#pcrm

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[beetroot-merchant]

Elon Musk's company Neuralink has just been given FDA approval to start human trials (Washington Post) (The Guardian) (CNBC).

Yes, the same Neuralink that was put under investigation by the USDA for animal abuse (The Guardian) (Reuters), and that the PCRM believes killed 15 of the 23 monkeys it experimented on (Fortune).

[she-is-healthy]

Soy yogurt, blueberries, and a ton of cinnamon!

New studies shared by the PCRM suggests that just 1tsp of cinnamon can boost metabolism by as much as 15% from your resting rate, on average 5-7% 💚

[djuvlipen]

Hey, are there any romani Radfem orgs?

good question! as far as I know, there aren't any

When talking about Romani orgs of any kind we've got to keep in mind that the ones who get fundings and visibility are EU-sponsored or get private fundings from George Soros' Open Society Foundation, and those groups are actively crushing any grassroots romani organization. Romani feminist Angéla Koczé talked about this in her book Gender, Ethnicity and Class, here's some posts where I go into more details about her writing x x. Thing is, the EU tolerates the sex trade and gender ideology, and George Soros is notorious for funding pimp lobbies x. With that in mind, it's difficult for any Romani radical feminist (anticapitalist, anti gender, anti sex trade) org to blossom

As far as I know there aren't any explicitly gender critical, radical feminist romani org in Europe (if there are, it must be a pretty small group because I've absolutely never heard of any such group even though I try to keep track of anything that has to do with Romani women). In Spain, the only Romani feminist org that's openly against the sex trade and that I can think of right now, is Fakali

If we're talking about Romani orgs that actually do things to help women, there's Pattern, a program that aims at fighting against domestic violence in Romani communities in the Balkan, the Iberian peninsula and in the EU. There's also the PCRM (Policy Center for Roma and Minorities) whose goal is to help Roma in the education system and in the workplace and they have some programs directed specifically towards women. But both are EU-funded, not female-led, so I find it difficult to trust them

I guess the closest thing we have to a romani radfem org is the Domari Society, which is located in Jerusalem, was funded and is led by Palestinian-Domari women (the Dom are a people that's either considered a part of the Romani diaspora or akin to the Romani diaspora, it's complicated). They don't use the words "radical feminist" but their actions are definitely aligned on radical feminist values, they support Palestinian Domari women, help them with school, uni, on the workplace, they give food/hygiene products/clothes to families in need (which definitely will help mothers and girls). Their work is particularly relevant considering that the Dom suffer intense racism from the Israeli State

[comradejoanmir]

about this post: PCRM is just an animal rights group that claims to "promote optimal diet for prevention of human disease". the guy who leads it, neal barnard, is the medical advisor for PETA, if that gives any insight in their viewpoints.

Oh my god ofc the ‘anti milk’ people are connected with peta :/ anyways just had my third glass of milk for the day 👍 what disease would even be promoted by drinking milk it’s such bullshit

[mudwerks]

(via Neuralink transported brain implants covered in pathogens, group alleges | Ars Technica)

The Department of Transportation is investigating allegations that Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, violated federal transportation regulations when it shipped contaminated implants removed from the brains of deceased research monkeys infected with multiple types of dangerous pathogens. The alleged violations could have put humans at risk of exposure to hazardous germs, including drug-resistant bacteria and a potentially life-threatening herpes virus.

Reuters was the first to report the department's investigation, which was sparked by allegations brought Thursday by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a medical group that advocates for animal welfare in medical research. The Department of Transportation confirmed to Ars on Friday that it has opened a standard investigation of Neuralink in response to PCRM's allegations.

[carloskinzer]

The US is looking into Elon Musk's Neuralink in relation to dangerous pathogens.

The US Department of Transportation announced on Thursday that it is looking into Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink for potentially illegally transporting hazardous pathogens.

A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation told Reuters about the investigation after the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-welfare advocacy group, wrote to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg earlier on Thursday to inform him of records obtained on the subject.

PCRM stated that it obtained emails and other documents indicating unsafe packaging and movement of implants removed from monkey brains. According to PCRM, these implants may have contained infectious diseases, in violation of federal law.

A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation stated that the agency took PCRM's allegations "very seriously."

[400badrequest]

fun fact! ‘Subject 15’ (Gibbens, 2022), in which a monkey who was part of the Neuralink trials was found to tremble in fear when she saw staff, her conditioning becoming worse over many months until she had to be euthanized. Her necropsy found multiple hemorrhagic strokes and her cerebral cortex - the part of your brain that makes you you (Cleveland Clinic, 2022) - “focally tattered” (Gibbens, 2022).

This man is fucking awful.

Cleveland Clinic. (2022, May 23). Cerebral Cortex. Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/23073-cerebral-cortex

Gibbens, R. (2022). Violations of the Animal Welfare Act at University of California, Davis (93-R-0433) and Neuralink (93-R-0586) (pp. 1–6). https://pcrm.widen.net/s/7tqn59fhm8/2022-02-10-pcrm-usda-complaint-re-uc-davis-and-neuralink-with-exhibits-reduced

Oh so he’s doing eugenics now

[kennak]

IARCによれば肉は食べてはならず、PCRMによればチーズはダメで、心臓専門医のWilliam Davisによれば穀物は食べられず、環境ワーキンググループ(EWG)によれば慣行栽培された野菜や果物は食べられず、小児内分泌学者のRobert Lustigによれば砂糖は毒である。つまり私たちは爪を噛むしかない、但し内分泌かく乱作用のあるフタル酸エステル���含むマニキュアを塗っていない場合だけ。

2024-10-15 - 野良猫　食情報研究所

[bryantma]

PCRM

Vayan a seguirme en ig: solovivesenmimente2

[xlntwtch2]

wiki:

"....Experiments conducted by Neuralink and UC Davis have involved at least 23 monkeys, and the PCRM believes that 15 of those monkeys died or were euthanized as a result of the experiments. Furthermore, the PCRM alleged that UC Davis withheld photographic and video evidence of the mistreatment.[47]...

"A September 2023 exposé by Wired provided additional details on the primate deaths based on public records and confidential interviews with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the California National Primate Research Center.[13][52] Those records showed complications with the installation of electrodes....

"In October 2023, Wired reported that Neuralink worked to keep details of animal suffering and death hidden from the public.[55]

"In November 2023, U.S. lawmakers asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Neuralink deceived investors in by omitting details about possible animal deaths.[56] ...

"[62][63][64]MIT Technology Review accused the demonstration of having the main objective to "stir excitement", adding that "Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried to) treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide".[62] Andrew Jackson, professor of neural interfaces at Newcastle University, also commented on the presentation to the BBC. To Musk's statement that he found Neuralink's advancements to be "profound", Jackson responded, "I don't think there was anything revolutionary in the presentation...

Thiago Arzua of the Medical College of Wisconsin argued that Neuralink's functions are not novel and that ideas for a brain–machine interface (BMI) are at least 50 years old.[66] He cited successful control of a robotic prosthetic arm by a man that gave him haptic feedback, which he used in 2016 to give President Obama a fist bump.[67] Arzua said that the 2020 Neuralink presentation "showed little more than a flashy new design for a BMI with more electrodes".[66] "

another grifter at work -nothing new keep reading the news

"BREAKING NEWS:" is dated May 2023 - too old

Not a single monkey survived the Neuralink experiment. I’ll bet Elmo can’t wait to start torturing and murdering human beings with this.

[der-saisonkoch]

Neuigkeiten vom Sandu - Strich in Moldawien

PCRM-Neuigkeiten. MENSCHEN FLIEHEN AUS DEM LAND: DIE ZAHL DER EINWOHNER IN MOLDAWIEN SCHMILZT TÄGLICH – NUR DIE MITGLIEDER DER PASS GAN HABEN HIER EINE ZUKUNFT Die Bevölkerung Moldawiens ist rückläufig. Die Daten des National Bureau of Statistics der letzten Jahre spiegeln eine tragische Situation für das Land wider: Die Sterblichkeit übersteigt die Geburtenrate. Die Migration nimmt zu. Jedes…

[get-thee-to-a-shrubbery]

Did you read those articles? They both primarily cite the PCRM for their claims. These aren't "legit sources" if they all come from the same tainted primary source.

If you had already had "deranged horror villain experiments with the brains of live primates" on your Elon Musk corporate scandal bingo card, you're a pretty interesting person I gotta say

[darnellclayton]

United States 🇺🇸 Ignores Elon Musk’s Dead Monkeys

Image promo from 12 Monkeys movie. Another day, another startup raises millions of dollars ($43 million specifically). But the real story is what is typed underneath glitz & glamor. In 2022, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) alleged that Neuralink and UC Davis, once its research partner, had mistreated several monkeys involved with testing Neuralink hardware — subjecting…

[hackernewsrobot]

The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Died

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

[notiziariofinanziario]

Elon Musk potrà ora sperimentare i suoi chip neurali sugli esseri umani

L'azienda fondata da Elon Musk nel 2016 ha annunciato di essere alla ricerca di volontari per testare i suoi microprocessori da impiantare nel cervello. “Siamo entusiasti di annunciare che è aperto il reclutamento per il nostro primo studio clinico sull’uomo”, si legge sul profilo X e sul sito di Neuralink. Ci vorrà del tempo, ma l’azienda è convinta di poter raggiungere il suo obiettivo: consentire alle persone affette da paralisi di controllare dispositivi esterni con la forza del pensiero. Nel frattempo, c’è già chi scherza sulle possibili candidature: rispondendo a un tweet che riportava la notizia, il leader di Azione Carlo Calenda ha proposto un nome: “Matteo Salvini?”. La sperimentazione è stata ribattezzata “Prime Study”, acronimo di “Precise robotically implanted brain-computer interface”. A quanto afferma l’azienda, il suo obiettivo è valutare la sicurezza dei chip neurali e del robot chirurgico che li impianta. Ai candidati verrà infatti posizionato un dispositivo di interfaccia cervello-computer (chiamato “N1”) nella regione dell’encefalo che controlla l’intenzione del movimento. Il chip è esteticamente invisibile e potrà registrare e trasmettere segnali celebrali, in modalità wireless, a un’app in grado di decodificare la volontà del movimento. Il dispositivo permetterà ad esempio di controllare con il pensiero il cursore di un mouse o la tastiera di un computer: nulla di troppo diverso da quanto fatto con le scimmie, cui era stata data la facoltà di muovere un puntatore e giocare a Pong. Per gli esseri umani i vantaggi sarebbero evidenti, soprattutto nella cura di malattie, come la Sla, che richiedono un computer per comunicare. “Immaginate se Stephen Hawking lo avesse avuto a disposizione”, ha commentato Musk. I candidati per il trial clinico devono avere almeno 22 anni, devono essere residenti negli Stati Uniti e devono soffrire di particolari patologie che comportano paralisi, perdita di vista o udito o incapacità di parlare. Necessario anche un “caregiver regolare e affidabile” da coinvolgere nello studio. “Se soffri di quadriplegia a causa di una lesione del midollo spinale cervicale o di sclerosi laterale amiotrofica (Sla), potresti essere idoneo”, si legge sul profilo X e sul sito dell’azienda. Neuralink non ha ancora fatto sapere quando partiranno le sperimentazioni, né il numero esatto di partecipanti. Inizialmente sperava di avere l’approvazione per impiantare il chip in dieci pazienti, ma dopo i ripetuti rifiuti dell’Fda avrebbe negoziato per un numero inferiore. I volontari parteciperanno prima a uno studio di 18 mesi che prevede nove visite. Dopodiché, trascorreranno un minimo di due ore alla settimana in sessioni di ricerca e faranno altre venti visite nei cinque anni successivi. Nel complesso, la sperimentazione richiederà circa sei anni. E tuttavia – sostiene Reuters – anche se il dispositivo si dimostrasse sicuro per un uso umano, si prevede una tempistica di oltre un decennio prima che Neuralink autorizzi all’uso commerciale. Quella di Musk non è l’unica azienda di neurotecnologie, basti pensare a competitor come Paradromics e Neurosity. Si tratta di un settore ricco di sviluppi ed esperimenti. Pochi mesi fa, ad esempio, alcuni ricercatori svizzeri sono riusciti a far camminare una persona paralizzata da 12 anni dopo un incidente stradale impiantando un’interfaccia cervello-colonna vertebrale, ossia una tecnologia che consente al cervello di dare comandi agli arti con la sola forza del pensiero. Per dirla con Musk, “quando un Neuralink verrà combinato agli arti del robot Optimus, la mano di Luke Skywalker diventerà reale”: un riferimento, questo, al robot umanoide che ha svelato qualche mese fa e al celebre personaggio di Star Wars. Nel frattempo, il sito Business Insider ha reso noto che un gruppo che sostiene la ricerca scientifica etica, il Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (Pcrm), ha chiesto di avviare, negli Stati Uniti, un’indagine su Musk. Sotto accusa la sua recente affermazione secondo cui nessuna scimmia sarebbe morta a causa del chip cerebrale. Nel 2022, infatti, il Pcrm ha rivelato di aver ottenuto documenti dalla Davis University, l’istituto californiano dove sono stati condotti gli esperimenti di Neuralink: tali documenti evidenziavano le “sofferenze estreme” sperimentate dalle scimmie “a causa della cura e degli impianti sperimentali altamente invasivi”. L’ispettorato generale del dipartimento per l’Agricoltura degli Stati Unitiaveva pure aperto un’indagine federale su presunte violazioni dell’Animal Welfare Act, che regola il modo in cui i ricercatori trattano e testano gli animali: la pressione di Musk per accelerare lo sviluppo dei chip avrebbe portato al fallimento di numerosi esperimenti, causando la morte di più di 1.500 animali tra pecore, maiali e scimmie. In effetti, l’autorizzazione a sperimentare chip neurali sugli esseri umani era stata più volte negata dall’ente regolatorio statunitense Fda, prima del via libera lo scorso maggio. Si segnalavano possibili rischi per la salute degli animali e delle persone. Tra questi, il pericolo di avvelenamento causato dall’uso di batterie al litio nei chip, la possibilità che i fili del dispositivo si spostino e compromettano l’attività cerebrale, nonché la difficoltà a rimuovere l’impianto senza danneggiare il tessuto cerebrale. E ancora, a febbraio il ministero dei Trasporti statunitense aveva aperto un’indagine contro Neuralink, accusata di aver gestito in modo pericoloso alcuni dispositivi contenenti agenti patogeni prelevati dalle scimmie, durante una collaborazione con l’Università della California. Read the full article