[mikem170]

> Look how much hatred there is for Neuralink. A company actually trying to productize and bring to market a device that will allow quadriplegic people to move and walk again

People are wary of Neuralink because of how big tech manipulates peoples and pollutes society for profit, not because they are opposed to helping quadriplegics.

[Dig1t]

I agree there are things to be wary of, all new tech is a double edged sword. But the pro’s obviously outweigh the cons in the same way the internet and smart phones have.

You’ll find very few people who will say they would prefer to live in a world where all humanity’s collective knowledge is not instantly accessible to everyone. You used to have to drive to the library to look things up! Is that old world better? Heck no.

It will be the same with neural implants. Overcoming neurological illness and giving everyone’s brain super computer capabilities are worth the risk.

[autoexec]

> But the pro’s obviously outweigh the cons in the same way the internet and smart phones have

I suspect we're just starting to realize the extent of the cons for both of those things. The internet we probably have to accept was worth it, but you can probably already imagine ways that smart phones could be abused today which would be far worse than the convinces they offer. We're just sort of hoping that those types of abuses wont happen or aren't already happening.

The problem we have is that good tech designed to work for us is increasingly being turned against us, and new tech is being explicitly designed from day one to be adversarial. I'm already avoiding a lot of technology and modifying other technology to avoid the harms. No way would I ever risk handing direct access/control of my brain to a third party who wants to exploit me.

[tspike]

> in the same way the internet and smart phones have

I think the jury is very much still out on that one. I just got on Facebook for the first time in almost 10 years, and the comments on 'suggested' content have made me seriously question whether society was ready for these technologies. The corrosive impact of the falsehoods that are being thrown around has only begun to take effect.

[southernplaces7]

People have always thrown around corrosive falsehoods like you wouldn't believe. At least modern social networks also let others spread corrections and counteractions to common myths and bullshit political beliefs.

I'd love to see some modern polyannas about "misinformation" hop into a time machine and then spend even a few days talking to any average group of people about their general beliefs in the mid 20th century on downard, or just take a look at the kind of utter invented garbage and hyperbole that was constantly peddled and regularly sold to wide swathes of the public by government and media organizations of all kinds so much more easily in previos decades and centuries.

Humans love to invent stories based on tribal notions and biases, so falsehoods never go away even in the most advanced communication age in human history, but historically, we're not doing so bad, simply because the cost of spreading any idea is now lower than ever previously and the means for doing so are more widely available than they've ever been, letting things average out much more rapidly towards message dilution. Anything in the opposite direction, and any centralized "vigilance" of supposed wrong ideas will only take us back to a place where a small number control more narrative than they ever should, and that small number will always tend towards dictating based on selfish interest.

[barrysteve]

Generating knowledge and novel concepts requires privacy and control over the concept.

Instant access to knowledge has cheapened and diluted the process of creating new concepts.

The guys who put knowledge on the 'internet shelf' are not the guys who made the valueable knowledge in the first place.

The best way to create knowledge is to isolate concepts, structures and relationships into the human mind.

As soon as a concept stops being literally secret, it becomes infintely less worthwhile. Nobody works on hard intellectual problems any more because they've been massively cheapened by CTRL C, and CTRL V functionality.

The James Bond-ian culture of spies fighting over a hidden concept, is not just a flight of fancy at the movie theatres, it is one of the best culturally visible examples of how to develop and keep secret, aka. a new concept.

Spying, duplicating and publicating knowledge into instant-access platforms, is way more dangerous than anyone publicly admits.