The Chaser Report - Elon Musk In Trouble For Monkeying Around

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Charles issues a formal apology to Elon for our previous comments on the experiments held on monkeys by Musk's company Neuralink. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chasperort with Dom and, Charles, and Dom, unfortunately, we're going to have to do a bit of a public apology. Oh, what have we done now? We just need to apologise to Elon Musk. Elon Musk. Yes, so a few months ago, and this is totally on me, I made the mistake.

I accused Elon Musk of torturing and killing. 23 monkeys through the Neurrelink. 23 monkeys? Yeah, okay. Remember that? We did a whole very funny rave about torturing monkeys. Oh, yes, yes, yes. It's coming back to me now because Neurrelink is so hard to keep track of all of his

businesses. Neurilink's the one where he's implanting his technology into your brain, right? The one person you would definitely most trust with your own brain. Yeah, so, and it's like through a computer chip, so his idea is, which apparently the rest of the industry has decided is a complete dead end. Right. His version of the technology with Neurrelink is to implant a chip in your brain. It can then read all the neurons, and they basically use statistical analysis to then work out what's going on in the brain.

So the way they do that is they get these monkeys to do, you know, fairly simple computer games. Right. for that and in return for computer games they get given nice banana smoothies and using the you know they then track what's happening to the neurons in the brain as they're playing that game and very quickly like within literally about 10 minutes the statistical analysis of what's going on can start replicating what's going on in the brain in the computer and so the monkey doesn't have to sort of play the game with their hand anymore oh they can literally just think about what should happen and it happens on the screen.

It's quite an extraordinary technology. The reason why the rest of the industry has moved away from this is it does have a tendency to cause extreme agony in whoever's had the chip planted in their brain, tons of seizures and ultimately rapid death. Well, I presume, Charles, they've made the mistake of using Tesla chips. So the monkeys just navigate themselves repeatedly into the nearest wall. Is that what they do? I don't want to belittle these cruel deaths.

but it's the Elon signature. More about this horrible story involving monkey agony in just a moment. The reason why we've got to apologize, Doc, is because it turns out, over night, Elon Musk has justified all the deaths by saying, actually, those first 23 monkeys that we implanted the chip in, they were already going to die anyway. So it's not really, it doesn't matter that they went through an agonite.

death. They were terminal. They were going to die anyway. They were going to die anyway, which I think is true of all creatures though. But they said no monkey has died as a result of Neurilink implant. Now it must be said, this is actually counter to what Neurrelink admitted a few months ago. Oh, that's a terrible mistake. When they're applying to the FDA to be able to plan it into human beings. Oh, God. And the FDA, unsurprisingly, decided to deny them that request. Elon Musk said, first, our early implants, to minimize risk to healthy monkeys, we chose

terminal monkeys close to death already. Now, everyone's saying this is a lie by Holland Musk, but I think we need to take Elon Musk at his word. I don't think he would ever lie. No, is it, would he lie or would he just be completely incapable of processing human emotions in a way that would generate any empathy for the monkey. Yeah, he just wouldn't have any sense of what the truth is anyway. So it's not really a lie if you don't know what the truth is.

The reason why he's tweeted out this thing is sort of trying to justify Neurling is because he's also filed some paperwork and what he's trying to do is get Tesla and Neuraling to merge. As I was saying. Yes. No, exactly. You were very prescient. So, you know what, Charles, I would rather a monkey drive. my Tesla than the autopilot.

That would actually be an upgrade. If you can hear the rustling, by the way, that's just the lizard over there. We've got a lizard. Have you put a chip in the lizard? No, the reason he's bobbing his head is because it's spring, and they try and assert their dominance in spring. And any, so that's a male bearded dragon.

And as he bobs his head, any female bearded dragon, we go, ooh, ooh, ooh, that's fun for myself. This is getting hot in here. And apparently, if you're bobbing your head and you're another male, Peter Dragon, you see another male bobbing their head, it means rodeo, let's have a fight. Well, this is another aspect of Elon Musk that's worth noting, is that we've just learned overnight as well. He has another child.

Oh, yes, and we're a great name as well. He's always good at the names. This one's called Tao Techno Mechanicus, which is, to be honest, better than the earlier two with Grimes, which were Exa Dark Ciderale Musk. And the first one, which was X, which now is really embarrassing now that Twitter's called X. And then the A and E shoved together, then A-1-12, I think that is. So X-A-A-A-12. So, I mean, it can be to that Taur Technomechanicus is almost normal.

Yeah, that's true. It really is a form of child abuse to name your kids. I bet, I mean, compared to the enormity of having to be Elon Musk's child. I mean, isn't that just a drop in the ocean of awfulness? Yes, no, that's very sad. Anyway, getting back to the monkey. The real victims in all this. I still haven't worked out why you've apologised.

No, no. So I'm apologising because we accused him of killing perfectly healthy months. Oh, I see. Whereas in fact, he only tortured and killed terminally all monkeys according to him. Right. Now, so but the other thing is, so they're going to merge, what he wants to do is he wants to merge Tesla with neuraling and make it into, because his whole thing is they're basically, basically both AI companies. The Tesla, you know, their main selling point nowadays is that they have this FSD,

full, what's it called, full service driving, full... Yeah, it's the full autopilot. Full autopilot. Charles, just kind of get you on a point there. He thinks that's the main advantage of Tesla, the full auto pilot, whereas in fact, Tesla drivers hate full autopilot and fear it and don't want to pay a $10,000 extra for it, particularly given that it's never worked. Yeah.

And that the last person on the planet you would trust with driving. driving your family around for you is anything run by Elon Musk. People buy Tesla because petrol's incredibly expensive and because we all want to drive electric vehicles, right? Yes. Despite the stupid full service thing. Anyway, just a little sidebar. So, but the whole thing, yeah, because the last time I drove a Tesla,

we tried that sort of autopilot mode. And it was absolutely terrifying because every speed sign, it interpreted as a stop sign. So on the freeway, which had a whole lot of, you know, lit up speed signs, it kept on trying to break. thing that was a stop sign. Yeah. Horrific.

And that feature costs in Australia, I think 10 grand extra to install. So anyway, his whole thing is... But what they're doing with that FSD, the autopilot mode, is they've completely rewritten it. They've listened to the complaints. They've had 11 versions of it. There's 12.0 is about to come out. And they've rewritten it around the same statistical principles as large language models

and NeurLink, where instead of... of going oh you know how when you do a capture you know and Google always asks you oh you know can you identify this motorcycle or can you identify this pedestrian can you identify so that's the model that they've been using so far and there's huge limits to it for example um Tesla's FSD mode has had terrible trouble identifying non-white people as pedestrians is that a bug Or a feature for Elon Musk's perspective. I had to ask, but... The South African...

Given some of his recent comments. Yeah. Yeah. So the point is, like, if you're a person of colour, you're crossing the street, and you're facing a Tesla on autopilot, you know, you've got to run out of the way because it doesn't necessarily... It won't see it. It doesn't see colour.

It doesn't see colour. It's very unfortunate. So they're instead, they've completely overhauled it and they're going, let's just do it in terms of statistical models, which is sort of like what chat GPT is and neuraling, right? Yeah, and the thing about chat GPT, Charles, is that it's often wrong, right? Like, it really is. We've just been researching this. Chat GPT, just to be clear, it serves up the most likely next word.

It doesn't actually know. No, it doesn't know. It's just making an educated guess based on probability. Whereas when you're driving, you don't want your car to be trying to guess whether that's a stop sign or a red light. You want it to know, right? I know, but humans are basically large statistical machines. Like, you're right, but humans often don't know.

Yeah, but that just means, well, that's why they need neuralink to help them do the thing. I think there's, I cannot possibly see what could possibly go wrong with. Well, it's like my five-year-old writer, who's very bright in many ways. But if she doesn't know something, she'll just, like all children, Just make it up. Make it up. That's right. Just make it up in a world where unicorns are real.

And that's the level that chat GPT is on. Have you been in the Sydney cab recently? I'm pretty sure when you asked you to go, they don't know where to go. They just make it up. Let's be very clear. I'll take any self-driving over a cabby. Let's be honest. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers.

So he wants to merge the two things. That sounds like I don't quite know how, but that's... Maybe if I were an AI, I'd be able to work out the most likely outcome. My guess would be the most likely outcome is that it will be a screaming disaster because everything Elon Musk touches these days is a screaming disaster. No, I think it's because Tesla still has some market value and Neurrelink is rapidly becoming a boondoggle. Right.

Because everyone else in the, let's implant something in your brain sort of field of AI has gone, actually we don't need to implant a chip. You can actually access what's going on in the brain through the bloodstream. So what they do is instead of implanting a chip, which it requires surgery. You need to actually just open up your brain. I presume that's what Elon likes about it. That's right. But instead, you can tap into the sort of blood going in and out of the brain, like at the stem of the...

Oh, that sounds scary. And apparently there's enough signal, electrical signals there that you can get a pretty good map of the brain. So it's all, they've sort of gone down a bit of a dead end. So, of course, being Elon, what you do is you just completely folded into something else to sort of, you know, reinvented. It's also being sued. So, you know, the 23 monkeys being tortured and murdered, right? I presume just before they died, having had the extra sentience from newly, they retained counsel. They retain counsel.

No, but they are being sued by a number of professional organisations, as well as I think the government or something is coming in. because there's sort of animal cruelties and there's a whole lot of academics who also just hate the neuralink thing and in the lawsuit one of the things that they've asked for is they've got video and audio of all these monkeys being tortured to death

and they were done in a publicly funded lab right? So it's in the Berkeley lab fantastic to see the government getting involved in funding Elon's little brain company but the Neurrelink is arguing that even though it was in a publicly funded lab, they don't have to release any of these audio or video filings, which would be

otherwise public because it's a public funded lab, because it happens to be a private corporation, just renting out this space that happens to be public. Oh, of course, fantastic. So, but I'll tell you what. Got to see those videos. Monkey snuffvideo.com is where you go. It just occurs. If there's one thing that you know about technology, whether it's Tesla or particularly

Apple, Samsung, whatever, how much of an idiot would you have to be to get a chip implanted in your brain when the next year there will be one twice as good? What possible logic can there be for getting anything implanted in your body? This is the thing I can't understand.

Remember that guy we interviewed a few years ago on radio who had an Opel card? That's the Sydney Transport card implanted into his wrist, right? And then he got sued by the government for doing it. But they were very cross. And then shortly after that,

the government opened up being able to use a smart watch to tap on, which you just strapped to your wrist and guess what, you can take it off. Which is clearly far better than having an Opel card. But you think because Opel only works on buses, right? You can't use it to buy anything else. It just goes to show it's crazy to have any technology implanted in your body. That said, I mean, I do buy the idea that it would be nice if these sorts of chips, some of this technology could help,

for instance, people who are quadriplegicster theories, they might be able to help them move their body. I mean, that's what Elon says to justify what he's doing. Of course he really just wants to make himself smarter. Oh yeah, I think he wants to make himself smarter. And immortal probably too. And immortal. And I think also if you're driving a Tesla,

it would be great in the seconds before you get slammed into that brick wall on full service mode to be able to communicate using your brain with the car going, oh, fuck you! And just to send a message to Elon, the last second time. The last thoughts were fucking Elon. That said, Charles, I don't know that Elon, I mean, he's 50 years old or so, 50 something now. I don't think he wants to have a long life because as soon as they're old enough, his kids are going to sue him for those names. If you think the monkeys are bad, wait until the kids sue him.

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