbaugh’s implantation.
Yeah, “just shove it in deeper” sounds like a brilliant plan.
Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but if I was that second patient I wouldn’t exactly be feeling super confident about their approach.
Yeah, “just shove it in deeper” sounds like a brilliant plan.
Does your past experience in brain surgery suggest that this might be a bad idea?
They’re volunteers with next to nothing to lose. This isn’t some healthy person who just wants to play angry birds with their mind. They’re getting an experimental device planted into their brain. I’m sure they’re aware of the risks.
You’d think somewhere amongst the literal thousands of animals they maimed and killed, they’d have figured out how to prevent a simple mechanical issue like “the electrodes won’t stay in place”
Like by sticking them deeper?
If this was something they knew could happen, why didn’t they prepare the patient so he’d know what to expect? Informing the patient of what can go wrong is an important step in even routine surgery, let alone experimentation.
Moreover, it would have blunted this exact criticism if they were simply to say, “yes, this is something we expected from our trials but we specifically chose this depth to start with for these reasons”.
The actual blog post only mentions the thread retraction in passing: https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience/
There is non-zero risk in every surgery, and this is a major surgery. There is non-zero risk of very very severe consequences: brain infection, stroke being just some. While these risks are low, they are non-zero. The volunteers have the possibility of losing everything.
And I’m sure they’re aware of that. What are you trying to say here? Abandon development of this technology?
Or focus on the non-invasive form of this technology.
I don’t think it’s capable of doing what the ultimate goal of Neuralink is, which is much more than being able to move a cursor on the screen. Science and technology wont stop advancing just because it’s potenttially risky.
I think my confidence would be tied to if there were any complications on the monkeys or pigs with going deeper.
My intuition says go as shallow as needed to get the data you need as the deeper you go the more something could go wrong, but as we see here, going shallow also has problems.
I’m assuming they tested different depths on animals, so as long as deeper in the animals didn’t specifically cause problems, I think I’d be fine with it as a solution.
Now, if they didn’t try these depths during the animal trials, well, that’s another matter entirely.
Man I deleted my account because I didn’t want Musk involved in my newsfeed. I can’t imagine giving that fool direct access to my brain.
I wonder what it was like for all of the fools that ever bought an Oculus headset and might’ve been force fed anything Mark projected on that thing.
Well tbh Quests dont really bug you much about anything FB related. After you setup the account the only thing you deal with is the initial menu starts opened to the app store with suggestions based on what you already bought.
But that initial menu let’s you also set quick access buttons for your favorite apps.
So it’s only a single click to go from “put on headsst” to “open thing I want” usually.
It’s not any different from steam starting you out in the store tbh, I can accept that level of advertising as it’s pretty transparent and half the time it has something of interest for me anyways.
It’s about as big of a deal as a gift shop at a museum.
“All Hail Elon”
There really is a Spongebob gif for everything, isn’t there…
lmao
All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…
Someone paralyzed from the neck down for whom this enables the use of computers, which they before couldn’t do, probably would rather have the outdated model than none
Would they still want it if it became hackable and someone could do nefarious things to them which they no doubt will try?
That’s up to the individual, I don’t think there’s universal answer to that. If it eventually makes it possible to restore a person’s sight, hearing or the ability to walk, I’m sure most would take the gamble.
Those should be closed systems and don’t need to network with other systems and should be safe enough, its when we start networking that it becomes incredibly risky which is what neuralink is intended to do. I don’t think the average person understands how many automated attacks are flooding interconnected computers as we speak and you’re dropping someone’s brain into that and we don’t understand the scope of what can be done intentionally or unintentionally, it’s not outside the realm of possibility an automated attack trying to rapidly port scan and compromise a neuralink could overwhelm and damage the device and cause brain damage or death.
There are people out there with short-range, wireless pacemakers with no security. Most just provide information you’d expect but some of them are also defibrillators (they can kill). As far as I know none have been harmed in an hacked attack but a hacked brain implant brings to mind more than just killing the owner. We may have an interest as a society in making this illegal because it’s not worth the gamble to us for people’s actions to be hijacked remotely.
I highly doubt that someone disabled enough to need implants like this is capable of doing damage to anyone but themselves. Like if you’re interested in protecting them, sure I’ll accept that. But the idea that society needs to protect itself from this is silly.
I don’t understand how one could think brain implants is a totally safe invention for a society. Did you consider more possibilities than just manipulating people into to physically attacking others?
Did you? Because you haven’t named them.
Compared to full paralysis? I think a lot of people would still want it
No surgery needed. Just insert the ElonDongle into your rear port to upgrade your ElonOS. The process might be a bit stretchy, be patient and don’t remove the ElonDongle before it finishes the load to avoid unwanted residue leaking out of the port.
Oof, the fan boy-ing is strong in this thread.
Let’s wait until Elon puts a link into his own brain, then we can decide if that thing is good or bad. And you can be sure that he would get any and all follow up procedures he needs …
Is every non-blindly hateful person a fanboy? Any chance that some of us just look at things as they are instead of getting emotionally invested with it?
Plot twist: he already has one but stays quiet about it, because the result is apparently bad
Bro, just a few more disabled people sacrificed to the machine and I swear we’ll get it right! Move fast, break things! Technology always good!
Everyone like a week and a half ago pitching a fit over me saying that this is an unethical way to treat disabled people can go fuck themselves, lol.
The dude is fine and actually pretty lucky. Its sad that it stopped working but its not like he died or something.
You have no idea what the long term effects of the rejection are going to be, and neither does the corporation doing this to human beings after killing a bunch of monkeys and still failing.
You do not know if he is going to be ok either. Right now its been positive doesn’t look all that bad. This is a guy who was able to do things he normally would be unable to do.
I think Lemmy just seems to hate Elon Musk and they can’t stand that something positive may of come from this. You can’t know what the future holds but if there first subject died it would look very bad for the company and would likely get some serious attention from the government regulators.
He still can for the time being. They worked around the problem.
What’s the alternative? We either don’t create this technology at all or we do and accept the fact that it’s going to involve a lot of trial and error. You don’t just skip all that and jump to the final product. There’s only so much you can test on animals which exactly isn’t the most ethical thing to begin with anyway. At some point you’re going to need to stick it in a human brain.
The first heart transplant recepient died after 18 days. Should we have not done that either?
That’s just untrue. There are a lot of options between “give up” and “proceed irresponsibly”. After all the animals they’ve scrapped why are the human subjects having the EXACT SAME PROBLEMS that were identified in the animals. This is Musk’s typical “fail fast” strategy to advance research faster, but in the medical field the failures damage real humans.
Completely irresponsible!
The FDA regulatory failure with neuralink is as bad as the FAA’s failure with Boeing.
Imagine when they put ads directly into your brain.
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The funny thing about this ad is that it’s already lodged deep in my brain and anytime someone says they have a headache I think about it
All I knew until today was you apply headon directly to your forehead. Why would you do so? If I had to guess, I would’ve said for headaches, but that’s completely an assumption
Or Musk decides that you don’t need some part of your brain. Or worse, rents it out as server space.
Don’t worry, the dolphins will save us if it gets that far.
!unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org
A little glimps how it could be…
From Hyper-reality
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is the bigger concern. For that matter imagine if a government mandated mind control.
I’m loving the typo.
Stop letting this shit head do what ever he wants!
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Yes, good point. These people are desperate, so we should let a wildly irresponsible company, who during animal testing had identified the thread retraction issue and not fixed it, we should let them experiment on desperate humans because fuck them I guess.
Yeah the guy was able to do something cool for a while, but now he’s quickly getting back to where he was and with bonus bits of metal all over his brain and no way to fix the problem.
I don’t know if that’s a trade he or anyone would have made going in.
They need to stop messing around with this Musk “fail fast” approach, that’s not acceptable in medicine. You can’t speed up your research by endangering the most desperate people in society.
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They tested on animals, identifying the retraction issue… Then did nothing and installed it into a human anyway.
In your example it’d be shampoo that chemically burns pig scalps that is pushed to market for humans anyway.
Stop being an apologist and think about what it means to have billionaires treating desperate people as guinea pigs for invasive technology testing.
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Look, at this point it’s just an agree to disagree thing. You think it’s ok for companies to do irreversible operations as long as subjects are desperate enough to consent. Others think that’s abusive. There’s obviously no changing your mind. That’s ok, just move on.
And no. If you’ve spent any amount of time here then you know that a ton of people here are also against bezos and pretty much every other billionaires out there.
And for what it’s worth, I do see your point. And I’d probably be inclined to agree. But at the same time, I do see the fact that it’s morally questionable
People can find purpose by joining a cult lmao what’s your point
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There are existing technologies that allow quadriplegics to use computers… that don’t involve brain chips. It’s sad that the only way he had access to such technology was by being a human test subject.
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He literally said he “was a waste”
And now he’s not a “waste” anymore, right?
He’s now a piece of meat to be used and abused for the egotistical whims of one of the world’s most notorious capitalist parasites.
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Can I get a valid source on this?
Have you seen how Musk treats his employees? And the test subjects Tesla calls “customers”?
No… I’m going to need proof that he wasn’t abused - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, after all.
I will defend Nuralink and Nolan.
…which you won’t be doing without defending Musk.
Nolan has had no negative experience from this yet.
FTFY.
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Is Nolan an employee?
That actually matters to you?
How can you have an extraordinary claim and refuse to provide evidence,
If you have proof that he wasn’t I’m all ears.
Based on your argument I’ll assume your a MAGA kinda person.
If I was sympathetic to fascists or the capitalist parasites fascists serve I’d be defending Musk - you know… like you’re doing?
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No one has an issue with the notion of creating a technology that allows paralyzed people to control a computer with their mind.
Where people have an issue is that Musk was told multiple times by multiple people that an implant likely will never be 100% feasible because the brain moves around in the skull, making keeping a connection tricky at best and likely impossible. (hence why the threads have retracted)
He’s been told on multiple occasions that a non-invasive tech that is both more reliable and less risky is actually FAR more feasible. But his ego and his hard-on for being “edgy” basically makes him want to do things as “sci fi” as possible because a node that sticks to the side of your head isn’t as cool as an implant (to him).
Nolan would be just as happy. Just as capable. and just as helpful to the research with something less intrusive, but then Musk wouldn’t think of himself as cool.
tl;dr - No one has a problem with the concept. But the invasive way it’s being implemented is 100% because of Musk’s ego driven self-delusion of himself.
When someone claims they want to improve your quality of life, you need to consider the source, especially when it’s Elon Musk. And especially when he wants to screw with your BRAIN.
Your faith in the benevolence of billionaires is adorable but history has shown us that for the most part, billionaires are vain, greedy, brutal sociopaths. Especially Musk, who is an apartheid-loving fascist.
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Looks like we got an Elon Cuck
not an elon cuck, @FonsNihilo@lemmy.ca is just pointing out that the TEST SUBJECT HIMSELF has had only good things to say about this implant. i hate ketamine boy as much as you do, but it isnt like musky balls is building these himself, there are real professional engineers doing this, so it working should not be attributed to musk. he came up with the name and the vague idea, thats it.
EDIT: nvm.
In an interview with the Journal, Neuralink’s first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, opened up about the roller-coaster experience. “I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard,” Arbaugh said. “I cried.” He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.
fuck the neuralink people. all their test subjects are disposable to them, i guess.
Huh, the unethical company that installed known-bad tech into a human is acting unethically. Interesting.
His family should sue them for fraud and whatever crime is to knowingly injure someone with subpar products.
Considering this is pretty much ground-breaking work involving brain surgery, I think it’s prudent for Neuralink to wait to see what happens instead of immediately performing another surgery. If I were in charge I’d definitely take things slowly and surely instead of trying to move fast and possibly break things.
*break people
Out of curiosity, what do you think about the fact that they knew from animal testing that the retraction issue existed, but they installed it into a human anyway?
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In an interview with the Journal, Neuralink’s first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, opened up about the roller-coaster experience. “I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard,” Arbaugh said. “I cried.” He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.
Oh yeah, words of happiness right here! So much QOL, I’m glad you enjoy this.
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That’s just not how medical research works. Modern medicine isn’t built on trying unproven technology on desperate people and using their bodies as a fast track stairway to success. Medical experiments have to ensure human dignity and that doesn’t include “he was desperate enough to say yes” as a rationale.
your an idiot. "His"tech has not helped anyone. why? cause he can’t deliver on his product, hence why he should not be allowed to experiment on people that have it hard already.
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No it was not successful. They literally announced last week it failed. You need to read more.
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I almost want to work there just to know exactly how it all went down. Plus who knows maybe I could help.
What a world we live in, huh?
We’ve got corporations who’ve successfully contaminated the world with their waste in a systematic fashion.
We’ve got corporations who’ve blindsided the political system.
We’ve got corporations who’ve blindsided affordable living.
We’ve got corporations who’ve given us a filtered and artificial companion in AI.
And now we’ve got a company that is actively seeking ways possible to ruin your way of being and living through chip implanting.
Enjoy the world, people.
What a myopic view of the world.
First we had piles of monkeys, now piles of paralyzied people.
Relax, the guy is fine.
I really hope a good lawyer can find some kind of flaw in that liability waver
He was already paralyzed, there’s nothing to sue over…
I’m not sure wtf they expected to happen when they aren’t addressing the core problem with neural interfaces. Fix scar tissue buildup around the electrodes or GTFO
In other words
Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 85% of first one failed.
we are just chattel to them, why would they care
