What terrifies me about this is that there are no regulations or laws in place that say how long this tech that is implanted into people must be supported. Those poor people who got the bionic eye implants are now left with no replacement parts or support after the company went under, leaving those with implants that still work seeing with borrowed time.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Our right to repair and IP ownership laws are not ready for the cybernetic revolution
It'll be like Cyberpunk 2077: "Why repair when you could just get new stuff?" That's basically a quote from V too, as you find the possibly last repair shop in Night City. Took me by surprise...
I mean, my fridge (hitachi) has a condensation problem and was giving the error code thingy. The guys came down and quoted 1k+ to bring it back and fix it. I’m like. Literally can get a new fridge! At this point really, what should I do?
Edit: it’s a 9 year old fridge
Man, if right to repair laws were better for all industries, I'm sure the costs wouldn't be this high either :/
That problem will always exist to some degree. We want good access to the ability to repair (in our laws, in how things are engineered or designed, in our supply chains and in industry support, in our cultural expectations, etc.), but there will always be certain types of repairs that will cost more than manufacturing a new one from scratch.
Sometimes repairing some component will take more work than the entire component is worth. For example, the extreme example of a stripped screw shows us that replacing a stripped screw is cheaper and easier than trying to re-machine that same chunk of metal back into a screw shape.
Or some types of breakage just can't be repaired practically. A torn piece of paper can be taped back together, but it isn't quite the same as a new piece of paper.
Or the repair might require work done on a particular place that makes that labor more expensive. Welding a leaking pipe might be slower and more expensive than replacing that pipe, if the leak happens to be in a place that is hard to access. Or, as you learned, paying for a repairman to drive from one place to another with the right part might cost more than just the general cost of delivery of the whole thing.
Often, troubleshooting will take a skilled troubleshooter much more time, and their time is worth more than the cost of replacing the broken thing, perhaps by a less skilled technician.
As the price of a thing goes down compared to the cost of the labor to fix it, the calculus of whether a particular repair is worth the cost is going to shift towards replacement rather than repair. And that's not always a bad thing, as it usually means the thing is getting more affordable, or people's time is getting more valuable.
My car isn't even getting updates anymore and it's fewer than ten years old. I'll never put tech in my body until it's legally required to be supported, and also open source so I can support it
With neural implants open source is not the main issue. Sure, it's nice, but it's not like I'm gonna do a brain surgery because I did RTFM.
There are pacemakers with bugs shocking hearts incorrectly and companies can't help. They're bust or don't have the copyright to the code or just won't help - buy our new product next year.
It's not difficult to imagine malicious brain implants when the users are not in control. Being open source, or rather "free software", is equally a main issue.
There are pacemakers with bugs shocking hearts incorrectly, and companies can't help.
Do you have a source for that? I work with these pacemaker companies fairly frequently, and I'm not aware of this, and a quick search didn't turn up anything.
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Perhaps not, but it would make it far easier for any sympathetic brain surgeon you managed to find who was willing to try and fix the problem for you.
The key thing is not needing that specific company to help, but needing generic expert assistance is fine
I wonder if companies should be forced to provide a product’s core tech diagrams, material science, and major code base revisions to a kind of escrow, which is then released when the product is sunsetted.
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We also should have laws on other medical implants (ex. stents etc.), so there is a pathway to getting these regulations in
We just need them yesterday
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This whole thing sucks because this kind of tech has the potential to be revolutionary. For people with paralysis, or those experiencing vision loss due to eye issues, the tech to interface nerves with sensors and inputs will be absolutely revolutionary. On the other hand, Musk has a terrible track record with safety and regulation, develops tech by abusing researchers and workers with unrealistic timelines and expectations, overpromises and under delivers, and responds with hostility to even the most measured criticism. Having his name tied to the version of this tech leading the news cycle will paint it in a dystopian light, raising the regulatory bar to "panic" levels with no nuance, and will likely result in pushing more realistic approaches to the tech back a significant amount of time, hurting those it would help most.
Absolutely agree.
Musk is running twitter into the ground. He's already destroyed Tesla with his decisions around self-driving, it just seems the markets haven't cottoned on yet to how grossly overvalued the company is. OpenAI is looking to be a mess.
You're absolutely right that this technology has massive potential, and Musk is definitely not the guy to deliver it.
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How on earth did Musk manage to get the proper authorization for testing on humans???
Anyway, I hope everything goes well for the patient. Those reports about the monkeys planted horrible images in my mind.
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I wish the patient, scientists, and doctors success. I'm very concerned about the safety record for Neuralink, but I desperately hope they turned things around and that this patient responds well.
This tech has existed for decades, musk is just trying to shrink it.
I remember early 90s hearing about paralyzed patients who could control a mouse and keyboard through an implant.
It was mostly for bed ridden patients, so no one tri d to shrink it. Musk is billing this as a medical device, but the only reason to shrink it, is for people that dont need it.
He's predicting regular healthy people using it, so he's dumping crazy money into this. And there just isn't a big enough consumer base for it, even if it wasn't musk making it.
So even if it works, he ain't making money from it.
If the documentary ghost in the shell taught us anything, this that most everyone will have some level of cyberization in the future. Staying fully biological will be seen as a liability.
"At last we have invented the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci fi novel, Do Not Invent the Torment Nexus."
There’s a market for this if the tech is good enough and the side effects and reversibility are reasonable. I don’t think it’s particularly likely that Musk is the person to make it happen, but Doc Ock my shit up when it’s ready.
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Shrinking it would be very useful for people that have disabilities that don't leave them bedridden.
Hopefully they have other options than Muskshit. Anything he touches is unsafe
How long until the first subjects start beating their skulls against a wall like the chimps did?
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I'll implant a bullet in my head before any tech directly touches my neurons.
But you can be a cyberpunk!
Dreams of a cyberpunk future where the sum total of the world's knowledge of any subject can be just a thought away
Most likely reality:
Popup ads are now intrusive thoughts. 40 percent of your implant's processing power is spent looking for cues in your environment to better serve you "curated content" (i.e. advertising). Knowledge is still somewhat freely available but just after this quick shout out to our sponsors.
When you're looking for something specific it's a coin toss whether you get actual knowledge or an AI hallucination and you can't tell the difference. You can pay $279.99/mo for premium access to verified sources, but if your licence expires you forget everything.
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(got an email from google - reCaptcha is now 10,000 hits free rather than a million...)
I'm really high, and I just need you to know you posted good.
You'd be Elon's cyberpunk, though.
more like cyberbitch
Learn some computer security, get yourself a secondhand laptop and a shitty hoodie. There, you're cyberpunk.
No potential brain melting wetware needed.
"I’ll implant a bullet in somebody's head before any tech directly touches my neurons."
fixed
Guessing you're not a paraplegic?
FIRST MUSK MURDER/MANSLAUGHTER VICTIM TO BE REVEALED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS….
FIRST
Fam, the Teslas have been manslaughtering around for a while.
the driver is the crumple-zone~
I still laugh when I remember that for years they kept saying that the auto pilot was turned off every time some tesla crashed, until it was finally revealed that the auto pilot turns off automatically when it detects an imminent crash it can't avoid.
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Do you think the first subject is actually an Elon simp, or are they ethical enough to weed them out?
We both know the answer very well, don't we....
This is so depressing...
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You have to watch 2 15seconds advertisements before you sleep.
Every 2 years number of adds will increase by one and lenght by 5 second.
Have a nice hell in a retirement home.
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My mind is blown enough by the "what if we already have this in our heads from birth and it's controlling everything we see and we just don't know it" thought experiment to ever voluntarily do something like this. But I hope everyone is fine.
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As someone who would be open to modifying my mind, not with shitty Musk tech. Not with cars rated like his and rockets that fail regularly.
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