• Furbag@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This kind of emerging technology preys upon those people’s hopes of living a normal life again. I just recently saw a YouTube video of people who got implants to cure blindness (with a glasses-like device to bridge the gap) and once the company that produces them went out of business they ceased support for their units that were inevitably going to fail as all hardware does.

    Elon Musk and Neuralink is no different. They’re rushing this tech to market and they know it. High likelihood of it becoming abandonware, but improving the lives of their patients was never the goal. Making money is the goal.

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      All the advancements will still most likely help others down the line.

      The tech exists now and that’s still a big leap forward even if that particular company fucked people.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The fucking-people-over part is NOT a necessary part of the tech! You can have tech that gets stably supported with adequate safeguards in place to make sure patients get everything they need to keep them safe and working for the rest of their life–safeguards enforced by government mandates. Those are policy issues that we already know how to solve, we just don’t, because we let tech companies do whatever the hell they want.

        • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          Yeah most places except America this is what would happen. It’s a big advantage of nationalised medicine.

        • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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          11 months ago

          Yeah pretty much every country except America runs their healthcare that way.

          A big advantage of socialised medicine is the system has huge buying power and can enforce things like this when making contracts.