Neuralink said in a blog post that it was looking for people who had paralysis in all four limbs because of a spinal-cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, these people are willing to take a risk in order to overcome difficult conditions, and that should be allowed. On the other hand, it feels like Neuralink is preying on their hopes.

If the company figurehead wasn't a libertarian billionaire edgelord, I might look past that second hand. No chance of that, though. He's going to kill people, and then he's going to retweet memes about it.

I admit, under the right circumstances, cybernetic enhancements could be cool.

Anything connected in any way with Elon Musk is emphatically not the right circumstances, of course.

We're dumb animals, not much different from other dumb animals.

If squirrels had news media, they could have a story that says, "Thousands of squirrels are lining up to try to cross busy streets in front of cars."

And some number of squirrels would read that and think, "What the hell is wrong with them?"

I mean, if I couldn't communicate with the outside world or have use of my limbs I would take any risk to regain that functionality. This could have a real shot of giving people with terrible conditions a better quality of life.

*the median person

I don't think there's a better response than this.

“Please track my thoughts and sell the data, daddy Elon!” - the people lining up for this probably

And then there's the ads...

Dad got his brain chip in 2010. Worked great. Had nothing to do with neuralink. They've been doing these implants safely for at least that long. The fact that musk can't keep monkeys alive says a lot about the fact that neuralink isn't ready.

To be fair, everyone who doesn't get one will die too

It's useful for keeping track of your mental gymnastics.

Yeah. Or at least only the ones that use microservices. So... No worries...?

I'm happy they've moved on from testing on unwilling monkeys, to willing humans.

Synchron has already implanted the device in four patients in Australia who have been able to use the brain implant to send messages on WhatsApp and shop online.

Ahh, consumerism at its finest.

I would not trust anything that isn't FOSS hardware in this space. Stuff like your phone is one thong, but something that directly connects to your brain? Like, your actual being? Yeah, no, I'd rather keep it as independent and autonomous as possible from the grips of capitalism.