Call me evil however you want. But they could kill 1000x the amount of monkeys if the outcome is severly disabled humans regaining their life in some capacity. Worse is being done to animals for less useful things.
And what if the outcome is that nothing is achieved or learned. Or that they learned less than they would have with less sloppy practices. Or that their sloppier than average practices on animals translate to sloppier than average practices on humans and result in needlessly killing humans during testing trials and still achieving nothing.
Part of the reason we expect thorough and careful processes on animals is because it is practice. If you screw up during practice what hope do you have during the real thing. Careful animals trials increase the speed of developing medical interventions safe enough for human use. They are not just boneheaded red tape meant to slow down “radical thinkers”.
That is not to say that the current processes and methodologies are perfect, there is almost certainly unnecessary bureaucracy, but the right standard, the one that maximizes the rate of progress, is much closer to what we have than what the “move fast and break things” crowd wants.
> if the outcome is severly disabled humans regaining their life in some capacity
There needs to be some law that says that if you're going to do this research at the expense of the lives of so many sentient animals then it needs to be open and non-profit.
Because I have doubts that this is the real long-term mission of Neuralink.
I don't know how people get their head this far up their own arse, and before anyone flags me for saying that do remember that OP asked for this.
The exact same argument you're making could be used to justify human experiments too. In fact, this has happened - often - in recent history; with the same language and reasoning. And guess what... It was fucking evil.
Our society has already accepted many such evils and you are the beneficiary. We breed/rear sentient animals in very poor living conditions with explicit intent to kill them and eat them. We conduct experiments (clinical trials) on humans. These experiments have significant risk of harm. We also sell for profit, medical treatments and commercial products with significant risks of harm. We make them life-long-dependent or addictive so that our profit flow doesn't stop. We sell weapons/machinery of mass destructions for profit and we foment conflict to ensure we have proving grounds and strong market for those weapons. We externalize costs from our own society to faraway poorer societies for our own selfish interests. Point is, a few elites make moral decisions for all the masses and many times in history we see how these elite decision makers had no skin in the game. So, stop being judgmental. And make scientific arguments backed by data and context if you want to truly improve things.
The concern isn't about trading monkey lives for human lives, but instead that the component of needless torture and suffering is okay if it aids progress regardless of the effecacy of the outcome. I don't think people have as huge of a problem with monkeys being tested and dying in their trials more than they do about the lack of humanity and care about their position to the point of being dismissive.
yeah, I'd always trade monkey lives for human lives, but I'd also like the lives I trade to have been considered viable and worthwhile decisions to make from an ethical approach instead of being another number correlating to a large amount of attempts done. Saying similar to "I don't care if we kill 1000x more if anything at all improves" shows more of a lack of care to monkeys (i.e. their lives are being considered meaningless) than it does to defend the stance that killing more would be necessary to improve human lives.
I’m fine with for example cooking lobsters or prawns and other seafood that needs to be basically cooked alive. Because they are less sentient and less closer to human. I’m not fine with cooking chicken alive. There is a grey area about eating dogs and cats. I am generally fine with that, other people aren’t.
Monkeys are closer to human.
I think some amount of experimentation is necessary and can be good for science experiments. Monkeys are not human after all, never will be; but they are close.
I think excessive and useless experiments are bad.
But there is a gradient and I guess it’s hard to define. I don’t think sacrificing one monkey is evil. I also don’t think that needlessly torturing it is fine. There are gradients.
You can’t make parallel with experiments on human in 2nd world war though; that is a mockery of those people actually tortured back then. Saying that they are on monkey level
> I’m fine with for example cooking lobsters or prawns and other seafood that needs to be basically cooked alive
Just want to point out here: No, they don't need to be cooked alive. The human way to cook lobster is to run a knife through its head first. But most people don't have the stomach for this and choose to believe that boiling it alive is more humane.
It is also pretty bad calculus. Monkeys have almost the same level of intelligence we have (and probably more in some departments) so killing even one monkey is a debt that cannot be equalised with even one saved human.
They'll kill thousands for sure but your "if" is a very big "if" given the current trends in technology I bet they'll be displaying ads straight in your optical nerves way before they cure anything, and even when they'll cure anything you won't be able to afford ot
And then the bleeding hearts bled, and pleaded for me to wander down another path.
> Google: neuralink federal investigation
> Dec 2022, pigs and sheep died, no explanation of how, no explanation of to what purpose, no discussion of what law or ethic was broken.
> Feb 2023, contaminated hardware shipped improperly
Can you please cite anything specific? All I want is an instance of some animal being butchered; not by some bureaucratic corporate mistake; not by some individual slip, but by actually evil behavior or causing unnecessary pain to an animal.
How is everyone crying so hard when there is essentially no information of what actually happened? 60 pigs died- ok, how and why?
Part of the reason we expect thorough and careful processes on animals is because it is practice. If you screw up during practice what hope do you have during the real thing. Careful animals trials increase the speed of developing medical interventions safe enough for human use. They are not just boneheaded red tape meant to slow down “radical thinkers”.
That is not to say that the current processes and methodologies are perfect, there is almost certainly unnecessary bureaucracy, but the right standard, the one that maximizes the rate of progress, is much closer to what we have than what the “move fast and break things” crowd wants.