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> Five people who have worked on Neuralink’s animal experiments told Reuters they had raised concerns internally. They said they had advocated for a more tradit
by capableweb 4y ago
> Five people who have worked on Neuralink’s animal experiments told Reuters they had raised concerns internally. They said they had advocated for a more traditional testing approach, in which researchers would test one element at a time in an animal study and draw relevant conclusions before moving on to more animal tests. Instead, these people said, Neuralink launches tests in quick succession before fixing issues in earlier tests or drawing complete conclusions. The result: more animals overall are tested and killed, in part because the approach leads to repeated tests.
> On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment
> filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys, and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and dying
> included one instance in 2021 when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation
> staff accidentally implanted Neuralink’s device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two separate surgeries
Surely they could have a more scientific approach that would avoid having to kill so many animals and also make progress faster because the environment would be more stable. If it's borderline illegal to accidentally kill animals or making them suffer when it could prevented, I'm not sure.
As it seems right now, they have something of a cowboy approach to science which will lead to unnecessary pain and death of animals, and walking in circles in their progress as they don't seem to know what they are doing.
- thefounder 4y agoI have a better idea: instead to run tests concurrently(kinda what Musk is doing) let's run them sequentially so that less animals are used(even if it takes way more time). We can use the saved animals for some tasty burgers. Nevermind that some people need treatments now. We can give them the saved burgers.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI find it interesting how quickly people resort to a "the ends justify the means" attitude about this stuff when, as pointed out in the article, there are others in the same space doing the same thing who HAVE managed to perform the due diligence required to get the proper approval. Is the assumption their efforts won't lead to anything because they've managed not to screw up the implant sizes or glue?
- naasking 4y agoI think the argument is that they're taking too long. Actual humans continue to suffer with problems that could be addressed by this technology while some people are "hand-wringing" about animal life in a society that raises and kills animals inhumanely because they're tasty.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoWe can only assume that this is taking too long if we assume that Neuralink is somehow able to skip the fundamentals and be successful. As I pointed out above Synchron is further ahead, they are making more progress because they were able to meet the required standard, and I think we can all agree standards are important for human trials (or is a few extra human deaths ok if it gets to market sooner?), so I'd suggest it's Neuralink's own fault they can't meet the advancement criteria and not just concerns about animal welfare that are getting in the way.
- naasking 4y agoSynchron was also started 4 years earlier, so it's not necessarily because they are doing a better job. Neuralink is playing catch up in a sense.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago> Neuralink is playing catch up in a sense. Yes, in areas like testing discipline. I don't accept the argument that you can skip past the fundamentals and it'll all just work out because you may be able to help some people quicker. That's everyone's goal in that space - to get implants onto the market as fast as possible.
- capableweb 4y agoKilling animals needlessly aside, if you have to repeat experiments because you're sloppy, you're not moving at the correct speed as you'll have to double-run every trial you're doing. Regardless how you feel about killing animals for humans, don't you want companies that can help people to actually move forward faster rather than slower?
- treis 4y agoThey're not repeating all experiments.
- capableweb 4y agoI don't think anyone has claimed that either. What the claim is, is that Neuralink might have abnormally high number of repeated experiments as they continue to commit mistakes which makes them either have weak value or having to repeat the same trials. > the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research. Through company discussions and documents spanning several years, along with employee interviews, Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors. The mistakes weakened the experiments’ research value and required the tests to be repeated,
- treis 4y ago>I don't think anyone has claimed that either You said they'd "have to double-run every trial you're doing". Which isn't correct. They have to double run the experiments they screwed up on. That may or may not be faster than taking the time to improve experiment quality.
- radu_floricica 4y agoThat's isolated demand for rigor. You're basically saying that "yes, they're doing great work, and the average slaughterhouse is killing the same number of animals in a day or two, but they could be 10% more efficient and that makes them evil".
- rideontime 4y agoDo you think we're making monkey burgers?