From Jurassic Park To Telepathic Monkeys, Elon Musk Press Hype Is Getting A Bit Thick
from the born-every-minute dept
Last week the press was jam packed with headlines discussing how Elon Musk and his Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak would soon "have the technology to build a real life Jurassic Park." From the New York Post to The Hill, outlets quickly parroted the claim that Neuralink might soon get into the reanimated dinosaur business, triggering not only waves of Jeff-Goldblum-themed ridicule on social media, but a lot of free advertising for Elon Musk and Neuralink.
Except none of that's actually happening. For one thing, the original tweet by Hodak doesn't even mention Neuralink by name:
we could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to. wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs but 🤷♂️. maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species
— Max Hodak (@max_hodak) April 4, 2021
Hodak appears to have been speaking generally, not specifically, and there's zero evidence the company is even pursuing the concept. Nor is it clear that Hodak is actually correct in his statement that such a venture is technically possible:
"...it's pretty much impossible to resurrect a dinosaur. The science of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead isn't really as sound as Hodak makes it seem though. Even humanity would have a tough time building a Jurassic Park in the next 15 years. First, we'd need some DNA from the prehistoric tyrants. Unlike in the film Jurassic Park, where the DNA is retrieved from mosquitoes in amber and fused with frog DNA, that information has completely degraded over the millions of years it has spent in the ground."
To be clear, Musk has done, and is doing, plenty of interesting, innovative things. Just Space X/Starlink alone are impressive achievements that are delivering genuine innovation. At the same time, Musk and friends have a growing history of over-hyping products that either don't exist, or don't deliver what was promised by marketing. Like his Boring Company's Las Vegas Loop, a project built on $50 million in taxpayer dollars that was supposed to revolutionize mass transit. Yet during a media event last week was shown to be just a boring, one-way tunnel filled with non-automated Tesla vehicles moving at 35 MPH:
"Whatever happened to those 16-person vehicles? When Musk first announced the Loop, it genuinely looked like an exciting new transportation system. Musk promised that each vehicle could fit over a dozen people inside and everything was autonomous. But it doesn’t look like much of anything is automatic anymore. You even have to tell your human driver where you want to go."
Many outlets couldn't be bothered to even mention any of this, instead offering gushing, unskeptical stories that called the undercooked tunnel a "thrill ride":
Good piece!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
Last week Neuralink also made an ocean of headlines after posting a video showing a monkey playing Pong with a brain implant. Press outlets went to great lengths claiming this new pong-playing psychic monkey would soon be "revolutionizing healthcare." Only a few outlets could be bothered to mention that nothing Neuralink is doing has been peer reviewed, FDA approved human trials appear nowhere on the horizon, there's notable safety and adoption issues that could derail such efforts, or that most of what Neuralink was hyping isn't particularly new:
"It's really cool and looks really impressive. But so does the below video, which shows an implant being used by a human to control a robotic arm. Notably, this video dates from 2012. The actual work was probably done earlier, and there were undoubtedly trials in monkeys well before this."
Meanwhile, actual experts and neuroethicists quietly doubted Neuralink can get remotely close to the kind of technology the company and Musk have promised anytime soon. But such voices in unskeptical, hyper-enthusiastic news coverage weren't particularly well represented.
That's not to say that Neuralink's experiments don't hold potential, or that it's not damn impressive to see scientists transmitting data from 1,000 electrodes implanted in a monkey over a Bluetooth link. But at the same time, a lot of what Musk promises simply never materializes (like full and safe Tesla self driving), and news outlets aren't particularly great at presenting Musk and friends' latest claims with a grain or two of salt, or seeding stories with the essential context of a growing pattern of empty or over-inflated promises.
Many journalists and readers alike can't seem to hold conflicting ideas in their heads simultaneously when it comes to Musk. The reality is that Musk is both an innovative tech pioneer and an egomaniacal grifter who routinely says dumb and untrue things:
"It turns out it’s all true. The cars are impressive and their flaws get covered up. Musk is a lying ignorant grifter and he has inspired innovation in the electric car industry. Understanding that these seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously is important, because societies who cannot hold these two ideas at the same time may end up following scam artists and false prophets off the cliff and into the abyss."
There are countless researchers and scientists laboring under harsh halogen lighting at the edge of breakthrough tech and scientific innovation, who see little public attention. Their slow, steady progress generally isn't of interest to the ad-based media model. Such a model often isn't keen on explaining the deeper nuances of innovation with actual experts, because that simply doesn't make as much money as slack-jawed hype. Combine our ad-based media dysfunction with the generalized fanboy treatment of Musk as some kind of hybrid between Tony Stark and a god, and the net result is compounded hype untethered from reality.
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Filed Under: dinosaurs, elon musk, hype, jurassic park, telepathic monkeys
Companies: neuralink
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Las Vegas Loop was not supposed to revolutionize travel
The full loop concept will, but this is just a first prototype of the first parts of loop. It's not supposed to be anything more and it was still a great deal for LV and will grow to become more.
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Re: Las Vegas Loop was not supposed to revolutionize travel
I'm still wondering how it will deal with a summer deluge of water, ie flash flood.
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Or a fire within the tunnel.
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Re: Las Vegas Loop was not supposed to revolutionize travel
it's a tunnel
he found a way to dig it a bit cheaper than usual
if he was a civil engineer working for a municipality it wouldn't even be news (and he'd probably do a lot more good for the world)
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Re: Las Vegas Loop was not supposed to revolutionize travel
Really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4z0cgcBLBc
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But hey those flamethrowers were fun!
I'm guessing it hard for the media to find anyone to put way up on the pedestal so they can enjoy the inevitable fall, so they're just flinging fame whores towards the top so they can scream when the pipe dreams turnout to be pipe dreams.
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Elon Musk vs Physics
People really need to check out Thunderf00t's channel on youtube where he applies simple physics to many of Musk's claims... let's say that physics wins 10 times out of 10. :)
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Re: Elon Musk vs Physics
Would that be the Thunderfoot who built almost an entire video around a NASA paper (quite visibly so in the video) written by a NASA engineer and tried to pass it off as a Musk/SpaceX claim in order to "take them down"?
He may produce useful content sometimes, but at others he is a complete joke.
By the way, Joe, it's not cool to present blatant lies as proof of your position.
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Re: Re: Elon Musk vs Physics
Oh? So you're claiming Musk wins over physics? Please provide details...
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Re: Elon Musk vs Physics
He proved himself far too much of an ass many years ago for me to bother with anything he produces. Plenty of other sources in his niche for me to bother with him.
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Lots of binary thinkers in the world. Everything must be either pro- or anti-X: where X might be any particular politician, technology, philosophical proposition, entertainer, group of people (children's game team, political party, genealogical lineage, profession, association,...)
And journalism as a field (in all its forms) attracts the most binary..... The only linearity is that you may be more-or-less intently pro or anti.
Musk is too visible to too many people not to get lots of full-binary opinions. But the reality is, all of us humans are more talented at some things, less at others; often ethical, but never living up to the standard.
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To be fair to Hodak, he meant "we could probably breed/engineer animals with the size and shape of dinosaurs". But then to be fair to people who misunderstood him, the entire point of Jurassic Park was that the park's attractions had DNA that was mostly genuine dinosaur DNA.
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Re:
He kind of directly said that, yes.
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Re:
Avians would be the closest living relatives and we have some history in breeding them. So a little bit of creativity in splicing should do it.
So who wants to deal with a 10 ton genetically modified Canada Goose?
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Re: Re:
Heck, I don't want to deal with regular sized Canada Geese - or at least their poop (and I regularly have to around here...). But at least my 10lb Havanese dog loves to chase them and drive them away.
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Re: Re:
Being pecked to death would have fresh meaning.
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Re: Re:
You are wrong, birds aren't the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. Theropods to be more specific.
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Re:
And like pretty much all of Crichton's novels it also had a capital blunder: why create only female dinosaurs to be sure they can't breed? Going all male would have made more sense.
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Re: Re:
"Going all male would have made more sense."
Most organisms start out developing as female, then speciate into genders during fetus growth.
The big broken logic loop here is that if you have the tech to clone whole organisms from scratch then you have the tech to implement sterility. Monsanto does this every day, én másse, on organisms far more susceptible to spontaneous and viable mutation and have, thus far, succeeded in keeping their GMO crops from producing viable seed grain.
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Dinosaurs on Mars
Turn Mars into Jurassic Park. I think that is his evil genius plan.
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Re: Dinosaurs on Mars
Giant pseudo-dinosaurs, gasping for air until their blood boils and they pop in softer spots. Film at 11.
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Re: Re: Dinosaurs on Mars
Hmm, I Recall a movie like this...
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Re: Dinosaurs on Mars
Nah, it's all subterfuge.
Its actually genetically modified fungi seeded on the far side of the moon to break down the lunar surface and concentrate needed elements.
Nobody will notice anything until the moon goes all fuzzy from the covering of giant mushrooms.
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Re: Dinosaurs on Mars
I keep wondering about how everyone talks about Mars as if that's the next new home for humanity.
Mars has no magnetic field - and thus can't hold an atmosphere - so you can't even terraform the place. If you're going to be living in dug-out caves 24/7 then the moon is far easier destination to reach and work on building cities in.
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Re: Re: Dinosaurs on Mars
A lot of that is...well...not exactly true.
First, Mars does actually have an atmosphere (see the Ingenuity helicopter, just landed last Sunday), it's just not remotely breathable or thick enough to support human respiration.
Second, Mars at least has some nearly ready-made places to live - put a ceiling over Valles Marineris and you could fit millions of people inside.
Third, it actually requires less fuel to get to Deimos than it does to get to the Moon (under optimal conditions). See the link below. Deimos can serve as a stepping-stone to the asteroid belt and the outer planets, but the Moon isn't close enough for that.
https://www.spacefuture.com/archive/the_deimos_water_company.shtml
Fourth, there's a few issues with the Moon. For starters, solar panels are a bad investment because they won't produce power for two weeks at a time. (Mars will probably use solar thermal power plants, as those can be more easily scaled up for the lower sunlight-per-square-meter on Mars.) Second, the fact that the Moon is so much closer to the Sun makes it much more susceptible to solar flares (inverse square law applies).
Perhaps the most important point, though, is that Mars has lots of water. The Moon doesn't. Don't forget that water also means oxygen via electrolysis.
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SHHHHHHHH!
HE CAN HEAR YOU
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Getting a bit thick? If bullshit were rockets, musk would already have commercial flights to alpha centauri.
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Re:
Pah. Crystal Gayle had those in the mid 70s.
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The problem with neural links of any kind
The monkey always dies.
Always. If the monkey survives the insertion, the testing, they never survive the dissection.
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