I’m not surprised given the person in charge, but I still feel bad for the guy. Being almost completely paralyzed, it makes total sense to jump at the chance to get some normalcy back.
I didn’t expect 85% of the wires to already detach at this point. In a just society, the whole company would be shut down and the CEO put into a bottomless pit.
While I’m sure there are a number of worthwhile uses for brain implant tech (helping disabled people is the first thing coming to mind), the testing process just seems so cruel. Is there any way to perfect the tech that ISNT something out of a dystopian scifi?
Nope. The entirety of academic science is predicated on the dystopian scifi of modernity. E.g. the species of mouse that has been selectively bred to remain genetically identical (so it can be used as a scientific unit for experimentation) for more than a century, has been copyrighted, and is used in basically all testing. It’s been squished, starved (lab animals are generally kept in a state of hunger to make them more easily controlled), diseased, burnt, drowned, cut open (while alive), shocked, etcetc. Similar treatment of many other animals (and humans in the global south, and people of colour and disabled people and women etcetc in the global north).
Our (Capitalist-European) ways of knowing are based on this brute force torture-science where we tear stuff apart to find out “what it is” (and more importantly, can it be made profitable or is it useless?) as soon as possible, and then we declare the results of this torture-science universally applicable, e.g. we declared animals stupid because we ran tests on animals we’ve captured, starved to ensure food motivation and locked up in cages for ease of access and tested on things humans find relevant (e.g. testing facial recognition on apes using human faces instead of ape faces; shockingly gorillas are better at telling gorillas apart than telling humans apart).
Like, it rly has to be remembered the basis of Academic European Science is rich fucks doing experiments for fun, using “raw materials” (living or otherwise) available to them as a result of their immense privilege. As their wealth was already based on e.g. literal chattel slavery they had no qualms doing literal torture on subhumans for fun and “progress”, no qualms tearing up ecosystems to “study plants and animals” (bc of this, Academic science is still basically baffled by a lotta how plants and animals actually work in nature). They therefore had less than no qualms doing any of this to “improve the human condition (i.e. to make more shit for companies to sell)”.
Capital was willing to work 2 year olds to death in lace mills for pretty dresses; it has less than no qualms about torturing apes or mice to death to ensure quality hair products or slightly longer human lifespans (for the rich, in the global north). Socialism (as it exists after imperialism dies, not as it exists while competing with imperialism) will likely have to (be forced to by the poorest) reconsider a lotta the stuff we in the imperial core take as necessities of life.
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great comment/summary cde rat, do rats uh dislike mice?
The killing of a mouse by a rat is called muricide
Look who studied mouse law!
spoiler
Didn’t know that was a thing
great comment
There isn’t a capability to model a complete living brain in silico, so not really at this time.
Thanks for that. Given that’s the current case, I’m now of the mind (tee hee) that we should…idk, maybe do that first before human and animal testing?
But that would delay pushing it to market so nope no siree can’t have that
To get the data to build and validate that type of model, you would need to study a lot more living brains than these neuralink experiments. Like, orders on orders of magnitude more. You can’t really model this sort of thing from first principles.
I would say that if people were set for life in a more humane, egalitarian society, one can choose to opt into experiments without there being financial incentives to ruin informed consent.
Volunteering in this society with how they treat test subjects (a term that’s already loaded as fuck) is letting an unchecked researcher and/or corporation to fuck you up and deny responsibility while waiting you out in court.