Musk’s innovations increasingly looking like vanity projects
I’m sure that, like me, many of you saw the story about the first person to receive a brain implant from Elon Musk’s Neuralink and, it’s fair to say, I have some issues. Let’s start with the big one: why on earth would anyone allow Elon Musk anywhere near their brain?
According to the story, Neuralink’s first product, Telepathy, “allows users to control devices with their thoughts… Animal experiments showed that monkeys could play computer games using only their brains”.
The story adds that a volunteer has been found “willing to have a piece of his skull removed so that a computer can be inserted. This should enable an advanced robot to implant numerous electrodes and ultra-thin wires into the brain”.
The removed part of the skull is replaced with a tiny computer which continuously records the person’s brain activity and sends the recorded data wirelessly to a nearby computer.
The ultimate goal “is to prove that the device can reliably provide valuable information about brain function, which is a crucial step in Neuralink’s ambition to convert thought processes into computer language”.
That all sounds great but I would be slightly reticent in light of the story published by Wired in September 2023 which reported that complications with the implant procedures led to the deaths of monkeys used for Neuralink’s research.
Wired cited documents, including veterinary records made public in 2022, “that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering reportedly endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects, all of whom needed to be euthanised”.
The documents listed a range of complications from the surgical implants into the monkeys’ brains, including bloody diarrhoea, partial paralysis, and cerebral oedema, also known as “brain swelling”.
So, there’s that.
Free speech absolutism on a budget
Then there’s X, formerly known as Twitter. There may well be some people who believe it has improved since Musk paid $44 billion to acquire the social media platform but quite a large proportion of them might not necessarily be people you’d like to have as a family member, friend or acquaintance.
In a message beginning “Dear Twitter Advertisers” sent before acquiring Twitter, CNBC reported Musk stating: “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.”
The next sentence in that story is as follows: “The statement pushes back on the fear some progressives have expressed that a Musk-run Twitter would become overrun by hate speech and misinformation since Musk has said he would pull back on content moderation.”
Fast forward to barely a year later in November 2023 when the self-same Musk was telling advertisers: “Go fuck yourself!”.
The reason for his outburst was that they had withdrawn advertising following his apparent endorsement of an anti-semitic tweet referencing the Great Replacement Theory. Bizarrely, having told the advertisers to try and perform an anatomically difficult, although potentially very impressive and, who knows, rewarding, feat upon themselves, Musk added: “Actually what this advertising boycott is gonna do is it’s gonna kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”
Well, that is, as they say, open to interpretation and could be construed as misinformation. Faced with the evidence, some people might think that X has, in many respects, become increasingly populated with hate speech and misinformation. Some companies, understandably, objected to advertising on a platform that seemed to be struggling to prevent the spread of hate speech or misinformation and exercised the freedom to take their advertising somewhere else.
There’s a purported quote from Musk doing the rounds on X stating: “$44 billion was not the cost of Twitter. It was the cost of restoring free speech.” It’s not easy to find the original for that so it could well be misinformation, and considering the situation that X finds itself in, it probably reflects better on Musk if the quote is fake.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m not sure I’d like to be anywhere near the front of the queue when it comes to receiving the Neuralink implant.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers