Woman's experimental bionic hand passes major test(gizmodo.com) |
Woman's experimental bionic hand passes major test(gizmodo.com) |
This seems like a major achievement that's just casually tossed in there with no ceremony or explanation.
If you don't like that then the government will need to step up with public funds.
Look how much hatred there is for Neuralink. A company actually trying to productize and bring to market a device that will allow quadriplegic people to move and walk again, which could restore life for so many people who need help and have no other options.
So if you do try to bring it to market you’re pilloried by the press and everyone online and if you don’t it’s sad because it seems like there’s nobody trying to make the technology accessible.
People are wary of Neuralink because of how big tech manipulates peoples and pollutes society for profit, not because they are opposed to helping quadriplegics.
We've seen his track record and have a perceived idea of how he prefers to advance technology. That's why a lot of people are very nervous about him putting a chip into people's brains.
They do have a fairly high rate of both superficial and deep infection but advancements in coatings have improved the situation.
From what I remember, the major challenge was in the nerve-electrode connection, as they have a high failure rate and sending “sensation” signals back can easily cause nerve damage.
But in this case, the prosthetic must penetrate through the skin to connect to bone.
This is the kind of stuff I wish I worked on tech wise, I genuinely feel empathy
I joke... but I unironically can't wait for replacement limb tech to be that desirable. Imagine the upgrades people would get...
You can blame the incoherent travesty that is mechanistic metaphysics for the strange notion it is otherwise.
hold on there...
I replace my 2080ti with a 4080ti... is that's not an upgrade: that's instead categorically always a 'patch' to you?
metaphysically - a replacement says nothing to the quality of replacement.
Silly to think any change on anything is always for the worse...
A replacement can also be an upgrade. those are not mutually exclusive labels.
Look at literally every product ever built, that’s how it was made. Rockets especially need this treatment, you have to blow up a lot of rockets to refine the process in any reasonable time frame.
It’s not just Elon’s methodology that’s all new things. How many iPhone prototypes do you think they created before they shipped the first one?
Neuralink is doing the same thing with lab animals, which by the way is an established practice used in all of science. The end result will be a cure for people who desperately need it and it will be within our lifetime if they are allowed to continue without regulatory roadblocks.
It is funny, because so many other programs have had similar failures. How many people have Autopilot like things on their non-Tesla cars that they don't even use because they are uselessly bad? All of these things have been through iterations, including potentially dangerous public iterations.
All the poor naming criticisms of "FSD" and even "FSD Beta" are fair game though.
You’ll find very few people who will say they would prefer to live in a world where all humanity’s collective knowledge is not instantly accessible to everyone. You used to have to drive to the library to look things up! Is that old world better? Heck no.
It will be the same with neural implants. Overcoming neurological illness and giving everyone’s brain super computer capabilities are worth the risk.
I suspect we're just starting to realize the extent of the cons for both of those things. The internet we probably have to accept was worth it, but you can probably already imagine ways that smart phones could be abused today which would be far worse than the convinces they offer. We're just sort of hoping that those types of abuses wont happen or aren't already happening.
The problem we have is that good tech designed to work for us is increasingly being turned against us, and new tech is being explicitly designed from day one to be adversarial. I'm already avoiding a lot of technology and modifying other technology to avoid the harms. No way would I ever risk handing direct access/control of my brain to a third party who wants to exploit me.
I think the jury is very much still out on that one. I just got on Facebook for the first time in almost 10 years, and the comments on 'suggested' content have made me seriously question whether society was ready for these technologies. The corrosive impact of the falsehoods that are being thrown around has only begun to take effect.
I'd love to see some modern polyannas about "misinformation" hop into a time machine and then spend even a few days talking to any average group of people about their general beliefs in the mid 20th century on downard, or just take a look at the kind of utter invented garbage and hyperbole that was constantly peddled and regularly sold to wide swathes of the public by government and media organizations of all kinds so much more easily in previos decades and centuries.
Humans love to invent stories based on tribal notions and biases, so falsehoods never go away even in the most advanced communication age in human history, but historically, we're not doing so bad, simply because the cost of spreading any idea is now lower than ever previously and the means for doing so are more widely available than they've ever been, letting things average out much more rapidly towards message dilution. Anything in the opposite direction, and any centralized "vigilance" of supposed wrong ideas will only take us back to a place where a small number control more narrative than they ever should, and that small number will always tend towards dictating based on selfish interest.
Instant access to knowledge has cheapened and diluted the process of creating new concepts.
The guys who put knowledge on the 'internet shelf' are not the guys who made the valueable knowledge in the first place.
The best way to create knowledge is to isolate concepts, structures and relationships into the human mind.
As soon as a concept stops being literally secret, it becomes infintely less worthwhile. Nobody works on hard intellectual problems any more because they've been massively cheapened by CTRL C, and CTRL V functionality.
The James Bond-ian culture of spies fighting over a hidden concept, is not just a flight of fancy at the movie theatres, it is one of the best culturally visible examples of how to develop and keep secret, aka. a new concept.
Spying, duplicating and publicating knowledge into instant-access platforms, is way more dangerous than anyone publicly admits.