I don’t know how I feel about that. It would ruin my spotless record of never ever having convinced anyone of anything whatsoever.
I don’t hate Musk. I understand his frustration with rules and the regulators that stand in his way of doing things. Ofc it was on a relatively insignificant scale, but I’ve been in his position. I’ve taken risks I shouldn’t have. I was rewarded (or at least not punished) when they worked out and suffered consequences when they didn’t. Even though I didn’t agree with it at the time, if I hadn’t been constrained, well, there were a few occasions things could have gone way worse.
I don’t think Elon is evil, though he is moving in that direction. I don’t think he’s stupid, either. The opposite is true, but he doesn’t know every fucking thing. On topics others are experts in, he is frequently exposed as ignorant of basic facts. He’s an arrogant jackass with enough power to be dangerous. If he’s not restrained, he’s going to do damage.
i’ve done some things to rats, so monkeys would be ok… although if we’re making this personally it’s harder for sure. That’s a lot of monkey killing and I voted thinking I wasn’t literally murdering the monkeys.
I can’t bring myself to vote. Like, if I were paralyzed, maybe I’d kill 100 monkeys to walk again. But otoh, I might just risk my life to save one monkey.
Anyway, it’s complicated. Implanted electrodes may not be the only or the best answer. Idk if still true, but 10 years ago a fellow student was working on this and electrodes were incredibly problematic. Like ~hopeless, so she was looking at ways to use light. I think she used cow brain tissue or something, so no monkey killing involved. Now we can use noninvasive methods to practically read minds, so maybe we should go another way.
Yeah, it kinda sounds like the whole neurolink approach is a pretty dumb, shallow sci-fi thing. It’s an obvious thing to do, provided you don’t know anything about the brain. “Sure slap a pacemaker on that bad boy and it’ll be great.”
Most paralysis issues as I understand them are spinal cord, not brain. To the extent they are brain, like Parkinsons or ALS or what have you, they are at the level of cells, chemistry, maybe auto-immune issues. You aren’t going to fix them with big zaps any more than you would fix any intricate machine with big zaps (epilepsy may be different, partly because it operates at the level of zaps).
I can see how someone would say, hey let’s make an external augmentation to the brain, it’ll be great. They had it in the Matrix! But the brain is a dance of 100 billion neurons, not a device with a plug. If you want to improve how a neurological system functions, I would think the proper research would be at the level of cells and tissues, not whether you can drill a hole in a monkey skull and get an electrical input to stay in place. Basically, to my lay understanding (which is likely deeper than Elon’s) the whole project seems misguided.
I don’t imagine the result of this research will lead to a cure for paralysis, but more of an ability for a paralyzed person to more easily navigate our world and have a higher quality of life, like being able to use a computer or move their own wheelchair around
Like if a quadriplegic person can be able to play Xbox and surf unstuck politics and the internet, I mean, what else could one ask for? That’s a full life
The great thing about research is something unexpected might come in the future from the knowledge gained. For sure if the only possible result is a way to check Twitter without taking your phone out of your pocket, that’s worth zero monkey lives
Fair point. It may lead to better things, and worse case we’ll learn that whatever approach they are using doesn’t work, which is still progress.
I’m very sympathetic to Suzzer’s point, and I love me some steak and burgers.
I’ve always had reservations about animal experiments, and I’ve generally always supported them, even for things like invasive investigations of attentional mechanisms or the visual system in monkeys. Still, I hope we can do something about nuclear weapons and people eventually reach the point where present man’s treatment of animals is regarded as woeful.
A friend of mine at Oxford uni was involved in brain research on Monkeys.
This was a while back. So details are hazey.
I do remember that the ethics rules were INCREDIBLY strict. And administered by a a whole different team with complete veto power and control over the experiment.
They were able to do the experiment, but not if the money was sick or in pain.
There was an example where a monkey got an infection at the site of the brain implant, and the ethics folks overruled the head researcher and made the monkey be euthanized. Apparently the researcher was not happy, because this set the experiment way back.
Now of course, I’m sure that Elmo’s monkey torture circus will be similarly administered with the appropriate ethics controls.
It always has been weird to me that anything cows or monkeys or corn does is natural, but anything a human does is unnatural. Not sure where that puts me on the death to monkeys spectrum tho.
Idk I didn’t know how to frame it. Just thought it was interesting that most people here would kill individual monkeys to save individual humans but would also probably recognize that humans are “bad” and monkeys “good” (less bad? Idk) for life on this planet.
I could have said better for the universe I guess. It would be interesting to line up two questions:
Would you kill all monkeys to significantly improve the lives of paralyzed humans?
Vs
Do you think humans, the species, are a net positive for the universe? What about monkeys?
I feel like most here think humans are a net negative (maybe I’m wrong) but would also choose to kill monkeys to save humans.
