Technology
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Animal testing is awful in the best case, agreed.
What this article and other articles about Neuralink allege is that the company blew right past any kind of ethical guidelines that the industry has in a desire to be fast. The industry standard is to avoid any "undue suffering". They admit animals will suffer but all effort must be taken to minimize it.
What whistleblowers have exposed is that Neuralink started putting devices in primate's brains when they knew the devices won't work and were deadly in predictable ways. For instance a lot of monkeys got their brains cooked alive because the device put out too much waste heat. This was done because Elon was getting impatient and wanting to see progress in primate trials, so they just YOLOed a bunch of obviously deadly devices into a bunch of primate brains and in doing so, tortured and killed all the animals needlessly.
Musk is unplugging servers with customer data and then transporting them in a van. He 100% has zero interest in proper procedure. Look at the QA of Tesla ffs.
Musk is a petulant child. There’s no chip. It’s an abandoned project that killed a bunch of monkeys for a bit of press.
I haven’t read beyond the Verge article and it would make sense that neurallink is YOLO-ing it as you say.
IME, I think people would be surprised at how much this isn’t entirely true. There are grey zones and industries with people with careers and deadlines. There are groups that know staying out of the limelight and not talking about the slightly dodgy thing they do is a good strategy. Yes there are ethics groups and oversight and a general awareness of the importance of not being evil. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if neurallink isn’t categorically different from a lot of animal industries.