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I wonder how much did ethical concerns contributed to that decision. I am conflicted about neural-link. On one hand, if successful, it will improve lives of ma

I wonder how much did ethical concerns contributed to that decision. I am conflicted about neural-link. On one hand, if successful, it will improve lives of many disabled persons. On the other hand, fiddling with nature in this manner has never been good for anyone involved. I mean, poking things into your brain to control external devices, does humanity really need such tech?

throwaway3699 5y ago
Imagine if you could record your memories and play them back to yourself or others. Consider having an entire generation of family memories accessible to those who have dementia/alzheimer's. This technology will be life changing, consumer applications aside.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  For any new technology it is important to ask, who will have access and how will we treat those without access. Sometimes new tech enriches all our lives, nearly everyone benefits from renewable energy for instance. In other cases you risk furthering the divide between haves and have nots. When a person experiencing homelessness has their neural device go bad, how do we ensure they aren't just left in the street suffering? Are we comfortable living in a world where the elderly are permitted to suffer from Alzheimer's when we have a cure like you describe, just because they were too poor to afford treatment? Secondly, it is important to ask, how could the technology be used if greed or maliciousness are the main motivators. Do those downsides outweigh the positives? I'm moderately bullish on brain computer interfaces, but I caution or challenge people to put on their engineering hats and really think deeply about both the positives and negatives of new technology.
  - rdedev 5y ago
    Isn't it already happening now ? Many people simply don't go to the doctor because of the associated costs. But this dosent mean we shouldnt do research into curing diseases. A better solution to the scenario you provided above would be a nationalised healthcare system, or atleast something close to it where people can get a basic amount of care without having to think about money
    - Pfhreak 5y ago
      Yes, it's exactly what's happening now. It's extremely what's happening now. If you don't take deliberate acts in addressing your assumptions about access when thinking about the future, you'll end up in the same place as now. I'm saying looking at the current model and asking yourself, "Is this really the right model?" is a key part of building something new.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Now imagine a state implanting false memories in witnesses to trap political inconveniences.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  You already can, it’s called a camera. There’s nothing stopping someone from getting a camera implanted in their head, or even just wearing a Google Glass or something like it.
- PostOnce 5y ago
  And what of the court-ordered memory extraction by invasive brain surgery? Perhaps not even of alleged perpetrators, but of bystanders. It sounds far-fetched, but we've done worse. The choices we make today dictate the future we live in tomorrow.
  - actinium226 5y ago
    Is it really that different from court-ordered email dumps? FBI raids taking people's computers? Before email and the widespread use of computers these things weren't done, but I don't hear anybody saying we should go back to "the good old days" before computers and email because at least then we wouldn't have all this invasive government snooping.
    - PostOnce 5y ago
      Email dumps don't involve literal brain surgery with the risk of death. Also, unlike emails, memories are fuzzy, subject to change, and to being dreamt up, drug induced, or all manner of other things we probably aren't ready to cope with, given all the other ethical problems we have in our justice system.
- Daniel_sk 5y ago
  You are really simplifying at how memories or the brain works - we (IT workers) tend to think of memories as just some information that can be written down, stored and replayed. But the mechanism is much more different. You would need the specific brain to make any sense of it. You can't just upload some memories to a different brain for playback - these memories need to be formed in a long and slow process, same like you can't just upload some muscle mass to your body with a device. The same goes for retrieving memories, you can't just ask the brain to dump all the memories into a device. These memories would need to be "relived" (retrieved) by the brain at normal speed and this would be a tedious process. Unless we could do a scan of the whole brain at a single time and scan every single state of a cell (and then also build an interpreter device). There is a lot of biology behind memories and interaction with the whole body and chemistry to make it work. You can't rip memories out of the body because they are part of the whole system and they don't make sense outside of it.
- sarsway 5y ago
  you're supposed to let go of the past, not endlessly replay it in some in some nostalgic fever dream...
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    You can let go and still like to look at it? Otherwise would you say the same thing about cameras?
    - sarsway 5y ago
      well since you asked, yes never been a fan of keeping much pictures or memories from the distant past. It's about living in the present, those moments are gone, you already experienced them, no reason to cling to it, just let it go, forever. We'll be all dead soon anyway and none of your childhood memories will matter in the slightest, circling around the past only burdens you unnecessarily. You'd be better off to just always look forward and never look back.
      - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
        I like having a window into the distant past because it's interesting. I don't see how that could be a bad thing. Sure, we should live in the present, but doing so isn't necessarily at odds with looking back. In fact, even if you're focusing on looking forward, you still need to consider the past and learn from it.
- sidcool 5y ago
  I just hope they don't insert ads in the memories of my daughter and my wife playing. /s
Kiro 5y ago
Since when is wanting to become a cyborg something controversial in hacker circles? I want to be fully hooked up and wired in.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  With the hindsight of Facebook and the likes on social media, which went from "oh cute, I can be in touch with all my high school friends" to becoming a greedy, evil, manipulative corporations with unlimited money and captive audiences, I for one, am off the cyborg bandwagon. I really love technology, of what is possible, of what positive changes it can bring about. But history, even the very very recent ones, have show how quickly technology can be pivoted to suit vested interests.
  - visarga 5y ago
    I'm wondering if the Borg episodes were written in the FB era, how would they have turned out. The Borg are basically a neuralinked FB with ships and guns acting like the Horde of Huns.
    - chasd00 5y ago
      if the Bork were hooked together via FB the would all be arguing with each other and not present much of a threat.
- visarga 5y ago
  > I want to be fully hooked up and wired in. YOLO. Live the dream!
- drewwwwww 5y ago
  when other kinds of chickens finally started coming home to roost, and those within hacker circles started to have their oppenheimer moment.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  Probably since a lot of us spent the middle parts of our career watching our democratic institutions get dismantled in front of us using the tools we built early in our careers.
radu_floricica 5y ago
After the Covid fiasco I'd fully expect that over cautios bioethics becomes itself controversial. We're still counting extra hundreds of thousands dead because regulatory agencies refused to even consider challenge trials, not to mention dropping the ball in almost any possible way: actively discouraging masks, forbidding rapid tests, and lately hurting trust in vaccines with a fully reflex banning of AZ and JJ that had a clear outcome from the beginning. Since nazi germany and Mao I don't think there was a category of people that caused as many death and suffering as bioethicists. Moderna was clearly ready to bring a product to market, but it took a pandemic for us to get rna vaccines. God know how many people died needlessly because people created a whole career path by chanting "thalidomide".
- f6v 5y ago
  I think slow vaccine rollout was caused more by logistics issues. It’s just not easy to produce billion doses on a whim.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    I think at the current rates of production were still looking at another, what, 36 months to fully vaccinate the world?
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    The pandemic has an exponential growth. Starting vaccinations even a few weeks earlier would have saved many lives by lowering the curve earlier. Starting them three months earlier might have... actually, probably would have skipped the winter wave completely, at least in the developed countries. Which would have freed extra doses for the developing countries as well - it's an interlinked chain that works better earlier you start, because that's how vaccines work. They're a preventive measure. And the cost? Infecting 100 or 1000 volunteers in low risk categories, with an expected death count of under 1. There were websites where people registered in thousands for this.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
Robotbeat 5y ago
Medical devices have definitely helped people. Including brain medical devices. I agree the far-future type goals are a bit creepy.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Probably not at all. These people knew what they were getting into and obviously never shared your world views in this matter. Why would they have founded such a company otherwise? I bet the reason for leaving has more to do with a vision they disagree with, some internal inter personal issues, or something similar. Or possibly there are competitors that are offering attractive salaries. Who knows? Ethics are very unlikely to be a factor here. Anyway, us fiddling with nature is our very nature. It's what we do. Modern society is the result of thousands of years us fiddling with all sorts of stuff. I'd argue the net result isn't all bad.
f6v 5y ago
> On the other hand, fiddling with nature in this manner has never been good for anyone involved. It’s also unnatural to live in mega-cities, fix your teeth and survive many infections. Also, surviving past childhood.
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  Against the Grain argues that many of those "natural" problems you mentioned are a result of fiddling with nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
  - f6v 5y ago
    Not the first time I see something like this. What I don't get is what do these people propose to do. Suppose many health troubles are caused by living in the cities and agricultural diet (which is highly speculative). Is there a way to feed 7-8-9 billion people by following a hunter-gatherer diet?

throwaway3699 5y ago

Imagine if you could record your memories and play them back to yourself or others. Consider having an entire generation of family memories accessible to those who have dementia/alzheimer's. This technology will be life changing, consumer applications aside.

Pfhreak 5y ago
For any new technology it is important to ask, who will have access and how will we treat those without access. Sometimes new tech enriches all our lives, nearly everyone benefits from renewable energy for instance. In other cases you risk furthering the divide between haves and have nots. When a person experiencing homelessness has their neural device go bad, how do we ensure they aren't just left in the street suffering? Are we comfortable living in a world where the elderly are permitted to suffer from Alzheimer's when we have a cure like you describe, just because they were too poor to afford treatment? Secondly, it is important to ask, how could the technology be used if greed or maliciousness are the main motivators. Do those downsides outweigh the positives? I'm moderately bullish on brain computer interfaces, but I caution or challenge people to put on their engineering hats and really think deeply about both the positives and negatives of new technology.
- rdedev 5y ago
  Isn't it already happening now ? Many people simply don't go to the doctor because of the associated costs. But this dosent mean we shouldnt do research into curing diseases. A better solution to the scenario you provided above would be a nationalised healthcare system, or atleast something close to it where people can get a basic amount of care without having to think about money
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    Yes, it's exactly what's happening now. It's extremely what's happening now. If you don't take deliberate acts in addressing your assumptions about access when thinking about the future, you'll end up in the same place as now. I'm saying looking at the current model and asking yourself, "Is this really the right model?" is a key part of building something new.
kumarvvr 5y ago
Now imagine a state implanting false memories in witnesses to trap political inconveniences.
ironmagma 5y ago
You already can, it’s called a camera. There’s nothing stopping someone from getting a camera implanted in their head, or even just wearing a Google Glass or something like it.
PostOnce 5y ago
And what of the court-ordered memory extraction by invasive brain surgery? Perhaps not even of alleged perpetrators, but of bystanders. It sounds far-fetched, but we've done worse. The choices we make today dictate the future we live in tomorrow.
- actinium226 5y ago
  Is it really that different from court-ordered email dumps? FBI raids taking people's computers? Before email and the widespread use of computers these things weren't done, but I don't hear anybody saying we should go back to "the good old days" before computers and email because at least then we wouldn't have all this invasive government snooping.
  - PostOnce 5y ago
    Email dumps don't involve literal brain surgery with the risk of death. Also, unlike emails, memories are fuzzy, subject to change, and to being dreamt up, drug induced, or all manner of other things we probably aren't ready to cope with, given all the other ethical problems we have in our justice system.
Daniel_sk 5y ago
You are really simplifying at how memories or the brain works - we (IT workers) tend to think of memories as just some information that can be written down, stored and replayed. But the mechanism is much more different. You would need the specific brain to make any sense of it. You can't just upload some memories to a different brain for playback - these memories need to be formed in a long and slow process, same like you can't just upload some muscle mass to your body with a device. The same goes for retrieving memories, you can't just ask the brain to dump all the memories into a device. These memories would need to be "relived" (retrieved) by the brain at normal speed and this would be a tedious process. Unless we could do a scan of the whole brain at a single time and scan every single state of a cell (and then also build an interpreter device). There is a lot of biology behind memories and interaction with the whole body and chemistry to make it work. You can't rip memories out of the body because they are part of the whole system and they don't make sense outside of it.
sarsway 5y ago
you're supposed to let go of the past, not endlessly replay it in some in some nostalgic fever dream...
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  You can let go and still like to look at it? Otherwise would you say the same thing about cameras?
  - sarsway 5y ago
    well since you asked, yes never been a fan of keeping much pictures or memories from the distant past. It's about living in the present, those moments are gone, you already experienced them, no reason to cling to it, just let it go, forever. We'll be all dead soon anyway and none of your childhood memories will matter in the slightest, circling around the past only burdens you unnecessarily. You'd be better off to just always look forward and never look back.
    - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      I like having a window into the distant past because it's interesting. I don't see how that could be a bad thing. Sure, we should live in the present, but doing so isn't necessarily at odds with looking back. In fact, even if you're focusing on looking forward, you still need to consider the past and learn from it.
sidcool 5y ago
I just hope they don't insert ads in the memories of my daughter and my wife playing. /s

Kiro 5y ago

Since when is wanting to become a cyborg something controversial in hacker circles? I want to be fully hooked up and wired in.

kumarvvr 5y ago
With the hindsight of Facebook and the likes on social media, which went from "oh cute, I can be in touch with all my high school friends" to becoming a greedy, evil, manipulative corporations with unlimited money and captive audiences, I for one, am off the cyborg bandwagon. I really love technology, of what is possible, of what positive changes it can bring about. But history, even the very very recent ones, have show how quickly technology can be pivoted to suit vested interests.
- visarga 5y ago
  I'm wondering if the Borg episodes were written in the FB era, how would they have turned out. The Borg are basically a neuralinked FB with ships and guns acting like the Horde of Huns.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    if the Bork were hooked together via FB the would all be arguing with each other and not present much of a threat.
visarga 5y ago
> I want to be fully hooked up and wired in. YOLO. Live the dream!
drewwwwww 5y ago
when other kinds of chickens finally started coming home to roost, and those within hacker circles started to have their oppenheimer moment.
8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
Probably since a lot of us spent the middle parts of our career watching our democratic institutions get dismantled in front of us using the tools we built early in our careers.

radu_floricica 5y ago

After the Covid fiasco I'd fully expect that over cautios bioethics becomes itself controversial. We're still counting extra hundreds of thousands dead because regulatory agencies refused to even consider challenge trials, not to mention dropping the ball in almost any possible way: actively discouraging masks, forbidding rapid tests, and lately hurting trust in vaccines with a fully reflex banning of AZ and JJ that had a clear outcome from the beginning. Since nazi germany and Mao I don't think there was a category of people that caused as many death and suffering as bioethicists. Moderna was clearly ready to bring a product to market, but it took a pandemic for us to get rna vaccines. God know how many people died needlessly because people created a whole career path by chanting "thalidomide".

f6v 5y ago
I think slow vaccine rollout was caused more by logistics issues. It’s just not easy to produce billion doses on a whim.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I think at the current rates of production were still looking at another, what, 36 months to fully vaccinate the world?
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  The pandemic has an exponential growth. Starting vaccinations even a few weeks earlier would have saved many lives by lowering the curve earlier. Starting them three months earlier might have... actually, probably would have skipped the winter wave completely, at least in the developed countries. Which would have freed extra doses for the developing countries as well - it's an interlinked chain that works better earlier you start, because that's how vaccines work. They're a preventive measure. And the cost? Infecting 100 or 1000 volunteers in low risk categories, with an expected death count of under 1. There were websites where people registered in thousands for this.
  - saalweachter 5y ago

Robotbeat 5y ago

Medical devices have definitely helped people. Including brain medical devices. I agree the far-future type goals are a bit creepy.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Probably not at all. These people knew what they were getting into and obviously never shared your world views in this matter. Why would they have founded such a company otherwise? I bet the reason for leaving has more to do with a vision they disagree with, some internal inter personal issues, or something similar. Or possibly there are competitors that are offering attractive salaries. Who knows? Ethics are very unlikely to be a factor here. Anyway, us fiddling with nature is our very nature. It's what we do. Modern society is the result of thousands of years us fiddling with all sorts of stuff. I'd argue the net result isn't all bad.

f6v 5y ago

> On the other hand, fiddling with nature in this manner has never been good for anyone involved. It’s also unnatural to live in mega-cities, fix your teeth and survive many infections. Also, surviving past childhood.

clydethefrog 5y ago
Against the Grain argues that many of those "natural" problems you mentioned are a result of fiddling with nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
- f6v 5y ago
  Not the first time I see something like this. What I don't get is what do these people propose to do. Suppose many health troubles are caused by living in the cities and agricultural diet (which is highly speculative). Is there a way to feed 7-8-9 billion people by following a hunter-gatherer diet?