this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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RIP to whoever was desperate enough to try it. Hopefully they don’t die as painfully as the Neuralink monkeys did.
Imagine offering up your own brain (and probably life) for a ~~beta~~ alpha version of a prototype from a guy who's products have never left the beta stage?
As a software engineer myself there are certain things I know I never want to work on. Things like heart pumps and diagnostic machines where firmware needs to be so incredibly precise that one fuckup and people literally die. And these people trust the guy who makes Teslas. They're fun to drive... I wouldn't stick one in my brain though.
So what if you had the capability to be good at that heart pump software, and by not doing it you’re letting in someone who’s not as good as you at it.
Not trying to trap you or anything, but at a certain point somebody’s gotta do that high stakes stuff.
Maybe you know you’re not good at that kind of precision stuff, and I respect that. But maybe the difference between you and the guy who did step up to do that work isn’t that he has more skill, but merely less humility.
Maybe you, the one scared shitless of the ramifications of a mistake, are the one for that job.
There's quite a difference between rapid prototyping on software/hardware versus the human body.
Musk's approach to developing engineering advances has worked well in the software, aerospace, and vehicular industries. Development on inorganic things is much more predictable, we can isolate variables, and it is easier to understand cause & effect. If you screw up some software on an inorganic system, your program might crash, your rocket might explode, or your car won't start. These risks can be anticipated and costed fairly well, therefore rapid prototyping has an acceptable risk/reward ratio in that environment.
The human body, on the other hand, is an extremely complex system that we still don't fully understand. Each person is a unique variation on the model and that changes over time depending on upbringing, diet, exercise, and life experiences. Applying the same engineering approaches from inorganic industries has a much higher risk once you cross into the medical realm. If you have errors in a medical situation, you risk sickening, injuring, or even killing a person. The risk/reward ratio is skewed towards ensuring that human life is protected at all costs.
Using SpaceX as an example, the first three launches failed spectacularly and a fourth failure would have ended the business but fortunately the fourth test was a success. If you're suggesting that we apply the same risk-taking to Neuralink, are you suggesting that it's acceptable for the first three patients to die, as long as the fourth is a success?