#neuralink

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

All these billionaires who invested in the metaverce and Neuralink must be questioning their life choices looking at what what furries are doing in VR chat.

[anonymouscomrade]

the first log you read in an abandoned laboratory with blood stains on the floor and gouges in the walls:

[papirouge]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There���s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[animentality]

[scipunk]

Love, Death & Robots - S1E1 - Sonnie's Edge (2019)

[rhetthammersmithhorror]

The Man with Two Brains | 1983

[saywhat-politics]

The purging of federal employees carried out by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) somehow just keeps cutting staffers involved in investigating Elon Musk’s companies. According to a report from Reuters, several employees at the US Food and Drug Administration who were tasked with managing reviews and applications related to Musk’s Neuralink received pink slips over the weekend.

Per Reuters, 20 people who worked in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices got axed as part of a broader effort being carried out by DOGE to cut down the federal workforce. Several of those employees worked directly on Neuralink, Musk’s company that produces brain-computer interfaces designed to be implanted in a human brain, and were tasked with reviewing clinical trial applications.

[juegosintiperojuegocontigo]

[odinsblog]

Accurate af

(source)

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Could you give your best explanation for what exactly wetware is?

In science fiction, "wetware" is often the name for a brain-computer interface. In reality, wetware is a Don't-Create-The-Torment-Nexus sort of deal where despite many stories of the horrors possible from making such an invention without proper care, oversight and ethical concerns, certain ultra-rich people have rushed the development of wetware by abusing animal and human subjects with few actual benefits just so they can tell shareholders that they invented wetware.

Now, I know what you're thinking, isn't this a fake fact blog? Or is he gonna promote his own novels with their many cyberpunk elements? Or did he sneak in a clever reference to Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell above that I missed? Or did he load that question into my mind through the wetware he deleted my memory of getting?

No, I'm just tired and my sides and back hurt and I'm typing almost randomly while watching Elden Ring lore videos and I just want this fucking kidney shit to be OVER because I can't think straight.

Sorry everyone I'm not braining well these days but hopefully soon I'll be back and not just typing to try to ignore the ugh.

[welele]

"Muriendo de sed en 2038 porque el neuralink me bloquea beber por no estar suscrito a Nestle Water+"

Eh, no lo veo descabellado.

[animentality]

[samaelqayin]

[destielmemenews]

Neuralink reportedly killed at least a dozen monkeys during the animal testing of the implants. Despite this, Musk has announced that Neuralink is ready to begin human trials.

source 1 (content warning for graphic descriptions of animal injury and death)

source 2

source 3

[satellitecock]

𝕸𝖆𝖌𝖎𝖈𝖐 𝕵𝖊𝖑𝖖 𝕾𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖊𝖙𝖞

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NEW ERA FOR THE CATHOLIC JELQ COALITION

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ℙ𝕖𝕟𝕚𝕤 ℙ𝕦𝕞𝕡 𝕊𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕚𝕖𝕣𝕤, 𝕊𝕥𝕒𝕪 𝕍𝕚𝕘𝕚𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕥!