Category: [Science & technology]

You remember Neuralink, don’t you? You remember the 1500 animals that died in the course of experimenting on them? Well, as you may see above, Oolong is now claiming to have taken the next step; I was wrong the last time I posted about this, cos I said he didn’t have FDA approval for human testing when he actually had got it a few months earlier, and he’s apparently acted on that at last.

I say “apparently” because, well, this tweet appears to be the only evidence of it happening at all. Neuralink’s own Twitter account is conspicuously free of any statement on the subject, the “recipient” hasn’t been identified, and I’m just perplexed by the absence of hype. This tweet has been, you know, it. Kind of weird that people are just accepting this story on the face of it without, you know, evidence, though I have seen a few people wondering what Elon might be trying to distract us from with this amazing news, and someone may have found out:

“Unacceptable migration of contaminated ground water is present” is quite a way of putting it. Tesla’s fuckup is, as far as I can see, getting rather less coverage than Musk’s putative neurosurgery success, but maybe it just needs more time to circulate. Either way, if this operation did happen, and I somehow feel it didn’t, I hope the proud owner of a new brain chip has a happier ending than Oolong’s monkeys…

Parenthetically, one of the responders to the Brian Tyler Cohen tweet I posted at the start of this made some snide remark about how at least Elon admits he wants to microchip you. Which is not an entirely bad point, but, really, if you’re going to be like that about it, one might further add the reason why Bill Gates doesn’t tell you about microchipping is that HE ISN’T DOING THAT TO YOU. Fucking paranoids, man…

ELON WANTS YOUR BRAIN!

In theory, Neuralink actually sounds great, and to be honest, if I’d come away from my stroke without having regained movement, I’d maybe consider it… but not with what we know now about Oolong.

That was his response on Twitter to someone talking about animals dying during his tests on them. It’s… not great, is it? A whiff of “they were dying anyway, who gives a fuck” hangs over it, but apart from that, it appears to be bullshit:

Fresh allegations of potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths. […]
Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research. The documents include veterinary records, first made public last year, 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 euthanized. These records could serve as the basis for any potential SEC probe into Musk’s comments about Neuralink, which has faced multiple federal investigations as the company moves toward its goal of releasing the first commercially available brain-computer interface for humans. […]
Shown a copy of Musk’s remarks on X about Neuralink’s animal subjects being “close to death already,” a former Neuralink employee alleges to WIRED that the claim is “ridiculous,” if not a “straight fabrication.” “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” they say. The ex-employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.
A doctoral candidate currently conducting research at the CNPRC, granted anonymity due to a fear of professional retaliation, likewise questions Musk’s claim regarding the baseline health of Neutralink’s monkeys. “These are pretty young monkeys,” they tell WIRED. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”

Shocking that Musk might’ve been dishonest about this thing (if those reports are true, of course)… This may make me sound bad but I have no strong opinions about animal testing, in that I think it’d be better if we didn’t have to do it but I kind of understand why we do… but even so, there should be ways of doing it that don’t result in harming the animals in the way that seems to have happened with Musk’s monkeys. I don’t know about you but it makes me wonder how he’s going to approach experimenting on humans if this is what he’s like with animals. I think I’ll pass on the offer. Remember, too, he hasn’t got FDA approval for the Neuralink thing yet, so it’s maybe a bit previous of him to be saying he’s ready to test on humans, but I feel that the mere fact he can’t legally do something won’t stop him somehow…