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 just this: 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.
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.).
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?
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.
If there is a reason not to like Musk this isn’t it. Honestly I could care less about some random guy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“All Hail Elon”
There really is a Spongebob gif for everything, isn’t there…
lmao
Imagine when they put ads directly into your brain.
Removed by mod
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
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…
This is the bigger concern. For that matter imagine if a government mandated mind control.
I’m loving the typo.
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.
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 …
Plot twist: he already has one but stays quiet about it, because the result is apparently bad
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?
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?
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.
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
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…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Only 15 percent of the electrode-bearing threads implanted in the brain of Neuralink’s first human brain-chip patient continue to work properly, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The adjustments were effective enough to regain and then exceed performance on at least one metric—the bits-per-second (BPS) rate used to measure how quickly and accurately a patient with an implant can control a computer cursor.
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.
The Journal’s report adds more detail about the thread retraction as Neuralink gears up to surgically implant its chip into a second trial participant.
According to the report, the company hopes to perform the second surgery sometime in June and has gained a green light to do so from the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees clinical trials.
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 original article contains 481 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Stop letting this shit head do what ever he wants!
What shithead? I’ll assume Nuralink, or more specifically, Musk?
Instead of hating, why not try to see it from Nolans perspective? (Nolan was the 1st to get the implant.
He literally said he “was a waste” before his implant, and also stated he “has purpose again”.
It’s incredibly easy to be against this, when you have never had to experience being unable to use your body. Imagine being unable to move for 8 years. I’ll say that again; Eight years. A company offers an experimental implant so you can use a computer again. Who in their right mind would not accept that offer?
But because you do not like Musk, these people should just be happy with their current circumstance, just so you can be happy Musk cant move forward with these technology?
You hate Musk so much you would rather these people getting the implants simply don’t, and continue living as they are.
Yes, Musk is awful. Staff at nuralink are not, Nolan is not. You and Musk are.
