I read that Elon Musk is currently the richest man in the world, which is as complete an indictment of capitalism as could imagine. Whenever he opens his mouth he exposes his ignorance, yet people still think he’s saying something worthwhile. He’s just a guy with an undeserved mountain of money that he uses to buy stuff, nothing more, and it’s a shame that his follies haven’t caught up with him yet, if ever — money seems to be a pretty effective cushion against the consequences of your actions.
A few years ago, he bought a company called Neuralink, which was supposedly working on brain-machine interfaces, but is actually 99% hype, and put an unqualified tech bro in charge. The real neuroscientists could tell the whole idea was a load of overstuffed bullshit, but the media stumbled all over itself in a rush to give him more press.
You would think that someone — the investors, the journalists, the people hoping for medical breakthroughs — would notice the similarities between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes, especially since the Holmes trial just wrapped up with a conviction, but noooo.
Now Neuralink is looking to find human guinea pigs for his overhyped technology.
The Silicon Valley company, which has already successfully implanted artificial intelligence microchips in the brains of a macaque monkey named Pager and a pig named Gertrude, is now recruiting for a “clinical trial director” to run tests of the technology in humans.
“As the clinical trial director, you’ll work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink’s first clinical trial participants,” the advert for the role in Fremont, California, says. “You will lead and help build the team responsible for enabling Neuralink’s clinical research activities and developing the regulatory interactions that come with a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment.”
Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated $256bn fortune, said last month he was cautiously optimistic that the implants could allow tetraplegic people to walk.
“We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year, pending FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval,” he told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit.
“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury. Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.”
He is nowhere near that capability. He is lying. I know that here in America no one is going to care about the victims of irresponsible experimentation, but I would hope that someone would give a loving, concerned thought to the investors who are being taken to the cleaners by this fraud. Hope is not data. Appealing to the suffering victims of tragedy is one of the oldest tricks in the con artist’s toolbox.
That’s not all. Someone has confused science-fiction novels with reality.
Musk said that he thinks in the future we will be able to save and replay memories. “I mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode but yeah essentially if you have a whole brain interface everything that’s encoded in memory you could you could upload you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be weird one!” said Musk.
A “whole brain interface” — what’s that? How are you going to do that? You think you can skim off the totality of a person’s experience with a little chip you can pop on and off? Where are memories encoded so you can extract them? How are you planning to overwrite a brain’s structure and chemistry and connectivity so you can replace one brain’s identity with another?
I don’t think he’s going to have much luck hiring someone to oversee human experimentation in these areas, since Josef Mengele is dead. He’ll probably just hire some tech-dude with no qualifications and no sense of ethics — I hear those guys are sprouting up all over Silicon Valley.
One of the big problems with money, as we use it now, is that it can buy you a very bug megaphone.
The richer you are, the louder you can talk.
And since we are bad at telling volume from truth because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic we end up convinced of whatever propaganda the rich throw at us.
How do we break this?
How do we turn the tide?
I’ll believe that Musk believes that he’s on to something when he himself volunteers to have an interface surgically implanted into his brain. Until then I’ll just believe that he believes that scraping up a couple of spare billion from the back of the sofa and chucking it at a tech project is a cheap way of ensuring publicity and of gaining fawning adoration from fuckwits.
Silly pinko, Musk doesn’t need any of those implants, he’s already a superman! /s
You would think that someone … would notice the similarities between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes, especially since the Holmes trial just wrapped up with a conviction…
Well, they did learn that Holmes only got punished for defrauding investors, not for selling crap products that may have messed with innocent people’s lives. So yeah, Musk undoubtedly did learn that he can do what he wants as long as he keeps his investors happy. So you see, market forces DO respond rationally to real-world events!
“Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated $256bn fortune, said last month he was cautiously optimistic that the implants could allow tetraplegic people to walk.”
“Cautiously optimistic” is a huge red flag.
“Richest man in the world is a talking ass-HOLE.” Fixed that for you.
I swear that name sounds like a men’s cologne or a lady’s perfume product. A lot of such products have the word “musk” in many of their names. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out there is such a product as a cologne or a perfume named after this guy out on the market today.
@1 We have more to fear from rich bastards who pull the strings in secret.
Musk hates paying taxes and I suspect the adoration he gets from his followers just might lead him to proclaim himself a prophet and form his own religion. He could call it Neurontology or something like that.
#1 We could cap wealth at a million dollars, including assets and shares. Everything above that goes to the state.
Presumably Step One is “reanimate corpse of Josef Mengele”. Then Frankenmengele can oversee the research programme. What kind of mad science project doesn’t start with something like that as its first step?
@Oli Davies #10:
“We” can’t do squat.
We don’t control our governments, and the media decides which candidates actually have any chances.
Even if we managed the cap you propose, or any other sort of check & balance or whatever, it would just be a matter of time till it is eroded.
The more power you have, the more you can steer a society towards whatever you want, the more power you can accumulate.
Thanks to modern propaganda, most people accept this and I personally struggle to find a way out.
@F.O., #12: How about open revolt and exile?
I still have trouble grasping how Musk is the richest person in the world. I like Teslas, but they have far less impact than runner-up Bezos’s Amazon. If I didn’t know already, I would say it hammers home what a lottery the whole thing is.
A few years ago, I felt his legacy could be similar to Thomas Edison–an inventor rather than theoretical scientist and as much a businessperson as technologist. This was actually refreshing to me compared to what usually passes for “technology” like new ways to send cat videos.
But he really does insist on making an ass of himself. I would rank Teslas and storage batteries as very important for the future, privatized orbital launches as environmentally problematic but potentially cost-cutting. And everything else as a complete load of crap. I wish he would just shut up. He’s not the “rock star” he thinks he is.
OTOH, absent Musk, the U. S. would have no ability to send people to orbit and the electric car industry would be moribund. Discuss.
He’ll need a physician to oversee clinical trials. Unfortunately, the pandemic has revealed just how many clueless and grifting physicians there are out there; so I doubt he’ll have too much trouble finding one.
walterguyll@15 I can’t tell if you’re serious or not. So pardon me if I’m missing the joke.
I give Musk some credit for making electric cars attractive to consumers, but big automakers were already coming around. If the US needs to put people in orbit, we have the means to do so whether it is done by the public or private sector.
Sending humans safely to the moon and back before there was CAD technology, when solid state electronics were very new, and when engineerings were literally doing calculations on slide rules was a hell of a feat. What Musk is doing with his little rockets is like comparing Prometheus to a butane lighter.
True, we now seem to lack the national will to do anything like the Apollo mission today, but Musk is not some great savior. He is a smart engineer and entrepreneur who sadly has bought into his own hype.
Oli Davies: “We could cap wealth at a million dollars, including assets and shares. Everything above that goes to the state.”
Not if we want people to be able to retire, we can’t. A million bucks ‘ll buy you a little crap shack in California or New York, and the crap shack would take close to half that in DC. Financial analysts are now recommending $2-3 million if you want to retire semi-comfortably.
I recommend a binge watch of the old show “Fringe”, at least the first two seasons. Plenty of brain “science” being used and exploited there, and with some gnarly consequences.
snarkrates@18 As someone who owns a home and works in the SF Bay Area, I don’t see the leap to where I’m entitled to retire here. In fact, I might be able to hold on, and I might even do so, but I would be hogging some of the best real estate for people who might want to come here to work hard and even raise a family. People like me are a menace! I can totally understand someone seeing it from a very different perspective than my own.
If I were to adjust this idea to make it fit my self-interest better, I’d advocate a cap on inherited wealth. Nobody should be able to establish a dynasty. (Of course, people are going to try and it’s unclear how you legislate against concentrated power.)
The main thing that worries me in retirement are medical expenses. How about capping wealth, but providing health care? That’s the main thing that is likely to beggar you in old age (even with medicare).
the thing about money and value is the the value of money is not some fixed quantity and there has never been any way to control that value for any real length of time.
an arbitrary cap on wealth at some fixed value is unlikely to ever be enacted certainly not at such a low number as a million. It is politically impossible.
how ever you shaped the law there would be loop holes found to allow a number of now rich and powerful people to regain the effects and benefits they now receive from their wealth. Though I would expect that the number of those as a percent of the population would be roughly the same many of the people would be different people
as we are experiencing right now for the vast proportion of the population inflation has a negative effect on the accumulation of wealth proportional to how much capital you have and control.
changing all the numbers is not a help unless they all change at the same time inflation is when they do not
Paul BC, Oh, I agree that current wealth disparities in the US are absurd. However people don’t realize that a million $ ain’t what it used to be. These days $1 million simply won’t last you through 20 years of retirement. For one thing, the 4% rule is dead–so $1 million of wealth simply won’t produce the income stream needed. For another, healthcare costs keep rising.
Folks saying $1 million sound like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.
I’m reminded of an era that, regrettably, seems to have gone dormant, like a cancer. Surely you remember the dot-bomb era?
Tech is magic, tech is money flowing out of a vast sluice, tech is god-like miracles one need only claim something and it is money.
As for the full brain interface, that’s easy. One can easily get one’s talking gorilla by removing the brain, installing the interface and have it reply Muskisms. Sort of like Arthur Dent having a brain replaced with one that simply says, “What?” and asks where the tea is.
Whenever his name is mentioned, my mind involuntarily starts playing his Spitting Image doppelganger singing his “car man” song that sounds suspiciously close to “con man.”
I’m not sure what it will take for the spell to be broken and for his name to be forever more sullied, but I hope it doesn’t involve death.
One would’ve thought his reputation would’ve taken a near fatal hit from the false promises surrounding his cybertruck and semi. Not to mention the fiasco surrounding his Las Vegas loop. I guess people enjoy being lied to if it’s in the form of a pretty presentation.
snarkrates@22 I agree with you that $1 million isn’t what it used to be. However, I believe there are many Americans whose retirement savings don’t approach that. Many will rely on social security. Some who might live in very expensive places now may reasonably consider moving somewhere less expensive without the job opportunities that they no longer need.
I also agree with unclefrogy@21 that setting a specific numeric cap is not very workable no matter where you set it.
Wealth…
The Stockholm stock market lost 4% of its value this monday, tracking the turbulence of international economy.
Even though it affects my savings I am trying to be philosophical about it.
I have a job and a home and do not have to live in a tent in Afghanistan or Syria.
Late-stage capitalism is a big con game anyway.
What worked in the past, and would work again if we had the political will to implement it, would be a very high marginal tax rate for the highest incomes.
In the past it was set to a fixed value, but let’s say we adjust it to say that any income above, say either 500 times the 1-person poverty line (roughly 6 million today), or 100 times the median income level (also roughly 6 million) is taxed at 90% marginal tax rate. The dollar number $5,999,999 earned could still be taxed at 35%, but tax dollar $6,000,001 at 90%.
We did that throughout the greatest economic expansion the USA ever saw, the late 1930’s to the late 1960’s. But as soon as Nixon started lowering that rate, the growth of the middle class stalled and when Reagan cut the top marginal rate more than half, the middle-class started to shrink.
What doing this does is put more money into circulation. The wealthy make the decision to not give 90 cents on every dollar they are rewarded (I will not say earn) to the government. So they decide to limit their income. But the money has to go somewhere. In the 1950’s it went to employee benefits, higher wages, R&D, etc. And the higher wages paid to employees meant their taxes were higher, so the government still got money to invest in infrastructure, R&D, etc.
It’s not like a wealth tax, which will simply generate a profession of faux experts who will artificially devalue items owned by the rich. Value is arbitrary. Income, however, isn’t. We have a very good tracking mechanism in place already to monitor people’s income. Putting in place a high marginal tax rate will not eliminate, and mainly not even hurt, the already wealthy. But it will raise wages and fund government.
We’ve tried this before, and it worked. There is no reason to think it wouldn’t work again.
Oh, and money made buying and selling stock should be taxed as double income. The stock market is a zero-sum game, the only money you can get out of it is money someone else is putting in. If you want to encourage good business, tax dividends at half income. The only way for a company to create dividends is to be profitable, but there are lots of ways for a company to manipulate a stock price without even providing a product/service.
PaulBC, So, when someone is ready to retire, they need to leave all the friends they’ve made throughout their working life just because the real estate is too damned expensive? Perhaps they live in an urban area because they have better access to good medical care than they would out in the exurbs.
And wrt the money needed for retirement, I don’t make the rules. And all it would take is a decade of double digit inflation, and even $5 million will be marginal.
Imaginary wealth as far as I am concerned when based entirely on a theoretical “worth” of a company (shares). It can all disappear in the blink of a floor-traders eye.
As for the Dr Evil-esque “1 million dollars”. Well, it the government were to take any wealth over and above such an arbitrary figure, they would have lots of money spare to look after retirees, allowing everyone to live out their last years in relative comfort after their life of labour for the state. they could treat everyone with equal respect and dignity by valuing their contribution to society, however small.
Perhaps they could also fund education (free university tuition), eliminate homelessness, fight environmental degradation and climate change?
Oh, wait, what’s that you say? You are talking about the USA? Oh well. Never mind.
And what’s that? If you don’t get to keep all your cash what is the point in generating it?
snarkrates@28 I raised my kids in Silicon Valley and they made all their friends right here. Can they come back and live? Unless they’re either moving back in with us or have successful tech careers, the answer is no. My son just started college. He’s bright but not financially ambitious (so far) and not very interested in tech. Actually, I’d be OK if he needs to stay here at some point in his 20s, but I don’t expect to act as his permanent home.
I never had the idea that anyone is entitled to stay. Not me, not my kids. What right do I even have to be here in the first place? Nobody asked the Ohlone if they’d prefer to stay. Nobody stopped the destruction of orchards in the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight” that has one of the best climates and soil for stone fruits in the entire world.
That’s life. Or it’s capitalism. It kind of sucks, but it’s bigger than I am. You can get excellent medical care outside the SF Bay Area for a fraction of the home prices. I’m not advocating sending anyone off on an ice flow–nor planning to go off on one myself. If you are going to answer the question “Is it possible to retire on $X?” this has to presume a willingness to relocate. If in some hypothetical new world order (maybe like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge that I just finished) there was an actual cap on wealth, I would not advocate making exceptions for people like me who happen to live in absurdly expensive housing markets. In fact, I would hope the caps themselves would change market dynamics.
… some tech-dude with no qualifications and no sense of ethics …
I hear Martin Shkreli is available (so long as this project doesn’t involve pharmaceuticals).
Ms. Holmes, it seems, may not need employment for a decade or so. (Somebody out there cares about the investors!)
Not at all! I happen to know that Elon Musk is in contact (i.e. Contact)
with the Culture! He’s being run by Diziet Sma, if you must know.
;->
But folks are going to be falling all over themselves to be taking
a ride to Mars on the Musk Bus. Challenger, you say? Columbia?
Oh, the Schadenfreude is so alluring. :-0
Hey, Liz Holmes is still a heroine, in some folks’ eyes! Is Tim Draper
still a believer? Yep:
https://fortune.com/2022/01/05/venture-capital-tim-draper-elizabeth-holmes-guilty-fraud-theranos/
++++
Venture capitalist Tim Draper continues to stand by Elizabeth Holmes after guilty verdict
BY
JESSICA MATHEWS
January 5, 2022
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I have Smart(TM) acquaintances (for some value of “Smart”) who think that Elon Musk
is the Great Hero Of Our Times. He’s gonna invent fusion, or move the planet
away from the sun, or Do Something to save the world. Wait and see!
I have an idea there’s some kind of common thread among these admirers.
A susceptibility to the narcissistic Guru Whammy. Libertarianism, and a
great belief in entrepreneurialism. A great, great admiration for
Gee-nyus (self-ascribed or not). People like that get very shirty if you
poop on their heroes.
“I don’t think he’s going to have much luck hiring someone to oversee human experimentation in these areas, since Josef Mengele is dead.” Much like with the sir-name Hitler, anyone alive today unfortunate enough to have the last name of Mengele must find it tough to hang their shingle after successfully completing med school or a PHD. I guess you could insist that it’s pronounced, Men-GELL-iie.
What, you can’t see him sparkling, like Vampire Eddie in Twilight ?
Elites have more life force, more vril , than the rest of us
mundanes, dontcha know!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites
++++
Competent Elites
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
26th Sep 2008
. . .
I tried—once—going to an interesting-sounding mainstream AI conference
that happened to be in my area. I met ordinary research scholars and looked
at their posterboards and read some of their papers. I watched their
presentations and talked to them at lunch. And they were way below the level
of the big names. I mean, they weren’t visibly incompetent, they had their
various research interests and I’m sure they were doing passable work on them.
And I gave up and left before the conference was over, because I kept thinking
“What am I even doing here?”
An intermediate stratum, above the ordinary scientist but below the
ordinary CEO, is that of, say, partners at a non-big-name venture capital firm.
The way their aura feels to me, is that they can hold up one end of an
interesting conversation, but they don’t sound very original, and they don’t
sparkle with extra life force.
I wonder if you have to reach the Jurvetson level before thinking outside the
“Outside the Box” box starts to become a serious possibility. Or maybe that
art can be taught, but isn’t , and the Jurvetson level is where
it starts to happen spontaneously . It’s at this level that I talk to
people and find that they routinely have interesting thoughts I haven’t
heard before.
Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force. At least the ones
I’ve talked to. Large amounts of money seem to attract smart people.
No, really .
If you’re wondering how it could be possible that the upper echelons of the
world could be genuinely intelligent, and yet the world is so screwed up…
There’s “smart” and then there’s “smart enough for your cognitive
mechanisms to reliably decide to sign up for cryonics”. . .
(via
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/7rsz40/these_ceos_and_ctos_and_hedgefund_traders_these/ )
The penis! Don’t forget the penis!
Flex @27 marginal tax won’t cut it. The wealthy don’t draw large incomes. They have unrealised capital gains. The progressive democrats tried introducing a tax on that but republicans with Manchin and Sinemma torpedoed it, along with the increased minimum wage.
snarkrates@18,
With all those assets, the state could afford to provide everyone with free medical care, and a guaranteed income. Indeed, it would have to, in order to prevent catastrophic deflation (though if it didn’t, the deflation would at least turn $1m back into real money).
Note: of course it wouldn’t be as simple as Oli Davies@10 appears to imply, but nor can it be as easily dismissed as you suggest.
As for Musk, he’s a loathsome individual, and full of hyperbolic bullshit, but I don’t feel his work on rockets can be as easily dismissed as PaulBC suggests @17. If his absurdly-named “Starship” is successful (and my guess is that it will be), it will be able to launch about 2/3 as much as a Saturn V, but be fully resusable, bringing down the cost of putting stuff into orbit or beyond considerably. That may not be a net benefit, as frequent launches would contribute significant GHG emissions, but in any case, can’t be dismissed as:
@DanDare #36,
So we should discard a tool which worked to expand the middle-class for 30+ years because it doesn’t hurt the wealthy enough?
KG@37
The day Elon Musk mumbles something about standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ll consider giving him some credit. It’s been over 50 years since we landed an astronaut on the moon. I would expect significant improvements.
That we have to rely on the likes of Elon Musk says more about our national investment priorities than about our actual capabilities or Musk’s “genius.”
(And I do give him a lot of credit for turning electric cars into a real industry, but the rest is either speculative or vaporware.)