Elon Musk finds himself in hot water, yet again. The Musk Man of the Elongated variety was served with his favorite condiment this week; more allegations of securities fraud, this time over statements he made about his computer-brain biotech company, Neuralink.
A medical ethics group is asking the SEC (that’s Securities and Exchange Commission nerds) to look into the Muskrat’s dubious claims that the primates who died during test trials at Neuralink were terminally ill and didn’t die as a result of his sketchy brain implants. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit working to abolish live-animal testing, is disputing Musk’s outrageous and lethal claims.
Their allegations include documents and veterinary records, first made public last year, that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering allegedly endured by as many as a dozen of the primate subjects at Neuralink, all of whom had to be put down. These records could serve as the basis for any potential SEC probe into Musk’s comments about Neuralink, which has already faced heavy scrutiny and multiple federal investigations as it moves toward its goal of dropping the first commercially-available brain-computer interface for humans. Who even asked for this stuff?
Unrelated, Neuralink opened up recruitment for its first human clinical trials earlier this week, according to a company blog. So if anyone is looking for the quick, unnecessarily-painful way out, I think I’ve found an option!
Side Items
Indo-Canadian Escalations: Things continue to get spicy between the Indian and Canadian governments. India’s visa processing center in Canada suspended services yesterday “due to operational reasons” as the controversy continues surrounding allegations by Canada that Indian officials may have been involved in the killing of a Canadian citizen. Prime minister Justin Trudeau alleges that Indian agents are linked to the murder of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar back in June, making this a sort of north-of-the-border remix to the Saudi-American squabble over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment back in 2018
Suing ChatGPT: More than 17 prominent authors are suing OpenAI and its most popular tool, ChatGPT, for “systematic theft on a mass scale”. This is just the latest in a wave of legal actions by writers worried about artificial intelligence programs using their copyrighted works without permission. It’d be really cool if artificial intelligence tools were anything other than low-grade plagiarists and aggregators, but at this point that’s what we’re working with. The authors allege “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and referred to the ChatGPT program as a “massive commercial enterprise” reliant on “systematic theft on a mass scale”. The technology of the future relies on the same research skills as a middle schooler