6 ms·

Battle Erupts over Alleged Grisly Photos of Brain-Hacked Neuralink Monkeys

29 points by elsewhen 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago
You know, I honestly don’t care. It’s probably tens to hundreds of monkeys at the most, they’re probably pumped full of drugs so they don’t feel the pain during implantation and I’m sick of blocking any sort of progress in anything due to ethical concerns. We literally kill millions of cows a day and we’re okay with it, let’s extend some of that understanding to technological progress as well.
- theonemind 4y ago
  Yeah, ethics man. What a pain. Why are we using monkeys anyway when we could just use prisoners and homeless people? Double-score, scientific progress and decreasing the homelessness and prison problem.
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    There’s a homeless camp down the street, please send a cleanup crew after you’ve picked them up, thanks.
  - UnFleshedOne 4y ago
    He does have a point about food animals though. We are perfectly ok with treating them horribly their whole lives to save few cents on the costs (not to mention killing them at all). Yet we pretend to be shocked when something that makes us feel squeamish happens. And then go right back to chewing on that steak...
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > He does have a point about food animals though. People can make a choice for themselves, most don't because deep down they don't give a fuck, many do though
      - addicted 4y ago
        But many, in fact most, people do. There’s a reason a bunch of states passed laws making it illegal to photograph the warehouses where these animals are raised. If there was a transparency law, that required an accurate picture of the location where the animals whose meat is being sold was raised to be stuck on the packaging it wouldn’t be very long before the more inhumane (or more accurately, the more inhumane looking) meat sources would become unprofitable. Because most people are willing to pay a little bit more if they fully understand the ethical consequences. Actually, what is more likely to happen is that many people would eat meat less frequently, opting for more plant based sources of protein and then spend the extra money needed for the more humane meat when they wanted meat itself.
        quantified 4y ago
        And, cigarettes have to show lung damage photos (federal) and reproductive health clinics need to show you sonograms of your fetus (state).
        nobodyandproud 4y ago
        > Because most people are willing to pay a little bit more if they fully understand the ethical consequences. Actually, what is more likely to happen is that many people would eat meat less frequently, opting for more plant based sources of protein and then spend the extra money needed for the more humane meat when they wanted meat itself. Most people I’ve grown up with are aware but don’t care or just put it out mind. Willful blindness is a very human condition and a terrifying one.
        soulofmischief 4y ago
        These people don't care how many children were involved in the production of their iPhone and Nike shoes, they DEFINITELY don't care about the ethics of their meat consumption.
    - farisjarrah 4y ago
      Just because people eat meat out of a package from the super market does not mean they are okay with their bacon being raised on a farm where the pig was in a 1 square meter cage its whole life. Most people don't have the time, effort, or will to fight against large factory farming practices because they are too busy trying to survive and take care of themselves and their families. You can eat meat and still care about the welfare of the animals being raised. They're not mutually exclusive things.
      - nobodyandproud 4y ago
        > Just because people eat meat out of a package from the super market does not mean they are okay with their bacon being raised on a farm where the pig was in a 1 square meter cage its whole life. Most people don't have the time, effort, or will to fight against large factory farming practices because they are too busy trying to survive and take care of themselves and their families. Unless one is a hunter-gatherer, meat eating isn’t about survival. Instead, what it means is that they may care; but not enough to give up or work on giving up the pleasure of eating meat daily.
      - soulofmischief 4y ago
        I'd like to introduce you to the concepts of vegetarianism and veganism, with which one can claim to care about the welfare of factory farmed animals without being full of crap. No one is forcing these people to participate. Being overworked is an absolutely ridiculous excuse for not being able to cut out unethically farmed meat from your diet.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      Monkeys are primates though, which I feel like entitles them to somewhat special treatment. They are cognitively equivalent to a human child. While chickens are dumb, evil animals.
  - salawat 4y ago
    You forgot the /s (I hope). Poe's law people. Never assume that sarcasm sufficiently communicates over a textual medium.
- bunkmaster1337 4y ago
  You can experiment on yourself and no one bats an eye.
  - ashwagary 4y ago
    Yes, I'm completely fine with Elon putting electrodes and implants in his own brain to further science.
- salawat 4y ago
  >I’m sick of blocking any sort of progress in anything due to ethical concerns. Wish granted. Please, hop up on the operating table. We're not asking. Thank you, by the way, for the ongoing funding for our project that we've arranged to have diverted from your pay from your employer. Now, we're going to test the write functionality of Neuralink. We'll know it's working, because when it is, you'll stop screaming. Moral: Abandon ethics at your own risk. Normative suggestion: Those that suggest putting aside ethics should be the first to have ethics put aside in all matters pertaining to themselves, that they may be reminded why we make such a big deal of them in the first place.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Ethics can’t be black and white. There has to be a reasonable middle ground and clearly human testing is way, way past what’s acceptable. You can call it a slippery slope but everything is and it’s the reason we have laws to keep things sane.
    - salawat 4y ago
      >the reason we have laws to keep things sane. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/us/california-bees-fish-court-ruling-scn-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/us/california-bees-fish-court... https://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actually-Dreamed/dp/1627222693 https://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actuall... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Unit... https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-prewar-germany https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewis... Oh yes. It's the laws that will save us, and keep everything sane. /s Let's try this again shall we? Ethics and morality are a priori to any system of legalistic systemitization, not the other way around. You will not find a law that that "stealing is okay". You will find law that goes of it's way to decree that X is not (something morally/ethically unconscionable, but really something else). >You can call it a slippery slope It isn't. It's an incontrovertible case of anthropocentric thinking with a dash of self-referential inconsistency, followed by an appeal to pragmatism, stemming from a desire for nearer-term gratification at the expense of normalization of deviance/Overton window shifting. Slippery slope/heap fallacy my ass. You aren't getting out of this with "I'm just going to disengage with a platitude." You do you, but don't delude yourself into thinking there is some inherent virtue in lowering the bar and managing to traverse the hurdle when someone else is paying the price for you not being capable of being bothered to deal with things the right way.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > progress Something being new doesn't mean it's progress Lead paint was progress Asbestos was progress Freon was progress > We literally kill millions of cows a day and we’re okay with it, You might, I'm not, millions of people aren't
  - mturmon 4y ago
    Agree, and it's worth it to point out this lazy and insidious usage of "we". Here's Christopher Hitchens on this habit, in the first paragraphs of an early essay called "The `We' Fallacy": > Lionel Trilling once wrote a short essay on the problem of ‘we’. Apparently, whenever he said of a novel or other work under review that it engaged ‘our’ sympathy, or that ‘we’ felt repelled by the author’s assumptions, he would receive letters of complaint. Who was this ‘we’, the letterwriters demanded to know, and what allowed Trilling to speak for ‘us’ in this way? The literary critic’s experience may not seem immediately relevant to contemporary politics. > But as one surveys the dismal field of political commentary, it is hard not to conclude that half the cretinism of the mainstream media is attributable to the ‘we’ fallacy. This is especially true in any discussion of imperialism. There is talk of ‘our’ interests, ‘our’ credibility, and ‘our’ will. [...]
goplayoutside 4y ago
"If hooking some monkey's testicles up to a car battery can save a kid from dying of cancer in ten years, I've got two things to say: the red is the positive, and the black is the negative." - David Spade, paraphrased badly
- lm28469 4y ago
  What if you replaced "save a kid from dying of cancer in ten years" by "having an implant that lets you buy toilet paper on amazon if you blink twice", because we all know that's where we're going to end up
  - traverseda 4y ago
    Listen, no one is going to defend these excesses of capitalism, the tracking the increasingly user hostile designs, the anti-competitive consolidation and rent seeking behavior. But seriously, you're going to take research into actual human-machine interfaces and boil them down to "implant that lets you buy toilet paper by blinking"? I mean maybe the entire field of computing goes ethically bankrupt, even if the walled gardens and coercive algorithms win forever, the concept of a computer as a "bicycle for the mind" falling to the wayside as computers become only used as a tool for control. Assuming that you have no faith that anyone will ever use it to build a "bicycle for the mind". Even if you assume that it will mostly be used for Evil commercially it can still be used for dumb prosthetics and increase the quality of life for a lot of people.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > it can still be used for dumb prosthetics and increase the quality of life for a lot of people. Who and how ? Virtually every megacorp is busy showing you ads or taking your money when you buy the shit you saw in their ads. Everything has been corrupted, no one can assume good faith anymore
      - traverseda 4y ago
        By that logic is there any point in doing any sort of research on anything?
yummypaint 4y ago
For all the philosophising in this thread, remember this is just an attempt to get documentation into public view. Regardless of one's ethical position i think we can all agree that having more information out in the open is a good thing. Properly documenting failures is also important to avoid reproducing problems and creating more suffering. Factory farms have taken it further and managed to get people who document abuse at those facilities designated as terrorists. In a democracy the public cannot govern if it's shielded from the truth.

29 points by elsewhen 4y ago

You know, I honestly don’t care. It’s probably tens to hundreds of monkeys at the most, they’re probably pumped full of drugs so they don’t feel the pain during implantation and I’m sick of blocking any sort of progress in anything due to ethical concerns. We literally kill millions of cows a day and we’re okay with it, let’s extend some of that understanding to technological progress as well.

theonemind 4y ago
Yeah, ethics man. What a pain. Why are we using monkeys anyway when we could just use prisoners and homeless people? Double-score, scientific progress and decreasing the homelessness and prison problem.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  There’s a homeless camp down the street, please send a cleanup crew after you’ve picked them up, thanks.
- UnFleshedOne 4y ago
  He does have a point about food animals though. We are perfectly ok with treating them horribly their whole lives to save few cents on the costs (not to mention killing them at all). Yet we pretend to be shocked when something that makes us feel squeamish happens. And then go right back to chewing on that steak...
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > He does have a point about food animals though. People can make a choice for themselves, most don't because deep down they don't give a fuck, many do though
    - addicted 4y ago
      But many, in fact most, people do. There’s a reason a bunch of states passed laws making it illegal to photograph the warehouses where these animals are raised. If there was a transparency law, that required an accurate picture of the location where the animals whose meat is being sold was raised to be stuck on the packaging it wouldn’t be very long before the more inhumane (or more accurately, the more inhumane looking) meat sources would become unprofitable. Because most people are willing to pay a little bit more if they fully understand the ethical consequences. Actually, what is more likely to happen is that many people would eat meat less frequently, opting for more plant based sources of protein and then spend the extra money needed for the more humane meat when they wanted meat itself.
      - quantified 4y ago
        And, cigarettes have to show lung damage photos (federal) and reproductive health clinics need to show you sonograms of your fetus (state).
      - nobodyandproud 4y ago
        > Because most people are willing to pay a little bit more if they fully understand the ethical consequences. Actually, what is more likely to happen is that many people would eat meat less frequently, opting for more plant based sources of protein and then spend the extra money needed for the more humane meat when they wanted meat itself. Most people I’ve grown up with are aware but don’t care or just put it out mind. Willful blindness is a very human condition and a terrifying one.
      - soulofmischief 4y ago
        These people don't care how many children were involved in the production of their iPhone and Nike shoes, they DEFINITELY don't care about the ethics of their meat consumption.
  - farisjarrah 4y ago
    Just because people eat meat out of a package from the super market does not mean they are okay with their bacon being raised on a farm where the pig was in a 1 square meter cage its whole life. Most people don't have the time, effort, or will to fight against large factory farming practices because they are too busy trying to survive and take care of themselves and their families. You can eat meat and still care about the welfare of the animals being raised. They're not mutually exclusive things.
    - nobodyandproud 4y ago
      > Just because people eat meat out of a package from the super market does not mean they are okay with their bacon being raised on a farm where the pig was in a 1 square meter cage its whole life. Most people don't have the time, effort, or will to fight against large factory farming practices because they are too busy trying to survive and take care of themselves and their families. Unless one is a hunter-gatherer, meat eating isn’t about survival. Instead, what it means is that they may care; but not enough to give up or work on giving up the pleasure of eating meat daily.
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      I'd like to introduce you to the concepts of vegetarianism and veganism, with which one can claim to care about the welfare of factory farmed animals without being full of crap. No one is forcing these people to participate. Being overworked is an absolutely ridiculous excuse for not being able to cut out unethically farmed meat from your diet.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    Monkeys are primates though, which I feel like entitles them to somewhat special treatment. They are cognitively equivalent to a human child. While chickens are dumb, evil animals.
- salawat 4y ago
  You forgot the /s (I hope). Poe's law people. Never assume that sarcasm sufficiently communicates over a textual medium.
bunkmaster1337 4y ago
You can experiment on yourself and no one bats an eye.
- ashwagary 4y ago
  Yes, I'm completely fine with Elon putting electrodes and implants in his own brain to further science.
salawat 4y ago
>I’m sick of blocking any sort of progress in anything due to ethical concerns. Wish granted. Please, hop up on the operating table. We're not asking. Thank you, by the way, for the ongoing funding for our project that we've arranged to have diverted from your pay from your employer. Now, we're going to test the write functionality of Neuralink. We'll know it's working, because when it is, you'll stop screaming. Moral: Abandon ethics at your own risk. Normative suggestion: Those that suggest putting aside ethics should be the first to have ethics put aside in all matters pertaining to themselves, that they may be reminded why we make such a big deal of them in the first place.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Ethics can’t be black and white. There has to be a reasonable middle ground and clearly human testing is way, way past what’s acceptable. You can call it a slippery slope but everything is and it’s the reason we have laws to keep things sane.
  - salawat 4y ago
    >the reason we have laws to keep things sane. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/us/california-bees-fish-court-ruling-scn-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/us/california-bees-fish-court... https://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actually-Dreamed/dp/1627222693 https://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actuall... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Unit... https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-prewar-germany https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewis... Oh yes. It's the laws that will save us, and keep everything sane. /s Let's try this again shall we? Ethics and morality are a priori to any system of legalistic systemitization, not the other way around. You will not find a law that that "stealing is okay". You will find law that goes of it's way to decree that X is not (something morally/ethically unconscionable, but really something else). >You can call it a slippery slope It isn't. It's an incontrovertible case of anthropocentric thinking with a dash of self-referential inconsistency, followed by an appeal to pragmatism, stemming from a desire for nearer-term gratification at the expense of normalization of deviance/Overton window shifting. Slippery slope/heap fallacy my ass. You aren't getting out of this with "I'm just going to disengage with a platitude." You do you, but don't delude yourself into thinking there is some inherent virtue in lowering the bar and managing to traverse the hurdle when someone else is paying the price for you not being capable of being bothered to deal with things the right way.
lm28469 4y ago
> progress Something being new doesn't mean it's progress Lead paint was progress Asbestos was progress Freon was progress > We literally kill millions of cows a day and we’re okay with it, You might, I'm not, millions of people aren't
- mturmon 4y ago
  Agree, and it's worth it to point out this lazy and insidious usage of "we". Here's Christopher Hitchens on this habit, in the first paragraphs of an early essay called "The `We' Fallacy": > Lionel Trilling once wrote a short essay on the problem of ‘we’. Apparently, whenever he said of a novel or other work under review that it engaged ‘our’ sympathy, or that ‘we’ felt repelled by the author’s assumptions, he would receive letters of complaint. Who was this ‘we’, the letterwriters demanded to know, and what allowed Trilling to speak for ‘us’ in this way? The literary critic’s experience may not seem immediately relevant to contemporary politics. > But as one surveys the dismal field of political commentary, it is hard not to conclude that half the cretinism of the mainstream media is attributable to the ‘we’ fallacy. This is especially true in any discussion of imperialism. There is talk of ‘our’ interests, ‘our’ credibility, and ‘our’ will. [...]

goplayoutside 4y ago

"If hooking some monkey's testicles up to a car battery can save a kid from dying of cancer in ten years, I've got two things to say: the red is the positive, and the black is the negative." - David Spade, paraphrased badly

lm28469 4y ago
What if you replaced "save a kid from dying of cancer in ten years" by "having an implant that lets you buy toilet paper on amazon if you blink twice", because we all know that's where we're going to end up
- traverseda 4y ago
  Listen, no one is going to defend these excesses of capitalism, the tracking the increasingly user hostile designs, the anti-competitive consolidation and rent seeking behavior. But seriously, you're going to take research into actual human-machine interfaces and boil them down to "implant that lets you buy toilet paper by blinking"? I mean maybe the entire field of computing goes ethically bankrupt, even if the walled gardens and coercive algorithms win forever, the concept of a computer as a "bicycle for the mind" falling to the wayside as computers become only used as a tool for control. Assuming that you have no faith that anyone will ever use it to build a "bicycle for the mind". Even if you assume that it will mostly be used for Evil commercially it can still be used for dumb prosthetics and increase the quality of life for a lot of people.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > it can still be used for dumb prosthetics and increase the quality of life for a lot of people. Who and how ? Virtually every megacorp is busy showing you ads or taking your money when you buy the shit you saw in their ads. Everything has been corrupted, no one can assume good faith anymore
    - traverseda 4y ago
      By that logic is there any point in doing any sort of research on anything?

yummypaint 4y ago

For all the philosophising in this thread, remember this is just an attempt to get documentation into public view. Regardless of one's ethical position i think we can all agree that having more information out in the open is a good thing. Properly documenting failures is also important to avoid reproducing problems and creating more suffering. Factory farms have taken it further and managed to get people who document abuse at those facilities designated as terrorists. In a democracy the public cannot govern if it's shielded from the truth.