Neuralink won't be giving this product away. The company is not sacrificing these animals to better mankind, it's sacrificing them to make a profit, and our hope is that in making a profit they will accidentally make a lot of peoples' lives better. However, we have regulations and restrictions around that process because when that company makes decisions about what it is and isn't willing to sacrifice, those decisions are not going to be made based on the number of people they help, they'll be made based on profit maximization.
We can do (and should do) better work than this to improve lives for disabled and differently-abled people in ways that won't require this sheer level of suffering and that won't gate those peoples' quality of life behind expensive devices controlled by a single company, headed by a man who is historically against right-to-repair movements, against consumer privacy, and against consumer rights. There are the cliche opportunities to help (which is not to say that they're not important) like improving building and process accessibility, improving disabled rights. But there's also pure research opportunities like making the devices that already exist cheaper and more easily available. Neuralink isn't going to be cheaper than the existing hardware we have today to help disabled people, and if that hardware is out of reach of many disabled people, than Neuralink is also going to be out of reach for them.
Heck, we can also do (and should do) this exact same research outside of a startup culture with less animal suffering involved, and the outcomes will very likely be better.
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> It's low hundreds of thousands to millions, depending how we count, against 1500 animal tortures
This also isn't the choice being offered. Neuralink isn't ready for human testing, and we have no guarantee that the company is going to succeed or that they'll end up being competitive in the market. People are treating this as if you just press a button and grant people the ability to walk at the cost of 1,500 animals, but Neuralink has a lot more testing to do, and we have no guarantee that those animals aren't going to eventually turn out to have been killed for no reason at all.
This is also why we have regulations around this; because every single company believes that they are working on something so important that it justifies this level of sacrifice, and every company believes that if they were allowed to make those sacrifices that they would be certain to succeed and their products wouldn't have any serious tradeoffs or problems. Even makeup companies believe that they are working on something important enough that it justifies this level of sacrifice. So we have rules about research that apply to everyone, even (especially) people sticking computers in our brains.
Neuralink won't be giving this product away. The company is not sacrificing these animals to better mankind, it's sacrificing them to make a profit, and our hope is that in making a profit they will accidentally make a lot of peoples' lives better. However, we have regulations and restrictions around that process because when that company makes decisions about what it is and isn't willing to sacrifice, those decisions are not going to be made based on the number of people they help, they'll be made based on profit maximization.
We can do (and should do) better work than this to improve lives for disabled and differently-abled people in ways that won't require this sheer level of suffering and that won't gate those peoples' quality of life behind expensive devices controlled by a single company, headed by a man who is historically against right-to-repair movements, against consumer privacy, and against consumer rights. There are the cliche opportunities to help (which is not to say that they're not important) like improving building and process accessibility, improving disabled rights. But there's also pure research opportunities like making the devices that already exist cheaper and more easily available. Neuralink isn't going to be cheaper than the existing hardware we have today to help disabled people, and if that hardware is out of reach of many disabled people, than Neuralink is also going to be out of reach for them.
Heck, we can also do (and should do) this exact same research outside of a startup culture with less animal suffering involved, and the outcomes will very likely be better.
----
> It's low hundreds of thousands to millions, depending how we count, against 1500 animal tortures
This also isn't the choice being offered. Neuralink isn't ready for human testing, and we have no guarantee that the company is going to succeed or that they'll end up being competitive in the market. People are treating this as if you just press a button and grant people the ability to walk at the cost of 1,500 animals, but Neuralink has a lot more testing to do, and we have no guarantee that those animals aren't going to eventually turn out to have been killed for no reason at all.
This is also why we have regulations around this; because every single company believes that they are working on something so important that it justifies this level of sacrifice, and every company believes that if they were allowed to make those sacrifices that they would be certain to succeed and their products wouldn't have any serious tradeoffs or problems. Even makeup companies believe that they are working on something important enough that it justifies this level of sacrifice. So we have rules about research that apply to everyone, even (especially) people sticking computers in our brains.