People seem to be perfectly happy to trade future years of their life for present benefits.
"At some point" is not the same as long term or chronic use. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6517163/ :
> There is a distinction between lifetime ever-use of AASs and chronic use. Lifetime prevalence use includes a high percentage of short-term (even a single episode of) experimental use in teenagers and young men.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10472...
My perception of most gym goers are ordinary folks who want to get healthy, not gymbros who want to build giant muscles. Of course, this is at a single gym so this is anecdotal.
So ignore the ones that don't workout at all. Now probably ignore the ones just going through the motions at the gym and clearly aren't trying to achieve real muscle growth.
It stands to reason that if you see someone fit and with decent muscles, they're part of the group that might have taken them.
If it's 4% of all males, makes me think it's close to 25% of males with good amounts of muscles. Of course it's skewed by basically 90% of people with massive amounts of muscles taking them. But massive muscles alone doesn't make up 4% of the population.
Even if you set survey methods aside, it has been well established that there are is a single digit percent of people that are simply survey obstructionists. They will say that the sky is red on a survey, because they dont care or are trolling
Reasonable guess, but hard to verify.
It appears for example that every youtuber who looks like they have decent amount of muscles are going to be hit with the accusation that they used steroids.
Most humans will trade almost anything for reproductive fitness. It's what they're selected for.
First, there is no way 4% of males use steroids. That is totally absurd.
Most professional athletes are on steroids yet they are not dropping dead at an early age.
What you really don't understand though is how insane the amount of substances a professional bodybuilder takes compared to some average guy at the gym. It is the difference between someone who has a glass of wine with their dinner and a raging alcoholic. That probably is not extreme enough actually.
So much of this board is people talking out their ass.
The commenter is just trying to point out that people are willing to risk themselves for a perceived short term or long term benefit. Professional athletes might be on steroids, which we may not 100% know if there are long term hidden impacts from doing so.
However people do it regardless.
The best analogy would be showing someone from the 17th century a modern prosthetic device. There is a realistic chance that they would hang you for witchcraft. A mere digital camera would be considered interfering with the laws of nature and the work of the devil or something. We may be harboring similar biases in the present day we don’t even realize.
Mind uploading has the same philosophical problem as....teleportation. That is why some people Star Trek teleporters are actually death machine.
That's not the issue that the OP is concerned. He's concerned that the device will cause irreversible damage to the information substrate that is the brain.
The best analogy would be showing someone from the 17th century a modern prosthetic device. There is a realistic chance that they would hang you for witchcraft.
The problem with using analogies is that the logic might not apply. We can conceive or think certain things will be different in the future doesn't mean it will be.
For example, it is unlikely that we can travel beyond the speed of light, because the speed of light is the speed of cause and effect. You would need to show that cause and effect still hold when we travel faster than light or that our most fundamental assumption about reality is wrong.
The imagination of the 21st century and 20th century has explored the vast conceptual space of technology. It is unlikely that new technology 23rd or 24th century will likely get you hanged for witchcraft in the 21st century.
So he invents a time travel machine, and goes back in time to give Isaac Newton a modern electronic calculator.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/262571/isaac-newto...
I think taking a maximalist view of "this person actually knows what they're signing up for" would lead to almost no one being capable of consenting to almost any treatment. Do you actually know the pharmacology of acetaminophen? Are you aware of all the possible complications of an appendectomy? Can you truly grasp the difference between a one in a thousand occurrence and a one in a million occurrence?
The minimalist view of "this person said yes and so the treatment is ethical" is of course, also fraught.
I'm reminded of the potential for COVID vaccine challenge trials. Tens of thousands of people signed up to be deliberately infected with COVID so that we could complete the vaccine trials more quickly, and in the process save far more lives. Medical ethicists ultimately prevailed in not allowing such trials for the vaccines, arguing that no one involved could truly consent given the unknown effects of COVID.
But what about all the people that didn't consent to getting COVID the old-fashioned way, who wouldn't have had they had a vacccine?
Should we let paternalism prevail over heroics?
A nurse could choose (or be strongarmed) into treating sick patients. Parents and spouses can choose to tend the sick. Hell, people could and did go to covid parties to get infected.
The people that accept these kinds of implants during a "prototype phase" are usually in a very bad position, so the risk is worth it for them, as the technology can drastically improve their lives.
Killed in horrifying ways, in many cases for no reason at all. And definitely too quickly, compared to what would have been expected if they were trying to learn from their mistakes so that, one day, human implants would be successful. And, even then, there would still be all the unknowns you are talking about.
> if it all comes crashing down in 30 years
I give it 3, tops. Save this comment and add to a calendar if you have to.
>Have quadriplegia (limited function in all 4 limbs) due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and are at least 1-year post-injury (without improvement)
Even if all the problems you are talking about happen, I would venture a guess that the vast majority of quadriplegics would jump at the opportunity to use their arms and legs again, even if it meant an overall shorter lifespan or other complications.
Surely said jump would then invalidate them from eligibility?
Subtitle at the end says "The researchers hope to miniaturize the devices to make them completely wearable".
Reminds me of that post from last week about the guy being surprised at an IoT device connecting through wifi.
Surely they could have routed a cat6 cable through some vein!
Which drugs are you talking about? As far as I am aware, while there are pollution in the environment that are damaging, a lot of damage are caused by 'lifestyle' factor(arguably, the cause are still systematic).
Like, I don't have an issue with implants, I really don't. But I have a major issue with a company that comes from a fold of companies who has "plays it fast and loose" as a defining attribute. And has killed a lot of their own lab animals in experiments.
Are you talking about the safety issues from SpaceX's Starbase facility and manufacturing safety at Tesla factories? There's some controversy about autopilot as well. I know there are also controversy at Neuralink, but it doesn't seem clear to me how true it is. In any case, testing on animals isn't the same as testing on humans.
Falcon 9 is one of the most reliable and tested rocket of all time, and NASA is confident about launching astronauts on the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule.
At the same time, killing many test animals says something about the ethical disposition of neuralink. Not that they are unethical. But that they are not on the side of caution with action in the ethical debate, and more on the side of 'not developing life-improving tech is unethical'. Which is certainly a colorable ethical stance.
For example, lots of bio things can take a lifetime to have an effect. One crystal clear example of this is the buildup of AGEs in collagen and the like over time as a part of damage accumulation in the process of aging. Tons of drugs have taken decades to show signs of causing cancer, and whatnot.
Additionally, brain implants have been done before, but I honestly don't trust what comes out of neuralink, not just from the madcap madhouse environment that many employees have described it as, but also from the track record of dead animals, as well as the rather notorious examples of corner cutting in other similar companies. It's a human life. Is this thing on, are we thinking here? This is madness to me.
For example, what happens if there is progressive scarring over a few decades from electrodes. What about unintended side effects of certain kinds of signalling over several decades. Oh, you have a ground leak across leads? How does that impact brain dynamics over time? Why are we using humans as the subjects to describe these things? Why are people volunteering for this?
Like, I generally don't have a major conceptual issue with implants themselves in terms of the actual device itself. But I have a major issue with a company that comes from a fold of companies who has "plays it fast and loose" as a defining attribute. And has killed a lot of their own lab animals in experiments. I'm semi okay with brain implants happening through another organization that is much more responsible, but I really hope neuralink gets shut down before they do too much damage.
Just like asbestos snow decoration, you don't know the damage until it's too late. And maybe that's an okay analogy, structurally the leads aren't too terribly different from the absestos fibers that created scarring (though of course, asbestos is inherently carcinogenic on its own if I remember correctly).
Anyways. Hopefully people stay safe and we avoid the likely horror story that this is. And if it all comes crashing down in 30 years, I hope we look at this and don't do it again. :'((((