Technology
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So I think people here need to be mindful of how much they don’t know about animal testing, how easy it is for the topic of animal testing to become inflammatory and how much musk-hate makes that even more likely.
Animal testing and experimentation is happening all over the place. And in such work accidents to happen, as with any surgery. And a common measure to prevent suffering is to euthanise. In fact I think euthanasia is prescribed so often that it’s controversial, but you should keep in mind that any animal experimentation setup is likely to have an intentionally antagonistic relationship between experimenters and animal carers and ethicists.
There are groups deeply and actively opposed to animal experimentation of any sort and will infiltrate and target labs and try to expose them any way they can. There’s a real chance that something like that is behind these revelations. Point is that it’s often not objective and misleads you into thinking the targeted lab is particularly bad when it’s actually just a selected target for political reasons.
All of which is NOT to condone animal experimentation (I’m a vegan for example). But you really should be mindful of how dumb media hype around this issue can be.
If you’re outraged for instance, when was the last time you ate meat and how well do you think that animal was treated both before it’s killing and even during? Better than the monkey in this story? Hell, when was the last time you ran over an animal in your car and did you really need to be driving at all? Did that animal die peacefully? Did you even realise?
How many benefits come to both humanity and animals too from progress from animal experimentation and is that worth some of the mistakes and suffering caused?
These are some of the better thoughts IMO, where musk hate is really not relevant here. From what I could tell from the article, it did not seem odd at all. If you care about animals, take the issue seriously and don’t make it about one very famous person who’s cool to hate right now. Animals, and humanity, frankly deserve better.
Animal testing is awful in the best case, agreed.
What this article and other articles about Neuralink allege is that the company blew right past any kind of ethical guidelines that the industry has in a desire to be fast. The industry standard is to avoid any "undue suffering". They admit animals will suffer but all effort must be taken to minimize it.
What whistleblowers have exposed is that Neuralink started putting devices in primate's brains when they knew the devices won't work and were deadly in predictable ways. For instance a lot of monkeys got their brains cooked alive because the device put out too much waste heat. This was done because Elon was getting impatient and wanting to see progress in primate trials, so they just YOLOed a bunch of obviously deadly devices into a bunch of primate brains and in doing so, tortured and killed all the animals needlessly.
Musk is unplugging servers with customer data and then transporting them in a van. He 100% has zero interest in proper procedure. Look at the QA of Tesla ffs.
Musk is a petulant child. There’s no chip. It’s an abandoned project that killed a bunch of monkeys for a bit of press.
I mean:
I haven’t read beyond the Verge article and it would make sense that neurallink is YOLO-ing it as you say.
IME, I think people would be surprised at how much this isn’t entirely true. There are grey zones and industries with people with careers and deadlines. There are groups that know staying out of the limelight and not talking about the slightly dodgy thing they do is a good strategy. Yes there are ethics groups and oversight and a general awareness of the importance of not being evil. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if neurallink isn’t categorically different from a lot of animal industries.