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Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 75% of threads retract in 1st (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 183 points 6 months ago (28 children)

In an interview with the Journal, Neuralink's first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, opened up about the roller-coaster experience. "I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard," Arbaugh said. "I cried." He initially asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined, telling him it wanted to wait for more information.

Neuralink isn’t just treating humans like guinea pigs, they’re treating them like disposable guinea pigs.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago (10 children)

You cherry-picked the first part of that paragraph. The end goes like this:

Arbaugh went on to say that he has since recovered from the initial disappointment and continues to have hope for the technology.

And then the next part of his statement is found in the following paragraph:

"I thought that I had just gotten to, you know, scratch the surface of this amazing technology, and then it was all going to be taken away," he added. "But it only took me a few days to really recover from that and realize that everything I’ve done up to that point was going to benefit everyone who came after me.” He also said that "it seems like we’ve learned a lot and it seems like things are going in the right direction."

Of course, the goal here is not to have an honest assessment of what happened. . .but to simply choose what we want to further our hatred (justified, IMO) of Musk.

[–] [email protected] 100 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

None of that concerns Neuralink’s treatment of him—just his process of learning to live with it.

[+] [email protected] -14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

And nothing about what you quoted indicates what he was or was not told about the potential outcomes of the procedure, or how he was treated. Only that he was disappointed with the outcome. Of course he was, of course he wanted it to work out, so of course he was disappointed.

I stand by my point that only the negative part of his statement was cherry-picked out in order to justify shitting on Musk, rather than honestly assessing what happened.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

My criticism of Neuralink’s response has nothing to do with whether or not the first patient was treated unfairly. It’s that it reveals Neuralink’s priorities: they had a choice going forward of trying to fix the first patient’s implant or giving up and starting over with a fresh patient, and they chose the latter.

In animal testing, that decision would depend on how valuable the guinea pigs are.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

Okay, no. As much of an issue as I have with musk and the way he bullrushes into these things, this really was the right response at this point.

It's a new tech. That goes into someone's brain. You do not just go rutting around up there if the first attempt failed, and further tests (which have a significant element of risk) shouldn't be in the brain that's already been through this, not until it's much better tuned.

Brain surgery isn't a minor procedure.

If they're able to fix it for him, there's a fair chance they will, I'd imagine.

But continuing to dig around after that failure is what treating him like a disposable Guinea pig would look like because that's how they'd very likely kill him or substantially diminish his quality of life with brain damage.

There are lots of real reasons to hate musk. This isn't one of them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

No? That’s insane. “We don’t k ow exactly what’s going on, but we are going to go poke around inside- oh shit he’s dead, if only we had waited until things stabilized and we had the information we needed.”

Come on, don’t be ridiculous. “Try to fix it” could easily result in a dead patient, and I’m sure you’d be all for praising their attempt to fix it, right?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

They didn't exactly say no, they just said they want more data. It might not be that crazy not to rush things with a patient that needs re-implantation when you're trying to test the next revision of the implant and have willing patient who only requires an initial implantation.

As long as these patients are properly informed on the risks and limitations of this experimental tech, I don't see a problem. There's no evidence that they are treating their patients badly, or failing to fulfill any promises in regards to the efficacy of the implants, or commitment to support these early test implants insofar as they agreed to provide to their patients (to my understanding, they are informed that the implant could be a total failure with no opportunities to re-implant.).

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago

My guess is you know nothing about this. They may think reinserting them is too risky for the patient because they don't know. You're almost certainly just making up facts to justify your conclusions, rather than assessing the facts and coming to a conclusion based on them.