Home » 15 Dead Monkeys, Delays, Disgruntled Employees: Is Neuralink Elon Musk’s Big Flop?

15 Dead Monkeys, Delays, Disgruntled Employees: Is Neuralink Elon Musk’s Big Flop?

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15 Dead Monkeys, Delays, Disgruntled Employees: Is Neuralink Elon Musk’s Big Flop?

The monkeys used in Neuralink’s experiments would be subjected to “extreme suffering” and some would die. This is the complaint of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the American non-profit organization of over 17 thousand doctors that filed a petition with the United States Department of Agriculture for violation of the Animal Welfare Act accusing Neuralink of the killing. of 15 monkeys. Neuralink responded on his blog to allegations of alleged abuse of monkeys being tested at UC Davis (University of California), a former partner of the company founded by Elon Musk. “The allegations come from people who oppose any use of animals in research. Currently, all new medical devices and treatments must be tested on animals before they can be ethically tested on humans. At Neuralink, we are absolutely committed to working with animals in the most human and ethical way possible “, reads the post. Admitting, however, that they were forced to euthanize eight specimens.

an emblem
Neuralink, the company founded in 2016 that aims to create a device that connects the human brain to computers and the internet, risks becoming the very emblem of all the less convincing aspects of Elon Musk’s business model. It has long been known that this company is plagued by constant turnover and that only two of the eight members of the original team still work for Neuralink.

That Musk is willing to make promises he can’t keep is nothing new. From completely autonomous cars that should have become reality by 2021 (at the latest), to the landing of the human being on Mars which is proving – unsurprisingly – more difficult than expected, Musk himself admitted that “the timing does not I am his forte “. He is also known that the working conditions in the companies of the Tesla founder and SpaceX are particularly harsh. On the other hand, it is always Musk who has affirmed that “to change the world” it is not enough to work 40 hours a week, but it is necessary “to reach 80 or even 100”, suggesting that such hours could be required of its employees.

Little progress
Now, however, the numerous testimonies of former employees collected by Fortune paint an even grimmer picture. “In this empire, everyone is driven only by fear,” said an anonymous former Musk employee, for example. “There was dissatisfaction on the upper floors with the pace at which we were making progress, even though we were actually going at unprecedented speed,” explained another. More generally, the accusation is that a culture of guilt and fear has been established within Neuralink, in which the pressure to maintain timing considered impossible is very strong and one is accused of being responsible for delays even when the fault is a non-delivery. More generally, there is no realistic relationship between the timing of animal and human experimentation – which can take months or years – and the expectations of Musk, who wants to start showing concrete results on humans as soon as possible (the promise is to begin human experimentation this year; a related job advertisement actually appeared in January).

However, Neuralink is also accused of taking what sometimes seems to be Elon Musk’s business model to the extreme: attracting investments, shareholders and media attention with astonishing promises. “That guy is a master at selling things that may never work,” denounced neuroscience and machine-brain interface pioneer Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University. “We will never get to download people’s emotions or their deep cognitive functions, and it will never become possible to learn French by loading a French grammar into a brain-machine interface.” To be a company that has the declared objective of “merging the human being and artificial intelligence” and to cure “blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness” along the way, the concrete developments of Neuralink do not they also seem to be up to par. “Musk promotes things that have already been invented and he wants us to believe that he has accomplished exceptional feats,” Nicolelis always accused.

A future of Unicorns and Phoenicians: Elon Musk

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The link
It’s undeniable that Neuralink’s actual advances have sometimes left a bad taste in the mouth: humans have been manipulating robotic arms with their minds since 2005, wireless implants were grafted onto monkeys in 2014, and – as MIT Tech Review writes downplaying some of Neuralink’s recent achievements – scientists “in their labs have been listening to the buzzing and crackling of electrical impulses recorded by animal (and even human) brains for decades.” For many neuroscientists, the most interesting innovation of Neuralink is the device called “link”: the size of a coin and containing processors capable of transmitting the signals recorded by the electrodes, it could one day be installed in the human skull. The implant that Neuralink is testing on pigs has a thousand channels and is able to read the signals of as many neurons. Musk’s goal, however, is to increase this number by a factor of 10,000 times.

“These exponential goals, however, do not necessarily address specific medical needs,” says MIT Tech Review. “To solve paralysis, blindness or mental problems, what is often missing are not electrodes ten times more numerous, but scientific knowledge, for example, of the electrochemical imbalances that cause depression.” In short, the accusation against Musk is that of focusing exclusively on the technological aspects, without taking into consideration the human ramifications and the less quantitative and more qualitative aspects. Not only that: since Elon Musk’s declared goal is “symbiosis with artificial intelligence”, any medical applications of Neuralink seem a sort of trojan horse useful only for pursuing transhumanist objectives.

“At the species level, it is important to understand how to coexist with the most advanced artificial intelligence, gaining some form of symbiosis with AI,” said Musk some time ago. “In this way, the world can be controlled by the combined will of the people of the Earth. This may be the most important thing a device like this (the link, at) is able to obtain “. Elon Musk sometimes seems to want to turn humans into something very similar to robots capable of achieving the highest possible efficiency and productivity. Maybe it’s not a bad thing that his wishes often don’t seem to come true.

Because Elon Musk is not the man of the year

by Marco Mancassola *


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